XV.

Recent Trends

The British philosopher Bertrand Russell has influenced ethical thinking in recent decades. A vigorous critic of conventional morality, he held the view that moral judgments express individual desires or accepted habits. In his thinking, both the ascetic saint and the detached sage are poor human models because they are incomplete human beings. Complete human beings participate fully in the life of society and express all of their nature. Some impulses must be checked in the interests of society and others in the interest of individual development, but it is a person's relatively unimpeded natural growth and self-realization that makes for the good life and harmonious society.

A number of 20th-century philosophers, some of whom have espoused the theories of existentialism, have been concerned with the problems of individual ethical choice raised by Kierkegaard and Nietzsche. The orientation of some of these thinkers is religious, as was that of the Russian philosopher Nikolay Aleksandrovich Berdyayev, who emphasized freedom of the individual spirit; of the Austrian-Jewish philosopher Martin Buber, who was concerned with the morality of relations between individuals; of the German American Protestant theologian Paul Tillich, who stressed the courage to be oneself; and of the French Catholic philosopher and dramatist Gabriel Marcel and the German Protestant philosopher and psychiatrist Karl Jaspers, both of whom were concerned with the uniqueness of the individual and the importance of communication between individuals. A different tendency in modern ethical thought characterizes the writings of the French philosophers Jacques Maritain and Étienne Gilson, who followed the tradition of Thomas Aquinas. According to Maritain, “true existentialism” belongs only to this tradition.

Certain other modern philosophers do not accept any of the traditional religions. The German philosopher Martin Heidegger maintains that no God exists, although one may come into being in the future. Human beings are, therefore, alone in the universe and must make their ethical decisions with the constant awareness of death. The French philosopher and novelist Jean-Paul Sartre was an atheist who also emphasized the awareness of death. Sartre also maintained that people have an ethical responsibility to involve themselves in the social and political activities of their time.

Several other modern philosophers, such as the American John Dewey, have been concerned with ethical thought from the viewpoint of instrumentalism. According to Dewey, the good is that which is chosen after reflecting upon both the means and the probable consequences of realizing the good. Contemporary philosophical discussion of ethics in England and the United States is largely based on the writings of George Edward Moore, especially his Principia Ethica. Moore argued that ethical terms are definable in terms of the word good, whereas “good” is undefinable. This is so because goodness is a simple, unanalyzable quality. Philosophers who disagree with Moore in this regard, and who believe good to be definable, are termed naturalists. Moore is called an intuitionist. Naturalists and intuitionists regard ethical sentences as descriptive of the world, and hence true or false. Philosophers who disagree with this belong to a third major school, noncognitivism, in which ethics is not a form of knowledge, and ethical language is not descriptive. An important branch of the noncognitive school is logical empiricism, which questions the validity of ethical statements as compared with statements of fact or of logic. Some logical empiricists argue that ethical statements have only emotional or persuasive significance. Other contemporary American philosophers writing to indicate a concern with ethical considerations are Sidney Hook in his Human Values and Economic Policy (1967) and Mortimer Adler in The Conditions of Philosophy (1965).