The content of the conservatism or

I have made some very general remarks, in Section about the form of the device with which we are now equating morality in the narrow sense, but I have said very little about its content. Of the thinkers to whom I have referred, Protagoras, Hume, and Warnock are all concerned to explain the point of an already existing morality, though they select and emphasize particular parts of it. Hobbes writes as if his task were to a morality from scratch, but most of the provisions he builds into it are in fact parts of the conventionally accepted body of moral ideas.

His condemnation of retributive punishment is only a partial

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exception, since traditional Christian morality contains flicting suggestions about this.

But is it so obvious that what is conventionally accepted as morality is exactly what is required? As all our writers have stressed, the device of morality is beneficial because of certain contingent features of the human condition. But are contingent they may also have changed. The contrast between Protagoras and Hobbes points at least to a change in the scale of the problem. Protagoras was looking for the ordering prin-ciples of a city, a polis, and in Greece a could be pretty small: his problem was how men could form social units large enough to compete with the wild beasts. But for Hobbes the problem was how to maintain a stable nation state. Today the scale has changed again: we can no longer share as-sumption that it is only civil wars that are really a menace, that international wars do relatively little harm. Warnock thinks it is slightly improper for a philosopher to take any account at all of contingent empirical facts about the human predicament; but we might argue that, given this general approach, he should have taken more account of them, not less.

Changes in the human situation which may well be relevant to morality have occurred in the last hundred and fifty and particularly in the last fifty years. Though they are obvious and well known, they should at least be summarized. One is the growth of worldwide mutual dependence. This is partly econ-omic: an increased proportion of what people see as their needs is supplied directly or indirectly by goods from distant coun-tries. It is partly a matter of possibilities of assistance: in the inhabitants of Europe would not have known, at least till much later, of an earthquake or a famine in India, and even if they had known they could have done nothing about it; but this is no longer so. It is partly, also, that there are worldwide politi-cal movements, and that lopoliti-cal wars and changes of government can have repercussions far away. Again, technological advances of many kinds have put greatly increased powers into the hands of some men and some organizations. These include powers to 121

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do harm; for example, to wage nuclear war. Also, powers to do at least apparent good. As Belloc said:

Of old, when folk were sick and sorely tried The doctors gave them physic, and they died;

But here's a happier age, for now we know Both how to make men sick and keep them so.

Again, powers to do at once both good and harm, especially powers to produce economic goods at the cost of permanent depletion of resources and radical changes in the biological and physical environment. Again, developments in the means of communication (for information, entertainment, or persuasion, or mixtures of the three) have given some men increased powers over the minds of others, and probably there will be before long possibilities of genetic engineering applied to the human race itself.

It is tempting to speak of all these as increased powers that mankind (or now has and may use in one way or another or refrain from using. But this is utterly misleading. Mankind is not an agent; it has no unity of decision; it is therefore not confronted with any choices. Our game theory examples have made even plainer what should have been plain enough without them, that a plurality of interacting rational agents does not in general constitute a rational agent, and that the resultant of a number of choices is not in general a choice. These powers are scattered about: they are possessed, and may be exercised, by some men or groups of men or organizations, not by Man.

However, there is one kind of change that the technological increases in power have not produced. They have not falsified Hume's description of scanty provision nature has made for [man's] wants'. What men see as their needs have increased, in the economically developed countries, at least as fast as their ability to satisfy them, and in the less developed countries the growth of production has been matched by growth of population.

It may be argued that such changes as these, though of great importance for political philosophy, have little bearing on morality. Moral principles rest upon the basic general structure

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of the human predicament, and this does not change. Against this, it is clear that these changes at least extend the range and scope of moral issues. It is not so easy for us as it was for Hume to say in one breath Indian, or person wholly unknown to If we were thinking of loving all our neighbours, there are a more of them to take into account. Nor is it quite so easy to prescribe a theoretical universal concern when we have some possibility of implementing it. New powers raise embarrassing moral questions about their exercise. If we can keep people alive, or half alive, at certain costs, the question whether we should do so is not idle. Questions about the relative claims of present and future generations are no longer purely academic, since things that are done now can radically affect, in not wholly unforeseeable ways, the prospects of future generations, and control of the numbers of the inhabitants at least of particular countries, and as a more remote possibility, of the world as a whole, is becoming a conceivable political These facts, and the threats of psychological manipulation and gen-etic engineering, introduce a bewildering circularity into the relation between moral principles and human welfare. The human race is no longer something determinate whose members have fairly fixed interests in terms of whose satisfaction welfare might be measured and decisions thus morally assessed. Some of the decisions that come up for moral assessment can them-selves determine what those interests are and even what the race itself is to be.

At the beginning of this chapter I said that morality is not to be discovered but to be made; we cannot brush this aside by adding it has been made already, long It may well need to be in part remade. Of course only in part. Nothing has altered or will alter the importance of being able to make and keep and rely on others keeping agreements. Hobbes's third law of nature, that men perform their covenants made, is an eternal and immutable fragment of morality. But some more specific obligations traditionally attached to status, not created by con-tract, are dispensable; patriotism, for example, may have lived its usefulness.

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If we cannot be wholly satisfied with the content of what we can recognize as the main stream of moral tradition, we must be even less satisfied with the alternative of leaving the whole con-tent of morality to be determined by the conscience or moral sense of each individual agent. As says, man's conscience may him to do the vilest and this is not surprising when we realize how consciences are formed and how they work. They are based on the taking into the indi-vidual's mind, in childhood, of outside moral demands, but they are modified, usually unconsciously, by many motives, and can serve as an outlet for otherwise repressed desires. Even if we took the most optimistic view possible, and assumed that in general men's consciences have been appropriately moulded by evolutionary forces, the best we could hope for is that they should lay down principles which have been useful. Unlike the God it has replaced, natural selection cannot be supposed to possess or to embody foreknowledge.

This is not to deny that moral sense, and moral virtues, are essential parts of the form of the device of morality. Since prudence is not enough, even when combined in the Hobbesian solution with a coercive device, it is important that there should be a widespread tendency to act on moral grounds. But what I am now denying, and this does not imply, is that the best pos-sible content for the device of morality is supplied by the specific moral sense that each agent happens to have acquired.

Chapter 6 Utilitarianism