The End of Moral Philosophy in America

The common sense morality was the perfect prescription for a secular republic in which both Thomas Jefferson and John Witherspoon had to live together. It yielded moral laws without compelling people to embrace protestant Christian theology, but it allowed protestant Christians to slip the fundamentals of Christian morality into public affairs without having to name Edwarsean revivalism. Thus, it allowed a kind of low-level evangelism to operate on the republican masses.

The principle of analogy, in fact, worked so well, that sometimes it was hard to carry away with it. Through the intuitive response of a moral consciousness, Mark Hopkins rediscovered an intricate three-fold class of duties for which human beings had been created, including a moral obligation to obtain air, exercise, sleep and clothing. But also he discovered a right to property, which is graciously bestowed upon mankind for the purpose of stimulating them into action.

Union College students in the 1850’s found, through Lawrence Hickok, that they had natural and self-evident moral obligations to cleanliness of dress and person. Even more than that, Hickok believed that this common moral sense would teach people directly that they should privatize the post office, because State interference is oppressive to the public freedom. Like all tyranny, it should at once be abated.

All of these intuitive moral obligations climaxes in what Francis Wayland called the general obligation to the supreme love to God. This, for Wayland, led point by point to the cultivation of a devotional spirit, to prayer and even to good Sabbath keeping. As Wayland happily concluded: “as everything which we can know teaches a lesson concerning God, if we connect that lesson with everything which we learn, everything would be resplendent with the attributes of the deity”.

On the other hand, the fact that morality was supposed to be as real as physics did not mean that everyone naturally obeyed those moral laws the way inanimate nature obeys the laws of physics. After all, people had free will. They could choose to trump those laws if they wished. “Whether we can or cannot answer arguments against liberty, remarked the Presbyterian Archibald Alexander, we know that we are free”. Sort of an odd statement for a Presbyterian Calvinist to make. “Though we may not be able to understand or explain with precision this freedom, yet this ignorance of our nature should not disturb our minds.”

Free will was not the only culprit that kept people from realizing their moral duties. A consistent pattern of unwise choices would result in a permanent moral warpage of the soul.

The Status of the Moral Sense in the Human Mind

It is worth noting at this point that the 19th century moral philosophers were still talking about the human mind as a collection of faculties. Whatever else the Enlightenment had succeeded in questioning, it had not shaken people loose from the notion that the mind was an arrangement of mental departments. For the moral philosophers, the old warfare for supremacy between will and intellect had not ended. If anything, the Enlightenment’s suspicion of the way intellect could be perverted into wasting its energies on the creation of vast pyramids of theological nonsense, gave a new respectability to the legitimacy of the emotions or passions.

In Thomas Reid’s version of the Scottish common sense thinking, the mind’s faculties could be divided into three sections: the mechanical faculties, the animal faculties and the rational faculties, which were composed of the conscience and the intellect.

David Hume had dismissed morality as an animal faculty, just an emotion. But Reid upgraded the moral sense to the ranks of the rational faculties. So, the moral sense was above emotion. The moral sense was not ruled by the intellect, it ruled alongside it.

Too Much or Too Little Religion

Moral philosophy was a confident enterprise, but it also contained a number of important anxieties. The first of these anxieties concerned religion. Not whether moral philosophy had too much of it, but whether it might actually have too little. The college-based teachers of moral philosophy recorded their thinking and speculations in a lengthy collection of textbooks on ethics, many of which had very long lives and very high sales. Francis Wayland’s great “Elements of Moral Science”, which was first published in 1835, had sold 45000 copies by 1851, and 100000 copies by the end of the century.

These textbooks strained to present a semblance of uniformity on moral basis. Indeed they had to, because only uniformity would give a sense of verisimility to the claim that they were only reflecting the common sense of every conscious mind. However, the colleges where these moral philosophers taught were overwhelmingly church-related, and the faculties who taught in them were still overwhelmingly ordained clergy with specific, and sometimes very conflicting, denominational loyalties to serve.

Wayland was an ordained Baptist minister. Mark Hopkins was the grand nephew of Samuel Hopkins, and an ordained Congregationalist minister. Alexander was an old-school Presbyterian. It might prove highly inconvenient for a purely inductive and objective moral science to stumble across facts of human behavior, like free will, which might militate against their particular denominational identities, like Calvinism.

Worst still, it might be very embarrassing for these moral philosophers to find themselves in entire and uniform agreement in ethics with gentlemen who they were otherwise required by their denominations to anathematize. This was a particular problem for Calvinist, Presbyterian and Congregational churches and colleges. They could not had been happy at finding themselves allied in the cause of moral philosophy and the teaching of virtue alongside the wild fire of revivalism.

On the other hand, the moral philosophers may had been too loyal to their denominations. The very fact that they were mostly ordained clergy prevented them from setting up defensive national professional organization that other academic disciplines in America were already using to promote their own disciplinary interests, and the career of their members.

They all had to swear at the existence of a natural, and therefore common, Christian morality; but their conflicting denominational and theological identities prevented any of them from joining arms with each other in defense of either their discipline or morality. In the context of academic professionalization, that failure to organize any form of national professional association helped to deligitimize and undermine the whole moral philosophy endeavor.

So, they found themselves confused by the urge to remain loyal to their own denominational traditions, and paralyzed by the cynical suggestion that their denominational traditions really should mandate that they should never be seen together with these Revivalists.

The Failure of Moral Science

The second of moral philosophy’s anxieties touched on its claims to have a purely scientific non-partisan parentage. The moral philosophers liked to describe their inductive method of discovering universal moral principles out of the facts of consciousness as purely Baconian, after Sir Francis Bacon’s Novum Organum. In other words, as purely scientific, as an experiment in a laboratory.

To professional scientists, morality is not something you can measure in a test, or predict on an experimental basis. What was worst than the disapproval of the scientific professionals was the disapproval of the scientific amateurs. Already in the 1840’s, Americans were becoming fascinated by series of scientific enthusiasms which meant nothing good for the integrity of moral philosophy.

A similar threat emerged from a new interest in races, sparked in large measure by the hankering of Southern slave owners for a way of justifying the enslavement of African-Americans. Racism did this by ways of racial distinctions. Racism infused the identity of moral nature and moral characteristics with simple differences in human physical nature, without the need to consult the facts of consciousness or a moral sense.

But the greatest problem the moral philosophers encountered was the problem of overreach. Moral philosophy promised that it could discover a logical order, not just in physical nature, but in moral, economic and political nature as well. They found, over time, that the really serious ethical problems about virtue in the republic were so complicated and so ambiguous, that no absolute solution had any hope of appearing right to everyone’s moral sense.

The moral philosophers achieved consensus, but only on the issues that were so trivial that they mattered to no one but themselves. On the big ticket issues, like slavery, moral philosophers in the North and in the South arrived at solutions flatly contradictory to each other. So flatly, that it called into question the notion that everyone possesses some form of common moral sense that would always, like a scientific experiment, yield the same conclusion.

By the 1870’s, moral philosophy, attacked on one hand as too scientific to be religious; and attacked on the other hand as too religious to be scientific (both accusations sometimes coming from the same secular critics), had lost its intellectual legitimacy. The last great textbook in moral philosophy, “Our Moral Nature”, by Princeton’s James McCosh, was published after Mccosh’s retirement in 1888. By 1908, just 20 years later, when John Dewey collaborated with the production of a textbook on ethics for the American Science series, all mention of analogy and moral philosophy had been replaced by Pragmatism and Social Democracy.

Although the claims of the moral philosophers to scientific universality in ethics loosed legitimacy, it gave its heroes and readers an inescapable sense of their moral nature as human beings. With it, the need to order their lives on a plane considerably higher than the hedonism and indifference with which their successors, pragmatism and psychology, ended up with. Evolutionary humanism gave no joy, and less humanity to America than it had had at the hands of the moral philosophers.

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The American Moral Philosophy

Edwarsean revivalism was one way of solving the problem of how to generate and ensure virtue in the new American republic in the 18th century. It was not, however, the only way. The Enlightenment had won too many converts to deism, and there were too many routine ordinary protestants who were reluctant to embrace revivalism. However, there was an alternative, that laid remarkably close to the Scottish common sense philosophy, which we already saw how it influenced America before the Revolution at Princeton under John Witherspoon. It also had done so to a lesser degree at Yale, but it was really Witherspoon who gathered most of the credit for introducing Scottish thinking into America.

Using Scottish Epistemology

It hadn’t really been the purpose of the Scottish philosophy to engineer a republic. The real purpose of Scottish philosophy was to produce a realist epistemology that would reassure people about the reality of the external world, and the reliability of the mind’s perceptions of it. In so doing, rescue the Enlightenment from the death end of skepticism.

On the other hand, epistemology is never far removed from ethics. If you cannot be sure what or how you know something, then certainly you aren’t going to be sure about what you ought to do. And so, in short order, the chief labor of the common sense philosophy became the formation of a workable republican brand of ethics. This was not as easy as it sounds. Newtonian science taught to find in physical nature not the personal interventions of God, but repeatable and dependable laws of nature. What about human nature? Did human nature functioned the same way as physical nature?

The same reasoning that erased intelligence and purpose from physical nature, and reduced it all to laws, could just as easily erase intelligence and purpose from the human soul, and reduce everything we think of as unique to human behavior to some kind of psychological determinism. The effects of this kind of skepticism on science would be bewildering. On ethics, they will be fatal.

This did not necessarily troubled some of the American founders. Alexander Hamilton cheerfully accepted the notion that self-interest rather than virtue was the basic engine of human action. Little wonder that the Federalist Papers described the Constitution as a natural system that could work purely by checks and balances, rather than by virtue. But for many others, the disappearance of virtue was an intellectual disaster. It was the Scottish philosophy which became the second means of restoring virtue to public life.

In American colleges before the Civil War, just about every major collegiate intellectual was an enthusiastic disciple of Scottish common sense realism. Thomas Clap, Nathaniel William Taylor, Noah Porter; all preached to the undergraduates at Yale college.

These ethicists or moral philosophers were not content merely with using the Scottish philosophy to establish a certain epistemology, they wanted that epistemology to pay them the added dividend of articulating a public ethic that would serve as the foundation for public virtue and moral order in this new secular republic. They proposed to do this in three steps.

The Three Steps to Establish A New Moral Code

First of all, they proposed to establish a realist epistemology. An epistemology that would guarantee that human life was not passive, nor mistaken in its apprehension of a real external world. There was a real world exterior to the mind, filled with real objects, and the mind had real connections, real direct apprehensions of this world.

The second step was to erect, on that epistemological foundation, the proposition that purpose and intelligence in the universe also had to be real. If all the objects out there are real, and we have direct apprehensions of them, then we have to include perceptions of intelligence and purpose as real, because our perceptions of intelligence and purpose are the undeniable default position of human consciousness.

We look outside ourselves and see objects, the objects are really there and we have direct apprehensions of them. But we also look out at the external world and we see cause and effect. We don’t see cause and effect in the same way we might see a chair or a table, but nevertheless it is the default position of human consciousness, therefore cause and effect should be understood to be as real as those chairs. And not only we see cause and effect, when we see cause and effect, we also have to see a causer, and that means we have to see intelligence and purpose. When we see those things in such an elemental fashion, then we ought to understand that intelligence and purpose in the universe are qualities fully as real as all the other qualities that your mind perceives in things or objects exterior to yourself.

The third step comes when you invite the student to shift attention from physical nature to human nature. Ask whether the same intelligence and purpose cannot also be perceived in human nature as well as physical nature. Then you calculate form the nature of that intelligence and purpose what the contents of a real moral code ought to be. You do it not as though this moral code was based on religious doctrine or the product of religious teachings, but as an induction from the observed facts of human nature, fully as scientific in its method as Newtonian physics.

On that basis, such a code of ethics could be embraced by all the citizens of the republic: Christians, deists or otherwise; because it was simply a scientific realization of the moral facts hard-wired into human nature. Moral philosophy, will thus become what Yale’s Noah Porter called the science of duty. Was there a science of physics? Sure, because we have direct apprehensions of physical operations in the universe. Was there a science of duty? Sure, because we have direct apprehensions in human nature of intelligence and purpose.

The Moral Science

Fitting ethics and morality into the same clothes of science required that the moral philosophers produced a hermeneutical or interpretative principle, which would allow them to transfer the patterns of intelligence and purpose that they saw in physical nature to the human soul. That principle was the principle of analogy. Analogy worked like this: by the epistemological rules of the common sense realist philosophy, everybody experiences inescapable intuitions about the existence of facts. Facts are there. You cannot avoid coming to conclusions about facts. Facts are all around you. You have direct apprehensions of them. You can’t hide under the desk to get away from the reality that is all around you. The existence of facts is inescapable.

One of the most basic of those facts is that change operates in a law-like fashion. Certain things exist and certain changes are taking place in them, and this we know because we cannot avoid knowing them. But when we know it we also know that these changes don’t take place at random. Not only it is inescapable that you have intuitions about facts external to yourself, but you also know that those facts change and that the change follows a law-like pattern.

All laws can, according to the moral philosophers, be shown to have a single pattern. If they didn’t, then we couldn’t talk about a law at all, because every motion and every substance in the universe will then be a law by itself, and the result would be universal ruin.

If the mind could really know the exterior world, and knew it to be governed by laws, then one should expect the interior world of human consciousness to be governed by the same lawfulness. There should, in other words, be a striking ground of analogy between the laws of things, which command and put forth the force uniformly; and the laws of persons, which make certain ethical choices obligatory. “No man was ever known to exist who in any sense could be called a developed human being who did not recognize certain ethical distinctions as real and esteem them of supreme importance”, wrote Noah Porter. “We take them as we know them, whether civilized or savage”.

You see, morality or virtue is not merely a cultural accident. It is not merely a social convention. It is not just an illusion. It is a conscious component of the mind. Unlike the physical laws of science, it instructs people in the laws of character development, of social relationships, of politics, of economics and spiritual duties to God.

The Foundation for Public Virtue

This common sense morality was the perfect prescription for a secular republic in which both Thomas Jefferson and John Witherspoon had to live together. It yielded moral laws without compelling people to embrace protestant Christian theology, but it allowed protestant Christians to slip the fundamentals of Christian morality into public affairs without having to name Edwarsean revivalism. Thus, it allowed a kind of low-level evangelism to operate on the republican masses.

For instance, “the analogy of the human soul furnishes a decisive argument in favor of the conclusion that the Creator and Thinker is one being”. In saying that, Porter was not actually proselytizing anybody, he was simply making an inductive statement of ethical fact. But the result of that thinking would very likely be some form of Christian behavior. It was through this carefully scientized methodology that the moral philosophers were able to rebuild the structure of Christian public ethics in the half-century after the American Revolution, and offer it as a guide to national virtue without braking over Jefferson’s wall of separation, and without needing the furies of revivalism.

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