Russell - A Very Short Indroduction (14 page)

Despite Russell’s optimism about this view, it contains a number of difficulties. In effect it says that the basis of evaluation is consensus of desire. But this means that if the majority in a given society is offended by, say, homosexuality, homosexuality will accordingly count as bad, whereas in a more tolerant society where a different consensus holds, homosexuality will not be bad. Is moral relativism of this degree plausible? This difficulty is related to another, which is that because the value of consequences is measured by how much they satisfy desires, the degree of the Holocaust’s evil is a function of the degree to which the satisfaction of Nazi desires is outweighed by the frustration of their victims’ desires and those of the generality of the world’s population, who might not wish genocide to become commonplace (perhaps in case they become victims of it). Russell himself felt that something more compelling underlies the moral horror we feel in the face of the Holocaust, but his principles do not explain it.

Any familiarity with debate in ethics shows that Russell’s efforts in the field are sketchy. Even in
HSEP
the discussion is less philosophical than exhortatory. Based on broad psychological generalities, with only a gesture towards rigour, the aim of
HSEP
is to get us to accept a practical method of ethical evaluation rather than to provide ethics with a theoretical foundation. Part of the reason, as noted, is that Russell did not believe rigour can be applied to discussion of ethics; originally the ethical chapters in
HSEP
were to have been a continuation of
Human Knowledge
, but he held them back, dissatisfied, and only published them, supplemented by chapters on political questions, after at last deciding that he could not make the arguments they contain more systematic. But he did not repine; his chief aim in ethics, as with all the social questions he addressed, was after all a polemical one. He wished to influence how people live, and to that end was content to commit himself in the main to advocacy and persuasion.

Practical morality

Russell’s Nobel Prize was awarded to him for literature, and the book cited was
Marriage and Morals
. Russell wrote much on practical moral questions, some of the best of it to be found in the dozens of short pieces he contributed to newspapers, not least those published by the Hearst Press in America during the early 1930s. In these pieces (invariably 750 words long, as required by the size of the column reserved for them on the newspaper page) Russell comes across as remarkably observant, tolerant, humane, and sensible – and on many questions a long way ahead not only of his time but of ours.

Take, for example, his essay ‘On Tact’. We put tact and truthfulness in quite separate boxes, he observes, but this carries a certain cost.

I have sometimes passed children playing in the park and heard them say in a loud clear voice, ‘Mummy, who is that funny old man?’ To which comes a shocked, subdued, ‘Hush! Hush!’ The children become dimly aware that they have done something wrong, but are completely at a loss to imagine what it is. All children occasionally get presents that they do not like and are instructed by their parents that they must seem delighted with them. As they are also informed that they ought not to tell lies, the result is moral confusion.

(‘On Tact’, in
Mortals and Others
(Allen & Unwin, 1975), i. 158)

Such is an education in tact. Tact is undoubtedly a virtue, Russell says, but only the thinnest of lines separates it from hypocrisy. The distinction is one of motive. If kindliness prompts us to please another in circumstances where bluntness might cause upset, tact is appropriate; but it is less amiable when the motive is fear of offending, or desire to obtain an advantage by flattery. People who are profoundly earnest

9.
Russell was awarded a Nobel Prize in 1950, and is seen here receiving it from the King of Sweden.

dislike tact; when Beethoven visited Goethe in Weimar he was shocked to see him behaving politely to a set of foolish courtiers. People who are always sincere, and never tell polite lies, are generally appreciated, but this, says Russell, is because genuinely sincere people are free from envy, malice, and pettiness. ‘Most of us have a dose of these vices in our composition, and therefore have to exercise tact to avoid giving offence. We cannot all be saints, and if saintliness is impossible, we may at least try not to be too disagreeable.’

This may be slight stuff, but it is perceptive, and makes points worth considering. Russell’s journalism on social questions is characteristically like this: enjoyable, amusing, and instructive.

Marriage and Morals
deals with larger and more pressing questions. It focuses upon sex and family life. In Russell’s view, sexual morality has two principal sources: men’s desire to be sure that they are truly the fathers of the children to whom their women give birth, and the religion-inspired belief that sex is sinful. Russell was always prepared to take instruction from the science of his day, in this instance looking to biology for an explanation of the origins of custom. It prompted him to think that sexual morality in early times had the biological purpose of securing the protection of two parents for each child, a motive which Russell is keen to agree is a good one. Many pressures threaten modern family life, he says, and ought to be resisted. Children need the affection of both their parents; the alternative, which is to leave the upbringing of children partly or even wholly to the state, as Plato wished, has little to recommend it. If the state were to bring up children the result would be too much uniformity, and perhaps too much harshness; and children thus raised would be fertile recruits for political propagandists and demagogues.

But so far as personal sexual morality is concerned, in Russell’s view, the modern tendency to greater freedom of opinion and action is a good thing. Freer opinions result from a loosening of the grip of traditional morality, especially religious morality; and freer action is made possible by improvements in contraception, which put women on a par with men in having control over their sexual lives.

In Russell’s opinion the doctrine that sex is sinful has done untold harm. The harm begins in childhood and continues into adulthood in the form of inhibitions and the stresses they cause. By repressing sexual impulses, conventional morality subverts other kinds of friendly feeling also, making people less generous and kindly, and more prone to selfassertion and cruelty. Sex of course must be governed by an ethic, just as business or sport has to be, but it should not be based on ‘ancient prohibitions propounded by uneducated people in a society totally unlike our own’ – by which Russell means the teachings of the Church fathers long ago. ‘In sex, as in economics and in politics, our ethic is still dominated by fears which modern discoveries have made irrational’ (
MM
196–7).

A new morality, premissed on rejection of traditional Puritanism, must be based on the belief that instinct should be trained, not thwarted. A freer attitude to sexual life does not imply that we can simply follow our impulses and do as we like. This is because there has to be consistency in life, and some of our most worthwhile efforts are those directed at long-term goals, which means the deferral of short-term gratifications. Moreover, there has to be consideration for others and ‘standards of rectitude’. But, Russell argues, self-control is not an end in itself, and moral conventions should make the need for it a minimum rather than a maximum. It can be the former if the instincts are well directed from childhood onwards. Traditional moralists think that because the sexual instincts are powerful they have to be severely checked in childhood, for fear that they will become anarchic and gross. But a good life cannot be based on anxieties and prohibitions.

The general principles on which Russell thinks sexual morality ought to be founded are therefore simple and few. First, sexual relationships should be based on ‘as much as possible of that deep, serious love between man and woman which embraces the whole personality of both and leads to a fusion by which each is enriched and enhanced’. And secondly, if children result, they should be adequately cared for physically and psychologically. Neither of these principles is particularly shocking, Russell remarks with a certain wryness, conscious of the opprobrium he had earned for adultery, divorce, unmarried cohabitation, and insouciance about keeping them out of public view, all mightily scandalous at the time. But together the principles imply certain important adjustments to the conventional moral code.

One is that it permits a measure of what is usually called ‘infidelity’. If people were not brought up to think of sex as hedged about by taboos, and if jealousy did not have the sanction of moralists, then people would be capable of more wholehearted and generous attitudes towards each other. Jealousy makes couples keep one another in a mutual prison, as if it gave each a right over the other’s person and needs. ‘Unfaithfulness should not be treated as something terrible’, wrote Russell, for the existence of ‘confidence in the ultimate strength of a deep and permanent affection’ is a far better tie than jealousy (
MM
200–1). Elsewhere Russell argues that there can be no objection to open marriage, as such an arrangement is sometimes called, provided that the woman does not have children by a lover which her husband is expected to raise. His own marriage to Dora ended partly because of this problem.

Russell concludes
MM
by saying that the doctrine he is offering is not, despite these remarks on fidelity, one of licence; indeed, it involves nearly as much self-control as conventional morality demands, with the large difference that the self-control is to be exercised in abstaining from interference with the freedom of others rather than in restraining one’s own freedom. ‘It may, I think, be hoped’, Russell wrote, ‘that with the right education from the start this respect for the personality and freedom of others may become comparatively easy; but for those of us who have been brought up to think that we have a right to place a veto upon the actions of others in the name of virtue, it is undoubtedly difficult to forgo the exercise of this agreeable form of persecution.’ The essence of a good marriage is mutual respect and deep intimacy. Where these exist, serious love between man and woman is ‘the most fructifying of all human experiences’; and that is what all thinking about marriage and morals should aim to promote (
MM
202–3).

Many at the time found Russell’s views profoundly shocking.
Marriage and Morals
lost him his job in New York in 1940 (although ten years later, as noted, it earned him a Nobel Prize, which illustrates how unpredictable life can be), and together with his reputation for enjoying female company it led many to attach to him the character of a satyr. But two points might be noted about these views. One is their calm and tolerant good sense. The other is that they did not spring out of the blue; they are in fact expressive of an attitude shared by the vanguard of left-wing intellectuals in the 1920s and 1930s, for whom free love and rejection of sexual jealousy were unwritten principles. Russell had the courage and crisp logical eloquence required to put these ideas forward in the hope of letting fresh air into an area of life badly needing it. Despite the revolution in attitudes and practices which occurred a generation later, in part made possible by Russell’s advocacy, his arguments are still worth reading as a specific against reaction.

In Russell’s views on human relationships three topics frequently recur. One is the harmfulness of religion, another is the need for good education, and the third is individual liberty. Each is a constant theme in Russell’s social thought, and to each he devoted considerable attention. I consider them in turn.

Religion

It comes as a surprise to people when they learn that Russell was not an atheist. He was, instead, an agnostic. Consistency demanded of him that he accept the
possibility
that there might be a deity, but he thought that the existence of such a thing is highly improbable, and moreover, that if there were such a thing – especially if it were anything like the God of Christian orthodoxy – the moral repugnance of the universe would be even greater than it is, because then we would have to accept either that an omnipotent being allows, or that it wills, the existence of natural and moral evil in the world (‘natural evil’ denotes disease, catastrophes such as earthquakes and hurricanes, and the like). On Russell’s view, a visit to the wards of any children’s hospital should be enough to make one feel either that there cannot be a deity, or that if there is one, it is a monster.

Russell was famously asked what he would do if, upon dying, he discovered that God exists after all. He replied that he would take God to task for not providing sufficient evidence of his existence. He was also asked what he thought of ‘Pascal’s wager’. This is the view that we should believe in God even though the evidence for his existence is extremely slight, because the advantage of doing so, if God exists, far outweighs the disadvantage if he does not. Russell replied that if God exists he would approve of unbelievers who used their brains and saw that the evidence in favour of belief is inadequate.