Mary Warnock’s objective in moral philosophy is to find “the basis for a morality that is not purely relative, that is more than a matter of our own personal preference, and that can stand alone, without the supporting buttress of religion.”1 This chapter briefly summarizes Mary Warnock’s moral philosophy, and then analyzes and critiques two areas of it that have major implications for her objection to religiously- based moral arguments. First, Warnock makes a soft conceptual separation between morality and law. This separation allows her to insist that political authority is carried by law and not morality, and especially not religiously-based morality. She conceives political authority largely in procedural terms, emphasizing the duty of citizens to submit to the law’s authority even when it conflicts with their personal or religious moral
convictions. Second, Warnock follows the standard liberal strategy of differentiating between public and private morality and confining religiously-based morality to the private realm. Privatization of religion, however, is inherently unfair to religious people, misunderstands religion in important ways, and violates the equality of access to the political process demanded by a procedural justification of political authority.
Warnock’s View of Morality
Morality is a point of view; it is one specific way among numerous ways of looking at character and behavior, and it is unique in that it issues in practical judgments.2
1Mary Warnock, Dishonest to God: On Keeping Religion Out of Politics (London: Continuum, 2010), 117.
2Mary Warnock, An Intelligent Person’s Guide to Ethics (London: Duckworth, 1998), 75-76.
Warnock’s view runs parallel to that of her husband, Geoffrey Warnock. Her top ten books on philosophy
The moral point of view is voluntary; it cannot be forced upon people as a motive for action.3 The moral point of view can be adopted, however, by those who want to adopt it.
The moral point of view arises from the ability, granted by the faculty of imagination, to sympathize with the challenges and sufferings of fellow human beings.4
Morality is grounded in certain facts of human nature.5 People’s moral sensibilities, first, presume that everyone shares the same moral qualities as themselves.
Warnock notes that people use moral language sympathetically; for instance, a person uses the same terms to describe jealousy in herself as in other people.6 Second, people think their own mental states are similar enough to others to sympathize with them.7
includes Geoffrey J. Warnock, The Object of Morality (London: Meuthen and Co., 1971), written by her husband, and she acknowledges her debt to his theorizing about the sources and nature of morality and ethics. She comments, “Those who are inclined to deny that morality can exist without a religious foundation should read every word of this book.” Mary Warnock, “Mary Warnock’s Top 10 Philosophy Books,” The Guardian, December 3, 2000, accessed June 27, 2014, http://www.theguardian.com/books/
2000/dec/04/bestbooks.philosophy,
3Warnock, An Intelligent Person’s Guide, 75, 86-87; cf. G. Warnock, The Object of Morality, 164.
4Warnock, Dishonest to God, 112; Mary Warnock, Imagination and Time (Oxford: Blackwell, 1994), 19; Warnock, An Intelligent Person’s Guide, 86-88; G. Warnock, The Object of Morality, 165.
5Warnock, Dishonest to God, 94. Morality itself is a strictly human concern: natural “evils,”
e.g., earthquakes, are not moral evils, neither is the behavior of animals. Warnock, An Intelligent Person’s Guide, 77-78, 108. Warnock thinks Darwinism rules out thinking of humans as special creations of God, or of a different type than other animals. Warnock writes that only those who are “deliberately dogmatic and anti-rational” can think so. At the same time, she disagrees with Peter Singer’s radical approach, writing,
“redefining personhood does not really constitute an argument.” Mary Warnock, Nature and Mortality:
Reflections of a Philosopher in Public Life (New York: Continuum, 2003), 172. The idea that human beings are special, separate, or higher than other animals is not unjust, nor is it a bias that ought to be eliminated. Warnock, Nature and Mortality, 149, 172, 174. Warnock, Dishonest to God, 122, explains,
“There can be no morality except in a social context; that is, a context involving other people.”
6Warnock, An Intelligent Person’s Guide, 103. Cf. Peter Strawson, Freedom and Resentment (London: Methuen and Co., 1974).
7Warnock, An Intelligent Person’s Guide, 103-4. Though the idea of “putting yourself in the place of another” is fairly common in ethical thinking (it is relied upon to various degrees by R. M. Hare, Thomas Nagel and John Rawls), David Carrier, “Three Kinds of Imagination,” The Journal of Philosophy 70, no. 22 (1973): 827-29, points out that philosophical problems are involved. For instance, how can one know if she succeeds or fails at imagining herself in another’s place? There also seem to be cases in which it would be more difficult to succeed—for instance, when a fifteen-year-old must imagine himself to be
Third, people’s immediate reactions to the behavior of others show that they believe them to be responsible for their actions.8 People make moral judgments under the assumption that others would agree with their assessments.9
Warnock aims to recover the proper place of emotion in the human enterprise.10 Reason alone is an insufficient basis for morality.11 In moral philosophy, she finds Hume a truer guide than Kant; the categorical imperative’s over-rationality detaches it too much from the real practicality of human life as it is actually lived.12 Warnock thinks that Hume strikes a better balance. He famously wrote,
Since vice and virtue are not discoverable merely by reason, or the comparison of ideas, it must be by means of some impression or sentiment they occasion, that we are able to mark the difference betwixt them. . . . Morality, therefore, is more properly felt than judged of; though this feeling or sentiment is commonly so soft and gentle, that we are apt to confound it with an idea, according to our common custom of taking all things for the same, which have any near resemblance to each other.13
eighty, or when a wealthy, educated white European must imagine himself to be an uneducated black South African. Warnock does not address these challenges.
8Warnock, An Intelligent Person’s Guide, 104.
9Warnock, Dishonest to God, 119. Warnock, An Intelligent Person’s Guide, 9-10.
10Warnock complains that in the wake of logical positivism, moral language lost much of its meaning. Mary Warnock, Ethics since 1900, 3rd ed. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1978), 138.
11Warnock writes, “For morality rests not on calculation, or not on that alone, but much more on a sentiment of right and wrong, based on tradition, feelings, taught scruples, and perhaps a genetically inherited reluctance to do certain things.” Mary Warnock, The Uses of Philosophy (Oxford: Blackwell, 1992), 69. The choice of the moral viewpoint is not a function of reason, because rationality may be used in the service of harm as well as of good. G. Warnock, The Object of Morality, 26.
12Jenny Teichman thinks that Warnock dismisses Kant too quickly, but Teichman’s assessment is unwarranted, as Warnock does give Kant fair and respectful consideration. Jenny Teichman, “The Uses and Abuses of Philosophy,” New Criterion 18, no. 4 (1999): 27; Warnock, An Intelligent Person’s Guide, 81-83.
13David Hume, A Treatise of Human Nature, 2nd ed., ed. L. A. Selby-Bigge (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1978), 470.
Though it can be confused as a kind of reasoning, morality is essentially emotive, in that it springs from sympathy with other human beings.14 The ability to feel sympathetically the pleasures and pains of others implies what ought and ought not to be the case.
Warnock notes, however, that Hume takes more into account than just sympathy with pleasure and pain. Actions are properly praiseworthy or blameworthy only when considered in general, apart from individual interests. He writes,
Nor is every sentiment of pleasure or pain which arises from characters and actions of that peculiar kind, which makes us praise or condemn. The good qualities of an enemy are hurtful to us; but may still command our esteem and respect. ‘Tis only when a character is considered in general, without reference to our particular interest, that it causes such a feeling or sentiment, as denominates it morally good or evil.15
Emotions also need to be justified when they are used to come to moral conclusions. One could say that a feeling of pleasure or pain is unwarranted, that is, not fitting to the object giving rise to it, and that moral implications derived from it are poorly conceived or suspect.16 Feelings of pleasure or pain are also subject to the charge of insincerity; proper moral conclusions cannot be based upon the drama of emotional fakery.17 Therefore, reason plays a secondary role in morality: it examines and justifies the moral content arising from emotional intuitions, but is not itself the source of moral content. In Warnock’s metaethic, normative force arises from what Korsgaard calls
“reflective endorsement.”18 A person observes humans’ natural, instinctive ways of making and submitting to moral claims, and then considers whether to affirm or endorse those
14Warnock, Dishonest to God, 116.
15Hume, A Treatise of Human Nature, 472; Warnock, Dishonest to God, 116.
16Mary Warnock and A. C. Ewing, “Symposium: The Justification of Emotions,” Aristotelian Society Supplementary 31 (1957): 54.
17Ibid.
18Christine Korsgaard, The Sources of Normativity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 50.
inclinations or not.19 Reason, then, justifies morality and ratifies its normative force.
Emotions nevertheless are primary in morality. Warnock explains,
When we spontaneously use a vocabulary proper to morality, a vocabulary that contains besides “right” and “wrong” such words as “cruel,” “dishonest,” “disloyal,”
“cowardly,” and so on . . . we are expressing in these words our specifically moral sentiments; and if we had no such sentiments, we should have no morality.20
Legal debates must be “felt in the guts” before they can be settled.21 Sympathy, generated by the imagination, is the source of ethics.22
The primary moral challenge, then, is not irrationality, but what Warnock calls
“limited sympathy.”23 All people have a tendency to think more of their own satisfactions than those of others, and are inclined to work for their own in ways that they are not willing to work for others.’ In some cases, people can be not only indifferent but malevolent toward others.24 Morality presses against these limited sympathies and goads people to think of others.25 People can be exactly as moral as they want to be.26
19Korsgaard, The Sources of Normativity, 50-51, notes that this approach to normativity arose with eighteenth-century sentimentalists, among whom she names Hume. Reflective endorsement naturally accords with Warnock’s Romantic view of imagination. The realist model disapproves actions because they are wrong; reflective endorsement, by contrast, says actions are wrong because people disapprove them.
There are no moral truths prior to human assessments with which they agree or not.
20Warnock, The Uses of Philosophy, 93, emphasis original.
21Warnock, Dishonest to God, 114. Warnock, The Uses of Philosophy, 95, writes, “True morality must be felt in the bones. It will not be wholly susceptible to reason.” R. M. Hare, “An Ambiguity in Warnock,” Bioethics 1, no. 2 (1987):175-76, thinks Warnock’s connection between public moral sentiment and morality is weakly formulated. The way Warnock argues seems to indicate that if a majority of people feels something to be right or wrong, that must make it right or wrong—a position Hare thinks is hard to defend. The alternate would be to appeal to the effects of people’s moral feelings; for instance, if enough people would have feelings of outrage over a newly granted moral permission, the ensuing social instability might be enough of a consideration to justify a continuing ban. This posture is stronger, but is not the one Warnock adopts. Cf. Mary Warnock, “Moral Thinking and Government Policy: The Warnock Committee on Human Embryology,” The Milbank Memorial Fund Quarterly 63, no. 3 (1985): 512.
22Warnock, An Intelligent Person’s Guide, 88.
23Ibid., 108. Cf. G. Warnock, The Object of Morality, 26.
24Warnock, An Intelligent Person’s Guide, 87. Cf. G.Warnock, The Object of Morality, 21-22.
25Warnock, An Intelligent Person’s Guide, 108; cf. G. Warnock, The Object of Morality, 26.
Adopting the moral point of view amounts to embracing altruism. People act quite naturally in their own self-interest, but ethics arises when people see that they must at times act in the interest of others or of the whole, rather than themselves.27 Though altruism in one sense is in a person’s interest, because of how he is bound to the fortunes of the overall human society, altruism “does not follow automatically from self-interest.”28 Altruism frequently conflicts with self-interest and feels like a duty or command.29 It often entails foregoing what one would otherwise have done, or denying oneself a freedom you would like to exercise, for the sake of others.30 If altruism is impossible, then ethics is impossible, because in that case there would be no way to distinguish between the motivations of morally good and morally evil people.31
There are rational limits to the moral demands of altruism. The further
sympathies extend, the sooner those sympathies outstrip a person’s ability to do something that sympathy provokes him to. For instance, it is one thing for a person to have sympathy for a poor woman he passes on the street—it is entirely possible that he could do
Mary Warnock writes, “Our sympathies are limited. A growth into moral awareness may be seen as a gradual easing and stretching of such limitation.” Warnock, The Uses of Philosophy, 40-41.
26In her writing on choices, Warnock squarely places moral decisions and personal virtue in the realm of choices that people have the power to make. Warnock, The Uses of Philosophy, 224-25. See also G. Warnock, The Object of Morality, 165-66.
27Warnock, An Intelligent Person’s Guide, 89, explains, “In a precarious situation, people must assert and share certain values, or perish. It is this realization, it seems to me, which lies at the root of the ethical. This is what opens up the possibility of altruism, as each person thinks for himself, about his own relation to the rest.”
28Ibid., 87. Teichman, “The Uses and Abuses,” 28, in a generally caustic review of Warnock’s moral philosophy, points out Warnock’s conflicting views of altruism, among many inconsistencies:
“Warnock denies that altruism is a disguised form of egoism but her own definition implies that it is just that. Altruism, she says, is the recognition that ‘we are all in the same boat’; you behave altruistically because you know the boat will sink, with you in it, if you don’t.”
29Warnock, An Intelligent Person’s Guide, 87.
30Ibid., 86.
31Ibid., 91.
something to alleviate her poverty. Feeling sympathy for every poor person in the world cripples the ability to act on the feeling, because the scale of the problem is simply too vast.32 In these areas that outstrip an ordinary person’s ability to act, feelings of sympathy can sometimes be the strongest; yet his duties cannot be unlimited.33
Morality and Law
When it comes to moral issues of public concern, Warnock believes that the law ought to reflect the broad moral consensus of society.34 In her comments on the famous Hart-Devlin debate over the proper relationship of the law to society’s shared morality, she disagrees with Devlin about the specific issue of homosexuality, but thinks he is right about the need for moral consensus:
Nevertheless, in arguing that the law must be based on an accepted morality. . . . I believe that Devlin was fundamentally right. . . . If the law strays too far from what is widely thought to be right, whether in the matter of what is to be a criminal offence, or what sorts of civil cases may be brought, or especially, what are appropriate sentences for convicted criminals, then the law will cease to be regarded.35 Increasing moral pluralism, however, has made moral consensus harder to come by, especially on issues relating to life and death that express fundamental values.36 In
32Warnock, An Intelligent Person’s Guide, 87.
33Ibid., 87-88.
34Warnock, Dishonest to God, 89-91. Warnock insists that despite challenges to moral consensus, there is nevertheless “a huge degree of agreement in the public at large” on many basic moral questions. Ibid., 89. Warnock refers to the famous Hart-Devlin debate over the decriminalization of homosexuality, noting that both agreed there was a moral consensus in society, but they disagreed about the relationship of that consensus to the law. Devlin thought that the law must enforce that shared sense of morality; Hart insisted that the force of law only be applied when clear cases of harm would not ensue.
Warnock, Dishonest to God, 10, 60-61, 85-91; Warnock, Imagination and Time, 182-83; Warnock, The Uses of Philosophy, 85-87.
35Warnock, Imagination and Time, 183. This quote is from 1994. Though in Warnock,
Dishonest to God, 87-89, published in 2010, she does not side with Devlin quite as firmly; nevertheless, she reiterates the basic sentiments expressed.
36Warnock, Dishonest to God, 88; Warnock, Imagination and Time, 181-82; Warnock, “Moral Thinking and Government Policy,” 512-13. Warnock writes, “It is difficult to make a start towards consensus when the tradition-based feelings people have, which constitute their morality, are so diverse.”
Warnock, The Uses of Philosophy, 69.
contentious issues like abortion, moral opinions in society are in deep and irreconcilable conflict with each other. Warnock reports being “more skeptical than I used to be about the extent that moral consensus exists or can be achieved, still less assumed.”37 In cases where society is morally conflicted, Warnock turns to the legislature as the best means of discerning the moral opinions of society.38 Where a consensus cannot be found, legislators are tasked with creating one, or even imposing one.39 They must ask not “what is right?”
but “what will work?”40 As a result of her work on government commissions, Warnock came to view the terms “right” and “wrong” to be sternly absolutist enough that they had to be relegated to private moral considerations, and excluded from public moral
decisions, which needed to operate upon consensus and in consequentialist terms.41 When no moral consensus exists and no clear compromise is apparent, legislators ought to find a set of moral boundaries that is “acceptable,” a legal outcome
37Warnock, Dishonest to God, 88. But cf. Warnock, Imagination and Time, 185, where sixteen years earlier she writes that genuine moral disagreements are “comparatively rare.” The concept of moral consensus, further, does not accord with a strictly utilitarian approach to ethics. If it were, Warnock writes, moral agreements would be easier to come to. If, for instance, laws permitting abortion can be shown to cause more pleasure than pain than more restrictive arrangements, then on utilitarianism, the former would be objectively the better choice. Consensus language, however, implies conflicting positions that do not submit to easy, calculable resolutions. Warnock, The Uses of Philosophy, 90.
38Daniel F. Piar, “Morality as a Legitimate Government Interest,” Penn State Law Review 117 (2012): 157, states, “Legislatures are inherently more competent to discern and implement public morality than judges.” Wojciech Sadurski, “Conventional Morality and Judicial Standards,” Virginia Law Review 73 (1987): 350, explains, “The presumption that, by and large, legislators are responsive to the moral
sentiments in the community seems well founded.” Thomas Christiano, “The Authority of Democracy,”
The Journal of Political Philosophy 12, no. 3 (2004): 286, writes, “Democratic decision-making [by the legislature] is a publicly just and fair way of making collective decisions in the light of conflicts of interests and disagreements about shared aspects of social life.”
39Warnock, Imagination and Time, 186. Warnock extensively discusses Parliament’s
responsibility for moral leadership in Warnock, The Uses of Philosophy, 84-101. See also Warnock, Dishonest to God, 10. She also asserts that “an elected Parliament may sometimes lead moral opinion, and produce consensus where none existed before.” Warnock, Dishonest to God, 89.
40Warnock, Imagination and Time, 186.
41Warnock, An Intelligent Person’s Guide, 49-50.