Month: December 2022

Both conservative and leftwingers have maintained that there is a common good which we should set out to realize. But other conservatives and leftwingers have declared with equal conviction that there is any such common good. Could it be that both sides are unclear about what is at stake?

The case against the assumption of a common good is usually made in the name of moral pluralism or individualism. The claim is that there exists a plurality of different conceptions of the good which can lay equal claim to validity.  In one version of this claim, this moral pluralism manifests itself in the existence of different cultures; another, more radical version assumes that moral pluralism is grounded in human individuality.

Stuart Hampshire argues vividly argument against the idea of a common good t in his 1989 book Innocence and Experience. He asserts that the only thing that can hold society together is a commitment to procedures for negotiating our moral differences.  The key to the social order is what he calls “procedural justice” — which he contrasts to a substantive conception of justice which, according to him, is always the expression of a particular understanding of the good. Procedural justice, he writes, is a means for enabling human beings “to co-exist in civil society, to survive without any substantial reconciliation between them, and without a search for a common ground. [My emphasis] It is neither possible nor desirable that the mutually hostile conceptions of the good should be melted down to form a single and agreed conception of the human good. A machinery of arbitration is needed and this machinery has to be established by negotiation. Justice can then clear the path to recognition of untidy and temporary compromises between incompatible visions of a better way life.” (p. 109)

This account suffers from a number of flaws. The first is that it treats conceptions of the good as if they were necessarily disjoint. But we know from history and experiences that such conceptions may overlap in part and that the communalities they share may serve as a basis for mutual recognition and peaceful coexistence in society. We also know that parties that meet will try not only to identify existing common ground but set out to create new such ground. Societies are never held together only by a shared sense of procedural justice. they also seek to foster common sentiments.

We must accept that there is no complete vision of a common good shared by humanity at large and that there cannot be such a thing. But that should not deter us from striving to achieve a limited sort of social consensus. This is, indeed, what we generally set out to do in politics. We can, for that reason, characterize politics as an ongoing search for a common good. But we must allow at the same time that there is no single ultimate good of this kind to be found. Our search does not have a single, fixed target. We must also acknowledge that even when we agree, for the time being, on a particular conception of the good, there are likely to be those excluded by that conception. Social consensus is never the consensus of everyone in society.

Stuart Hampshire’s book Innocence and Experience from 1989 is one of my favorite works in philosophy. Hampshire’s star in philosophy seems to have faded somewhat, but his work deserves our continued attention. Innocence and Experience is an original and provocative work of philosophy. It is also a testament to its author’s humanity, experience, and wisdom.

The book brings together and elaborates ideas about morality that Hampshire had first voiced in earlier years. It has illuminating things to say about the importance of conditional judgments in morality and elsewhere, about the difference between substantive and procedural justice, and the role of imagination in moral thinking. Hampshire’s critique of Aristotle’s psychology with its overemphasis on reason is well-taken. So is his criticism of Hune’s detached treatment of morality. And so is also his critique of John Rawls’ attempt to pin down substantive principles of justice.

Hampshire is particularly clear-sighted on the difference between morality and politics. “Observation of the politics of the immediate pre-war years, ” he writes, “first made me think about the unavoidable split in morality between the acclaimed virtues of innocence and the undeniable virtues of experience.” And he complains that “most Anglo-American academic books and articles have a fairy-tale quality because the realities of politics, both contemporary and past politics, are absent from them.” With his background as a diplomat as well as a philosopher, Hampshire is keenly aware of the difficulty of maneuvering the gap between moral principles and the practical necessities of human politics. There is, he thinks, no  theoretical resolution of that issue.  “Once again the philosophical point to be recorded is that there is no completeness and no perfection to be found in morality.”

Hampshire’s view of our moral virtues and capacities is expansive: “Courage, a capacity for love and friendship, a disposition to be fair and just, good judgment in practical and political affairs, a creative imagination, generosity, sensibility: tese are all dispositions and capacities which are grounds for praising men and women.” But we know, he adds that historical circumstances and personal preferences and choices limit our ability to pursue all those virtues at once. Some of them are, indeed, incompatible. “Lopsidedness is a fact of human history and therefore a fact of human nature.”

What I appreciate most in the book is that Hampshire is writing from a broad range of human experience. His book gives testimony to a mature and humane wisdom as well as to exceptional philosophical acumen.

I remember Stuart Hampshire with gratitude as a friend and mentor and teacher of philosophy.