In Defense of Westermarck

In Defense of Westermarck TIMOTHY STROUP i THE HISTORY OF IDEAS can be approached in two ways. The first treats its materials like fossils, to be unearthed as clues to the past. Occasionally these exciting discoveries shed light on current concerns, but that is by no means a necessary reward. There is instead the thrill of the search, of tracking down a neglected work, of finding an outlook that is intrisically interesting, if not always fresh or vital. The other approach seeks out pioneers who have contributed to a continuum of intellectual progress. The aim is to establish theoretical pedigrees, to show the sources from which later refinements derive their inspiration. In some instances the stature of the innovator overshadows that of the followers, and a renascence or redirection of energies is required. The ethical theory of the Finnish philosopher Edward Westermarck (18621939 ) repays study from either standpoint: his writings are of interest in their historical context and of value to contemporary philosophy. Yet subsequent commentators have seldom recognized either of these merits in Westermarck's work. This is not entirely true of Nordic writers, who have contributed scattered articles on his life and thought, 1 but otherwise Westermarck has suffered a shabby treatment in the four decades since his death. When he is remembered at all, it is usually by critics who attribute to him an untenable subjectivism, a paradigm of what must be avoided in analyzing ethical discourse. Most of Westermarck 's interpreters have been guilty of judging him through eyeglasse.~, or blinders----of contemporary philosophical method or of letting their description be colored by its role in philosophical disputation. The result is distortion of the aims and orientation, as well as the substance, of Westermarck's moral philosophy , and misunderstanding can lead to easy dismissal. This is a revised version of a talk given at the University of Helsinki and the Abo Akademi in April 1976. 1 George Henrik von Wright, "Edvard Westermarck och Filosofiska fOreningen," Ajatus 27 (1965):123-61, and "Ore moraliska f0restallningars sanning," in Vetenskapens funktion i samhtillet (Copenhagen: Munksgaard, 1954),pp. 48-74; K. Rob. V. Wikraan, "Edward Westermarck as Anthropologist and Sociologist," Transactions of the Westermarck Society 9, no. 1 (1962):7-17, and "Edvard Westermarcks etiska relativitetsteori," Societas Scientiarum Fennica Jirsbok 21B, no. 1 (1942-43) 1-20; YrjOHim, "Edward Westermarck and His English Friends," Transactions of the Westermarck Society 1 (1947):39-51; Rolf Lagerborg, Om Edvard Westermarck och verkan fr,~n hans verkstad under hans tolv sista dr 1927-1939 (Helsinki: Svenska Litteratursiillskapets i Finland Forlag, 1951);Krister Segerberg, "Moores kritik av Westermarck," arsskrift utgiven av Abo Akademi 56 (1971-72):74-80;'Jussi Tenkku, "Westermarck's Definitionof the Concept of the Moral," Transactions of the Westermarck Society 9, no. 2 (1962):21-35. [213] 214 HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY Readers who come across Westermarck's work only through the filter of recent criticism may form the impression that his ethical theory consists of nothing more than a naive analysis of the meaning of moral judgments, that his massive study of moral beliefs was entitled not The Origin and Development of the Moral Ideas but The Meaning of Moral Utterance. Here are some samples of how Westermarck's theory has been described by others: He holds that what I am judging when I judge an action to be wrong, is merely that it is of a sort which tends to excite in me a peculiar kind of feeling--the feeling of moral indignation or disapproval,z [Westermarck defines] 'X is good' as 'I feel moral retributive kindly emotion towards X. '3 To say that an action is reprehensible, according to Westermarck, is essentially to say: 'I have a tendency to feel moral disapproval toward the agents of all acts like this one. TM Westermarck held that when I call it [an action] fight, I mean that I have a certain feeling about it.s According to Westermarck, every moral statement can be translated into an equivalent statement concerning the speaker's tendency to feel moral approval or disapproval. If I, for example, say 'This is bad,' and have, let us say, cruelty to animals in mind, then the statement has...