The Essential Santayana: Selected Writings

IV. Ethics and Politics

IV Ethics and Politics Santayana’s ethics and politics are grounded in his materialism. This section traces the natural and prerational grounds of moral judgments through ethical reasoning and the desire for universal harmony and then takes up questions of political organization. Judgments of good and evil are rooted in the prerational preferences of animal life. Such preferences may be excellent in their setting, but they lack understanding and awareness of context. They are modified by chance and expressed in traditional maxims, religious commandments, and ethical intuitions. This prerational morality, even if narrow, is not arbitrary; it expresses a human will formed according to typical human experience. But what is typical for one group is not so for another, hence this prerational or intuitive morality remains partial and provides no means besides force for resolving conflicts between different moralities . Conceiving different moralities is beyond the capacity of prerational morality . To go beyond traditional values requires “appeal to the only real authority, to experience, reason, and human nature in the living man” (ES, 421). By drawing on experience and universal sympathy, conscience becomes reason. Santayana thought that a rational morality, or an organization of impulses under a harmonizing ideal, presupposes perfect self-knowledge; and this he thought impossible to realize. Yet the ideal of a rational morality suggests a universal and practical method of valuing and judging impulses that Santayana characterized as “Rational Ethics.” Rational ethics consists in taking any sincere human value judgment and determining the dialectical relations of the judgment. This reveals the underlying values of the person making the judgment and so reveals what really ought to guide the conduct of that person. The method does not impose a predetermined system of values, but rather it overcomes the narrowness of prerational morality by pursuing consistency and completeness in its survey of impulses. Avoiding the torment of contradictory urges, illusions, and fears, the method of reason aims at harmony and so brings happiness. Post-rational morality arises out of the despair and pessimism of disintegrated societies and a desire for refuge, redemption, or eternal peace. Reason is left behind, not because of prejudice or incoherence as in prerational morality, but rather because of an overwhelming sense of the vanity of everything. Reason is regarded, rightly, as one impulse among many, but post-rational morality seeks a precept to which all impulses are subordinate; it seeks universal harmony. Some standard, natural in its origin, is inflated to universal applicability and acquires a supernatural character. In pursuit of universal harmony, reason is cut loose from any determinate goal and loses any practical harmonizing influence; it is no longer an ethical ideal. Santayana regarded prerational morality, rational ethics, and The Essential Santayana 410 post-rational morality as continuous, but he did not believe them to be successive historical phases. In the context of an essay on the philosophy of Bertrand Russell, Santayana criticized Russell’s “Hypostatic Ethics” and clarified his own understanding of good and bad. Russell claimed that good and bad belong to objects independently of what anyone might think, making them absolute rather than relative qualities. Santayana believed that ethics rested on felt preferences wholly conditioned by the constitution of the valuing animal. To think otherwise, claimed Santayana, made moral reasoning impossible because it eliminated any point of reference for value judgments. Without a criterion of good and bad with actual relevance to life, nothing but force could settle differences among values; but acknowledging the relativity of values would eliminate contempt for opposing views and introduce greater justice into social relations. When Santayana considered social relations in the political sphere, he concluded that public opinion and ‘the public’ are conceptual fictions, yet he contended that they indicate something real. The act of a social group, such as a vote or demonstration, might be justified after the fact with an idea called public opinion. This idea has no influence over the group or the individuals, and in fact each individual’s idea of public opinion is something personal and private. It is animal sympathy rather than any conscious idea that gives the individual a sense of being caught up by a social movement. And this animal sympathy points to the material conditions of concerted social action. “Government of the People” is an ambiguous phrase: the “of” may be in the objective genitive indicating that the government governs the people or the “of” may be possessive meaning that the government belongs to the people. The complexity of the government requires specialists, using...