C. I. Lewis in Focus: The Pulse of Pragmatism

6. Morality and Sociality: An Evolving Enterprise

Lewis’s ethics integrates the importance of consequences, experimentalism , workability, and the pragmatic understanding of humans and nature, with a vital role for imperatives. Human behavior as goal oriented and problem solving is rule-guided behavior , and rules are normative, or in other terms, are imperatives directing right ways of acting. As such, all our purposive activity has a normative dimension. Empirical knowledge in general, as incorporating conceptual schemes and criteria in mind, is ruleguided behavior. Like all the pragmatists, Lewis embraces the view that knowledge is for the sake of guiding action. And the goal of action is a life found good in the living of it, or the summum bonum. But, while evaluations are a type of empirical knowledge, there is no continuous line from knowledge of good and bad consequences to decisions that are morally right, to which among competing goods ought to be pursued. While the empirical facts concerning the goodness or badness of the consequences of any act enter into whether or not an act is right, empirical facts alone are not enough, because while “the good solicits,” it is the right that com6 Morality and Sociality An Evolving Enterprise mands. “It is desirable to cleave to what is good, imperative to conform to what is right.”1 Humans, as free and self-governing, govern themselves through rules. Human behavior is rule-guided modes of behavior or general ways of behaving, and rules, Lewis holds, are general imperatives that are normative in that they prescribe what should be done in particular situations.2 While Hume and others have made the point that one cannot obtain an “ought” from an “is,” Lewis claims that they have posed the issue in the wrong way. The issue is not whether an “is” can provide the validation of an “ought,” but whether any belief as to objective matters of fact can be validated without antecedent presumptions of the validity of normative principles.3 Again stressing the need for the distinction between justi¤cation and veri¤cation as developed in his epistemology, Lewis makes a related critique of James, pointing out that while warranted beliefs usually lead to good results in practice, such results are not the criterion of justi¤ed believing. There is not a 100 percent correlation between beliefs that are warranted and beliefs that work out well. For example, even the best diagnosis that the wisest of physicians makes may have an unfortunate outcome. But this does not show the diagnosis was unjusti¤ed any more than a successful outcome can prove a diagnosis justi¤ed. Truth indicates a relation of the belief to existent actuality rather than a relation between the belief and the evidence, which is the relation by which it meets the norms of cogency or justi¤ed acceptance . In short, “The normative character of warranted beliefs is not their good working, and good working is not the warrant of them, even though adherence to what is thus warranted has, as its sanction, that such adherence is the best we can do, in taking our commitments of belief, to assure a good result.”4 An act is absolutely right according to Lewis if its consequences are cogently expected to be good and are good; it is objectively right if they are cogently expected to be good, whether they actually are good or not; and it is subjectively right if they are expected to be good, whether this expectation is cogent or not.5 Two things are necessary to determine that an action is right. What is Morality and Sociality 149 needed is both a rule of some sort to direct right doing and a judgment that the consequences of the act are good. Normally we consider the judgment of good consequences to sanction a particular act by the rule, and the rule to sanction acts of this general type, “as a general directive extending to this case.”6 Too frequently it is not recognized that both of these are needed to constitute an act as right, with only one of them being put forth as adequate for ethical judgment. Lewis sees this as a possible explanation as to why there is such an intense and enduring opposition between those who emphasize goodness and consequences and those who emphasize conformity to principles and moral perfection. If either one is presumed, then it is the other that explicitly makes the act the right thing...