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Acceptance and Morality

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  30 January 2009

Sophie Botros
Sophie Botros
Affiliation:
University of Essex
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Extract

As a moral ideal, accepting the circumstances of one's life and its attendant miseries is, if not positively repugnant to modern ears, at least utterly puzzling.

Historians might attempt to trace this aversion to the French Rationalists and English Utilitarians who believed that once the laws of human behaviour were discovered all social problems would be solved and who even tried to establish communities in which unhappiness would simply be eradicated. In this optimistic climate of social engineering, when it began to appear as self-evident that each individual had a natural ‘right’ to happiness, accepting misery and social evil must have seemed perverse in contrast with striving to improve one's own and others’ condition in life.

Type
Articles
Information
Philosophy , Volume 58 , Issue 226 , October 1983 , pp. 433 - 453
Copyright
Copyright © The Royal Institute of Philosophy 1983

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References

1 Consider how many of Balzac's characters, a novelist much influenced by the prevailing materialism of his day, achieve good ends by their own efforts— Sechard, Bianchon, Joseph Brideau—when, by contrast, Dostoyevsky, a severe critic of the Utopian Socialism of the 1860s, hardly created a single character whose strivings to ameliorate circumstances led to anything but evil consequences.

2 A comparatively modern conception of freedom; see Isaiah Berlin in Four Essays on Liberty (Oxford University Press, 1969Google Scholar), 129.

3 Purity of Heart (London: Fontana Books, 1961Google Scholar), 152–153.

4 See ‘The Counter-Enlightenment’ in Against the Current (London: The Hogarth Press, 1979Google Scholar), 16.

5 Ibid.

6 Notebooks 1914–1916 (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1969Google Scholar), 73.

7 ‘And yet it seems that not wanting is the only good’, Ibid., 77.

8 Simone, Weil, ‘ Concerning the “Our Father” ‘, in Waiting on God (London: Fontana Books, 1974Google Scholar), 169.

9 Bruno, Bettelheim, The Informed Heart (London: Paladin, 1970Google Scholar), 140–141.

10 H., Putnam, ‘ Literature, Science and Reflection’ in Meaning and the Moral Sciences (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1978Google Scholar), 87.

11 I am indebted to Professor Peter Winch for drawing my attention to this point.

12 George, Eliot, Daniel Deronda (Penguin English Library, 1967Google Scholar), 729.

13 See, for instance, Peter, Winch in ‘ Ethical Reward and Punishment’, Ethics and Action (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1972Google Scholar), 219.

14 Stendhal, , Scarlet and Black (Penguin Classics, 1969). All subsequent page references are to this editionGoogle Scholar.

15 Dostoyevsky, , Crime and Punishment (Penguin Classics, 1966). All subsequent page references are to this edition unless otherwise statedGoogle Scholar.

16 Albert, Camus, The Outsider (Penguin Modern Classics, 1971Google Scholar), 108.

17 I have used the Norton Critical Edition of Crime and Punishment since the translation at this point seems more in keeping with the spirit of the passage.

18 Peter, Winch, ‘ Can a Good Man be Harmed?’ in Ethics and ActionGoogle Scholar, 193–209.

19 Peter, Winch, ‘ Ethical Reward and Punishment’ in Ethics and ActionGoogle Scholar, 219.

20 See particularly Job XLII, 3.

21 Simone, Weil, ‘ Concerning the “Our Father” ‘ in Waiting on GodGoogle Scholar, 173–174.

22 All page references are to the Penguin Classics Edition (1978) of Tolstoy's The Death of Ivan Ilyich.

23 Bruno, Bettelheim, The Informed HeartGoogle Scholar, 140–142.

24 In ‘Can a Good Man be Harmed?’.

25 In writing this paper, I benefited from long discussions with Will Cartwright of the Philosophy Department and Gabriel Pearson of the Literature Department of Essex University, and A. R. Jonckheere of the Psychology Department of University College, London. I am grateful to them, and to Dr Malcolm Pines, for their consistent encouragement and inspiration.