This book is a study in comparative ethics. Its purpose is sufficiently explained in the first lecture, but certain features of the treatment require some further explanation. I was led to undertake a study of the experiments in living of primitive peoples because I found writers on ethics with the most divergent views about the nature of morality and the principle of moral judgment appealing for support for their theories to the moral ideas of primitive peoples. After I had spent several years reading anthropological literature, as opportunity offered, I decided to confine my attention to contemporary primitive peoples; for the number even of these is considerable and the literature about them extensive; and fuller and more accurate information is available about them than about the early ancestors of people who are now advanced. But even with this limitation, the problem of the form in which the results of my enquiries should be presented for publication troubled me not a little. The main difficulty was to decide how much detail about particular primitive peoples should be included; and the difficulty was aggravated when I tried to put the results in a form which would satisfy the requirements of the Gifford Foundation. For by the will of the founder the Gifford Lectures are ‘public and popular’, which I take to mean that they should be intelligible to educated members of the general public who are not experts in ethics or anthropology. Such people could not be expected to read for themselves the accounts which anthropologists have given of the ways of life of primitive peoples, while the time at my disposal made it impossible for me to describe many of them in detail. In the end I decided to give a fairly full account of the ways of life of four representative primitive peoples, to use these as illustrations of the nature of primitive morality, and, where necessary, to supplement them by briefer references to other peoples. How far this compromise has been successful I must leave the reader to decide.
This method of treatment involved a certain amount of repetition, for some topics had to be dealt with on several occasions in different connections. In any case some repetition was inevitable in lectures to an audience in which some changes were liable to take place from week to week; so that each lecture had to be relatively self-contained. It is true that most of the lectures as they now appear contain more material than could have been included in a one-hour discourse (though much of the additional material was discussed in seminars); but any attempt to eliminate all repetition would have involved so drastic a departure from the original treatment that the result would scarcely be recognisable as the lectures actually delivered, and in the end it might not be any more successful. I, therefore, decided to retain the lecture form and keep as near as possible to the spoken word.
I am unhappy about the term ‘primitive’ which I have been obliged to use. As used by social anthropologists it is a purely descriptive term and does not imply a value judgment. It covers all peoples who have no written records and whose material culture is simple. But to the ordinary reader it is apt to suggest immaturity and crudity, if not even mental and moral inferiority; and such a suggestion is not warranted. It is true that there are primitive peoples whose moral ideas and manner of life are in many ways crude and barbarous; but there are others whose ways of life are gracious and dignified, and whose relations to one another compare favourably with those of peoples whose material culture is much more complex. I toyed for a time with various substitutes for the term ‘primitive’, but the only alternatives which have been suggested or of which I could think were clumsy and inelegant, and in the end I came to the conclusion that the term is too firmly established to be dispensed with. I want, however, to make it clear that I use it in a purely descriptive and morally neutral sense; for I am concerned to understand, not to evaluate.
In discussing contemporary ethical theories and considering how far they can be reconciled with what the anthropologists tell us about the moral judgments and ideals of primitive peoples, I have been mainly concerned with Intuitionism and Ideal Utilitarianism; and this may be regarded as an anachronism. For though these were the main ethical theories current a decade or so ago when I began my enquiries and though they still have distinguished adherents, fashions in philosophy have been changing so rapidly in recent years that many of the younger generation of philosophers now show little interest in them. And it may be thought a serious omission in a work on the nature of ethics that it pays no attention to the latest developments of ethical theory according to which moral judgments are merely expressions of emotions, attitudes, preferences, decisions or what not: not judgments in the strict sense at all but something else which by a strange mistake has been put into the form of statements. It is with these latest developments of ethical theory, I may be told, that the contemporary writer on ethics has to make his account. My reason for not referring to them in this work is not any lack of respect for the people who propound them nor of appreciation of the importance of their theories; it is rather that the moral ideas of primitive peoples do not seem specially relevant to the discussion of these theories and do not provide a special test of their adequacy. If these theories are a satisfactory account of the moral judgments of any people, they will apply to those of all peoples equally well; and, therefore, comparative ethics is not relevant in considering them. They seem to me to give a partial account of all moral judgments, but not a complete account of any. They emphasis some important peculiarities of moral judgments and call attention to an aspect of such judgments which had been insufficiently recognised by earlier theories; but they neglect or deny other elements in moral judgments which are equally important. So that they are right in what they assert, but wrong in what they deny. And their denial of the assertive element in moral judgments is the result not of an unprejudiced analysis of the deliverances of the moral consciousness, primitive or advanced, but of the presuppositions with which those who propounded them approached ethics. The advocates of the emotive and expressive theories had already come, on logical and epistemological grounds, to the conclusion that the only meaningful statements are either tautologies or empirical statements which are verifiable by an appeal to sense experience. Now moral judgments do not fall into either of these classes, but even advanced thinkers hesitated to class them, along with metaphysical and theological statements, as meaningless nonsense. Accordingly some other interpretation had to be found for them. This was done by concentrating attention on the non-assertive element in them and treating it as a complete account of their nature and function. If they do not assert anything, they are neither meaningful nor meaningless assertions. This, however, seems to me a drastic over-simplification; for while it emphasizes an important and hitherto neglected characteristic of moral judgments, namely, the fact that at least most moral judgments and all original moral judgments express emotions and attitudes towards the acts and agents and states of affairs to which they refer, it neglects the equally important fact that they convey information about them as well. This, however, is not the place to discuss these important and highly controversial issues, and dogmatic assertions about them are undesirable. If there is one lesson which the study of the moral ideas and ideals of other peoples and my own reflection on morality have taught me, it is the bewildering complexity of the moral life and the unwisdom of dogmatism regarding it. There is no short-cut to moral infallibility, and simple theories about morality, however tidy and attractive they may be, are almost certain to be one-sided, the results of over-simplification. All I wish to do here is to explain why I have not discussed the recent controversies about the assertive or expressive character of moral judgements in this work. It is because the researches of anthropologists into the ways of life of primitive peoples do not seem to me particularly relevant to our attempts to resolve them.
It remains only to express my thanks to those who helped to make this book possible: to the University of St. Andrews for the honour which they did me in appointing me Gifford Lecturer; to my colleagues at St. Andrews for the warmth of their welcome and for their generous hospitality which made my stay among them one of the most pleasant periods of my life; to those who attended my seminars and by their questions and criticisms helped me to clarify my thinking on many topics; to my own University for two terms' leave of absence to enable me to pursue my enquiries; to Professor R. Firth of the London School of Economics, Dr. R. O. Piddington of the University of Edinburgh and other anthropologists for advice about the relevant literature; to Mr. George E. Davie and Mr. John Faris, my colleagues in the Philosophy Department of this University, for assistance in proof-reading and many helpful suggestions; to my daughter Catriona for help in reading the proofs and preparing the index; to the University of Glasgow for permission to use in Lectures XI and XII some of the material which I used in the Frazer Lecture delivered in 1948 and published as a Glasgow University publication under the title The Relationship between Primitive Morality and Religion; and to the editor of Philosophy for permission to use in Lecture II two or three pages from an article on ‘Duty’ which appeared in that journal in April 1948.
A. MACBEATH
The Queen's University of Belfast
July 1951
