The Object of Morality, and the Obligation to Keep a Promise

Extract

In his recent and suitably provocative book on The Object of Morality G. J. Warnock argues that the fundamental moral concern is with what he sums up as the ‘amelioration of the human predicament’, a predicament which is made even more pressing by the natural limitations of our human sympathies. The distinctively moral virtues, Warnock concludes, will be those dispositions which tend to countervail these natural limitations, especially non-maleficence, fairness, beneficence, and non-deception; and from these fundamental moral virtues we can derive, in turn, four fundamental moral standards or principles. The theory of morality—and it is thank heaven a theory of morality, not of moral language—which I have crudely summarised here seems to me correct as far as it goes, but it also seems to me that Warnock’s concentration on the predicament of the individual human being leads him to ignore what is at least as fundamental, the essentially social and interpersonal aspect of much morality.