ABSTRACT
The morality Richards wants is one "which will change its values as circumstances alter, a morality free from occultism, absolutes and arbitrariness, a morality which will explain, as no morality has yet explained, the place and value of the arts in human affairs." This is to be found in a naturalistic ethic. "When we say that anything is good, we mean that it satisfies, and by a good experience we mean one in which the impulses wh ich make it are fulfilled and successful, adding as the necessary qualification that this exercise and satisfaction shall not interfere in any way with more important impulses" (58). There are two points to be noted about this statement. First, Richards' basic units are the different impulses and their satisfaction, not pleasure. "Every activity", he says, "has its own specific goal" (96). "Pleasure and unpleasure ... are at most delicate signs of how our activities are thriving", but "signs which need a very wary interpretation" (97), their intensity, for instance, being not directly related to the extent of the long-term success of the activities; and when they are, as a result of past experiences, goals of activity, then they may be self-defea ting. 2
The second feature of Richards' statement is the phrase, "more important impulses". Though he nowhere states that impulses are equal Richards implies that they may be taken as such. Accordingly, he defines the importance of an impulse in terms of "the extent of the disturbance of other impulses in the individual's activities which the thwarting of the impulse involves". "A vague definition", he comments, "but therefore suitable to our present incomplete and hazy knowledge of how impulses are related" (51). Examples are given to show what he means. Many of our physiological needs, which are necessary for life, require for their satisfaction "complicated cyc1es of instrumentallabour". They thus "involve as conditions a group of impulses, whose satisfaction becomes only second in importance to physiological necessities, those, namely, upon which communication and the ability to co-opera te depend". 3 "But", Richards continues,
"these, since man is a social creature, also become more directly necessary to his well-being". "Impulses", therefore, "whose exercise may have been originally only important as means, and which once might have been replaced by quite different sets, become in time necessary conditions for innumerable quite different performances" (49). This is not quite, I think, another version of Gordon Allport's theory of the functional autonomy of motives,l as to a quick reading it might appear, as a theory that any new functional activity is likely soon to serve other functions as weH, which are furthermore hierarchically interrelated in ways determined by the prevailing social organisation. This is then used to cope with such paradoxes of a naturalistic ethic as self-sacrifice of various kinds. "Acts", Richards says, "which will debar [a man] from his normal relations with his fellows are often avoided, even at the cost of death. Total cessation of all activities is preferred to the dreadful thwarting and privation which would ensue" (49-50). Included among these activities could presumably be asserting or denying a naturalistic ethic. Much of value has as its ground "humane, sympathetic, and friendly relations between individuals." "Unfair or aggressive behaviour, and preoccupation with self-regarding interests to the exclusion of due sensitiveness to the reciprocal claims of human intercourse, lead to a form of organisation which deprives the person so organised of whole ranges of important values" (53).
