Part 1.
Andre Comte-Sponville is professor of philosophy at the Sorbonne and the author of 5 scholarly works on classical philosophy — we cannot surely doubt that this man knows his stuff, then! So when one reads his Little Book of Philosophy one can feel assured that one is getting the real story from one of the best minds in the business, if not the world as a whole, for surely the business of philosophy is thinking and so if there are any people in the world who KNOW about thinking and are expert at it, it has to be philosophers.
He starts the book in the usual way by asking, and answering the question: what is philosophy? — and in the process, again as usual, finds it is the highest achievement of humanity — I won’t deal with the introduction, though there is much to deal with, but will go straight to the first chapter: Ethics.
Ethics is defined as rules derived from reason that a person imposes upon himself for the good of humanity. These rules are nothing to do with the law, or with the fear of censure but are purely the product of reason.
For example, one might reason that if everyone in the world allowed themselves to tell lies all the time, then society would collapse and any sort of decent life would be impossible. Thus one might conclude that it is immoral to tell lies. A similar process might be applied to acts such as stealing and murder etc so that these, too, might be classed as immoral.
The rule of reason is, of course, fundamental to all of philosophy. But in the case of ethics, reason must over-ride instinct, intuition, personal desire etc. This supposes that people are basically evil, or at least, have a natural desire to do wrong: if we did not have desires and instincts that would have us doing wrong, then there would be no need of ethics at all.
It also supposes that if there is a conflict between what a person feels instinctively compelled to do and what reason tells him is ‘morally’ correct, then it is what reason tells him to do that is right. That is to say that reason can deduce what is good for humanity better than instinct, intuition etc.
The natural world uses instinct and desire and intuition and operates so successfully that it has turned a barren rock, the early Earth, into a place that teems with life in ever richer variety and abundance. The success of nature in creating all the wealth of living things that covers the Earth is spectacular and incontestable — or so you would think, yet philosophers disagree. They are saying that THEY know better than nature and that without the rules worked out by reason, humanity could not survive???
Consider a practical example: where nature has produced a bird, reason (natural philosophy = physics) has come up with an aeroplane. As far as the art of flying goes, nature’s flying machines are incomparably better than man’s.
OK, so man has produced some juggernauts of the air, but nature has seen flying as a personal matter and has not seen fit to produce creatures whose sole purpose is to transport other creatures around the world — in other words, if man has produced a few things that nature has not, then it is not because nature CANNOT, but because it just HAS not, and if it did ‘chose’ to evolve massive flyers, or space faring creatures, then all the evidence says that it would make an incomparably better job of it than humanity.
But there are other ways in which the natural creature is way better than the human imitation: birds look after themselves and they reproduce themselves and they will change and adapt and evolve without any effort on anybody’s part. Planes are VERY HIGH MAINTENANCE, and they require huge amounts of time, effort, and fuel and they have short lives and when they have to go onto the rubbish heap a replacement has to be built, and if any improvements or changes are to be made then huge numbers of people have to spend huge amounts of time and effort in ‘thinking’ up the ideas etc.
To return to ethics: if we behave naturally, ie if we allow ourselves to be ruled by instinct, intuition and desire, then decisions are effortless and we do not have to be thinking and questioning ourselves and our behaviour all the time. On the other hand, if we decide that our ‘nature’ should be over-ruled by our reason, then we must put a great deal of effort and time into thinking, and into remembering what we have decided, and into updating those decisions in the light of new ideas; in other words, we are replacing an effortless, maintenance free system which constantly updates and renews itself with a very effortful, high maintenance one that resides in books which become precious because they do not renew themselves but just decay and can be lost with the loss of all the huge construct that is humanity’s ethical systems……………………
……………nature’s way is OBVIOUSLY by far and away the more practical one, and it may be that the very impracticability of human ethics makes the system unfeasible right from the start.
