BOOK REVIEW, Alex Koonthanam

Morality and Conflict, Stuart Hampshire

Introduction

I am happy to write a review on the book Morality and conflict. This book has seven chapters and dealing with morality and conflict separately and inclusively. In this book we can see the basis of morality is found principally in powers of mind that are common to all mankind.  The improvement of human life is to come from improved reasoning and in their different ways both theories contrast between reason on one side and desire and passion on the other. In the later chapters that morality and conflict are inseparable, conflict between different admirable ways of life and between essential but incompatible, interests. I believe now that the subject-matter of morality is misrepresented and finally disappears from view, when a moralist concludes with a picture of the ideal human life and of a possible harmony of essential human interests.

The argument of this book taken as a whole is that there are two faces of morality, the rational and articulate side and the less than rational, the historically conditioned, fiercely individual, imaginative parochial, the less than fully articulate side. This book try to show the two sides separately and detached from each other, which is obviously not as they are presented in our experience. In conduct and in normal thinking about conduct from day to day, we naturally switch attention from one aspect of moral claims upon us to the other.  The two aspects of morality, the universalizing and the particularizing, correspond to two modes of understanding and explaining, one that is characteristic of the natural sciences, and the other that is characteristic of historical and linguistic studies. An explanation of an activity or practice and the justification of it in a context of moral inquiry are certainly different things and must not be confused. Aristotle and Spinoza's moral philosophies which are theories of practical reasoning and of human improvement, have seemed to me the most credible and the most worth developing of all moral theories in the light of modern knowledge and of contemporary philosophy. But they give very different accounts both of practical reason should aim. The distinction between theory and practice is a pervasive and important an opposition as that between theory ad observation or between theory and fact.

Utilitarianism has always been a comparatively clear moral theory, with a simple core ad central notion, easily grasped and easily translated into practical terms. It essential instruction goes like this, when assessing the value of institutions habits, conventions manners rules and laws and also when considering the merits of individual actions or policies turn your attention to the actual or probable states of mind of the persons who are or will be affected by them, that is all you need to consider in your assessments.

There is a presumed distinction between rationality in choosing between lines of conduct, practical reason, and rationality in arriving at true statements and beliefs theoretical reason, and this distinction is associated with a specific account of practical reasoning. It should be possible to exhibit the principal differences between public morality and the morality of private life rather more clearly. In both spheres of practical thinking which obviously overlap; abstract computational morality properly has a pejorative sense for the reasons given.

There is disturbing phrase in Aristotle's definition of the human good which turns out to be activity of soul in accordance with virtue, and if there is more than one virtue in accordance with the best and most complete. The idea of the human good presented in this framework implies that any falling away any comparative failure in total achievement will be a defect ad a vice, a form of incompleteness, an absence of the complete human being completely active in a complete life.

Conclusion

The word institution must finally come into the discussion because all men and women belong to or are imbedded in some institutions which impose moral claims on them. It is not enough to follow the current habit among moral philosophers who write about practices as distinct from individual actions. An institution is a more formally established and a more definitely identifiable entity than a practice it is generally governed by its own observances and rituals. The moral claims of pure practical reason calculating consequences often come into conflict with the duties and obligations that arise from participation in an institution and there sometimes is no third independent source of moral arbitration.