The hope of getting some argument or theory to share our responsibilities is, I believe, one of the basic motives of ‘scientific’ ethics. ‘Scientific’ ethics is in its absolute barrenness one of the most amazing of social phenomena. What does it aim at? At telling us what we ought to do, i.e. at constructing a code of norms upon a scientific basis, so that we need only look up the index of the code if we are face with a difficult moral decision? This clearly would be absurd; quite apart from the fact that if it could be achieved, it would destroy all personal responsibility and therefore all ethics. Or would it give scientific criteria of the truth and falsity of moral judgments, i.e. of judgments involving such terms as ‘good’ or ‘bad’? But it is clear that moral judgments are absolutely irrelevant. Only a scandalmonger is interested in judging people or their actions; ‘judge not’ appears to some of us one of the fundamental and much too little appreciate laws of humanitarian ethics. (We may have to disarm and to imprison a criminal in order to prevent him from repeating his crimes, but too much of moral judgment and especially of moral indignation is always a sign of hypocrisy and pharisaism.) Thus an ethics of moral judgment would be not only irrelevant but indeed an immoral affair. The all-importance of moral problems rests, of course, on the fact that we can act with intelligent foresight, and that we can ask ourselves what our aims ought to be, i.e. how we ought to act.
Nearly all moral philosophers who have dealt with the problem of how we ought to act (with the possible exception of Kant) have tried to answer it either by reference to ‘human nature’ (as did even Kant, when he referred to human reason) or to the nature of ‘the good’. The first of these ways leads nowhere, since all actions possible to us are founded upon ‘human nature’, so that the problem of ethics could also be put by asking which elements in human nature I ought to approve and to develop, and which sides I ought to suppress or to control. But the second of these ways also leads nowhere; for given an analysis of ‘the good’ in the form of a sentence like: ‘The good is such and such’ (or ‘such and such is good’), we would always have to ask: What about it? Why should this concern me? Only if the word ‘good’ is used in an ethical sense, i.e. only if it is used to mean ‘that which I ought to do’, could I derive from the information ‘x is good’ the conclusion that I ought to do x. In other words, if the word ‘good’ is to have any ethical significance at all, it must be defined as ‘that which I (or we) ought to do (or to promote)’. But if it is so defined, then its whole meaning is exhausted by the defining phrase, and it can in every context be replaced by this phrase, i.e. the introduction of the term ‘good’ cannot materially contribute to our problem. [some reference notes omitted]
All the discussions about the definition of the good, or about the possibility of defining it, are therefore quite useless. They only show how far ‘scientific’ ethics is removed from the urgent problems of moral life. And they thus indicate that ‘scientific’ ethics is a form of escape, and escape from the realities of moral life, i.e. from our moral responsibilities. (In view of these considerations it is not surprising to find that the beginning of ‘scientific’ ethics, in the form of ethical naturalism, coincides in time with what may be called the discovery of personal responsibility. [some reference remarks omitted.]
From The Open Society and Its Enemies (Volume 1), chapter 5, footnote 18
