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Russell's Moral Theories

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  25 February 2009

D. H. Monro
Affiliation:
University of Sydney

Extract

If Bertrand Russell had lived in an earlier century, no one would have hesitated to call him a moral philosopher. In our more finicking age, some academics may want to say that, great as his achievements have been in other branches of philosophy, he is less a moral philosopher than a moralist. That is to say, he has consistently advocated ideals and expressed beliefs which have made him, along with Shaw and Wells, if not quite with Marx and Freud, one of the formative influences on the modern mind; but he has usually addressed these writings to the general public, and, although writing always with great force, clarity and skill, he has not always troubled his readers with the minutiae of philosophical argument. But this point should not be exaggerated. Even in his most popular works, Russell never loses sight of the philosophical problems in his concern for the political or psychological ones, and he certainly has views on meta-morals and meta-politics as well as on morals and politics. Indeed, his attempts to reconcile the two are highly illuminating; for they show one of the clearest minds of our time faced with one of the central problems of our time: how to justify passionately-held moral convictions when all the evidence seems to lead to moral scepticism. (To guard against misunderstanding, I should perhaps say that I do not mean religious scepticism. It is demonstrable, though it would be irrelevant here to demonstrate, that religious beliefs, whether justified or not, cannot provide an intellectually satisfying basis for morality.)

Type
Articles
Copyright
Copyright © The Royal Institute of Philosophy 1960

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References

page 30 note 1 Sceptical Essays, 1928, p. 11.

page 30 note 2 Ibid., p. 13.

page 31 note 1 Roads to Freedom, 2nd ed., 1919, p. 121.

page 31 note 2 Roads to Freedom, p. 117.

page 33 note 1 Reprinted in Philosophical Essays, 1910.

page 33 note 2 Philosophical Essays, p. 4.

page 34 note 1 Principles of Social Reconstruction, 1916, p. 5.

page 34 note 2 Ibid., p. 36.

page 34 note 3 Ibid., p. 12.

page 35 note 1 Principles of Social Reconstruction, pp. 17–18.

page 36 note 1 Principles of Social Reconstruction, p. 24.

page 37 note 1 Principles of Social Reconstruction, p. 155.

page 37 note 2 New Introductory Lectures in Psycho-analysis, 1933, p. 103.

page 38 note 1 Principles of Social Reconstruction, p. 209.

page 39 note 1 Principles of Social Reconstruction, p. 209.

page 40 note 1 Principles of Social Reconstruction, p. 219.

page 41 note 1 Principles of Social Reconstruction, p. 207.

page 42 note 1 Principles of Social Reconstruction, p. 5.

page 42 note 2 Practice and. Theory of Bolshevism, p. 131.

page 43 note 1 Practice and Theory of Bolshevism, p. 114.

page 43 note 2 Civilisation and its Discontents, 1930, p. 103.

page 44 note 1 Power, 1938, pp. 142–3

page 44 note 2 Home University Library, 1935.

page 49 note 1 Op. cit., pp. 238–9.

page 49 note 2 p. 260.

page 49 note 3 p. 282.