A selection of the best from recent issues of the Philosopher

Whether it is a matter of giving to charity, or sticking to duty or insisting on our rights, we can be confused, or paralysed by the rear that our principles are groundless. Many are afraid that in a Godless world science has unmasked us as creatures fated by our genes to be selfish and tribalistic, or competitive and aggressive.

The first part of the book launches itself vigorously with reminders of how awful Hitler was, at these same issues. 'The death of God' turns out to be a necessary 'clearing of the ground'; relativism turns out to be okay for some people but not for others, at least not all the time; egoism; evolutionary theory; determinism and futility...  are all what the author dubs 'Grand Unifying Pessimisms', indeed contributing to a false consciousness. 'Hitler could come to power' warns Blackburn, 'only because people did think - but their thinking was poisoned by an enveloping climate of ideas, many of which many not even have been conscious. For we may not be aware of our ideas... 

Yet such dispositions rule the social and political world.'
That is his first point. The second is that 'Human beings are ethical animals', endless judging ourselves and each other. Sometimes indeed our rules are too strict, and ethics founders by making 'unreasonable demands' - such as Kant's prohibition on lying, or the more everyday conflict between ideals and business reality - the example Blackburn uses is of a company making torture implements - why should the work go to another company? 'The moralist is simply out of touch with the needs of the market', And this is why many of us (reproves the author) delude ourselves with false stories of 'why' our actions are justified.

Then there are the accusations, for example by feminists, that 'Ethics' with a capital 'E', as an institution, is 'an instrument of patriarchal oppression'. For Marxists, of course, it is an instrument of class oppression. For Nietzsche it is an instrument of the weak to trap the strong... 

At this point, with the issues raised, Blackburn launches into 'Some Ethical Ideas', saying that although there is 'more to be said' about such problems for ethics, 'we need to think'. Birth, death, life, pleasure, freedom, rights are presented, with the odd illustration, as a kind of leisurely Cooks Tour of current issues in applied philosophy. But now, we are nearing what at the outset was admitted to be 'a very short introduction to ethics' and it is time to see how Blackburn resolves the debates. 'It is time to pick up some unfinished business' he announces. 

From Kant's Categorical Imperative, Blackburn moves on to Habermas' and Rawls' notions of social contract, which is a surprisingly late introduction indeed, (borne out by the book's complete ignoring of Thomas Hobbes, even in the section on egoism). But the 'foundations of moral motivations are not the procedural rules on a kind of discourse, but the feeling to which we can rise. As Confucius saw long ago, benevolence or concern for humanity is the indispensable root of it all', the author says.

 Blackburn's Being Good is a small book , attractively produced in hardcovers with a colourful flysheet, and it is both easy to read and informative. However, its lofty stance is not borne out by the rearrangement of deckchairs that is offered for analysis. We do not in fact 'de-fang' the vampires, nor do we actually pick up the debates even where they were left by the 'Greats' - Hobbes, Plato, Mencius - all elbowed aside in the necessarily brusque selection of Blackburn's own  authorities: Aristotle, Kant and Hume. Left out of the introduction are the issues surrounding non-human animals, the environment, social policy, discrimination too. What we are offered instead is a comfortable, even middle-class view of the world, and ethics' role within it. Let us finish with a final couplet from Blackburn's introduction:

If we are careful, and mature, and imaginative, and fair, and nice, and lucky, the moral mirror in which we gaze at ourselves may not show us saints. But it need not show us monsters either.