## 1. The Structure of Volitional Choice




Bradley begins his study of morality and the moral agent with an
analysis of the ordinary person's understanding of moral
responsibility. The reason for this starting-place is revealed much
later, when he argues that children are not moral creatures until they
have developed a measure of self-consciousness. This, he says,
makes possible "imputation and responsibility, and here begins
the proper moral life of the self" (*Ethical Studies*, p.
299). If an action has any moral significance whatsoever then the
person responsible (in the causal sense) can be held accountable
(responsible in the normative sense). One could feel accountable
to other people, to God or to one's own conscience, and with this
goes a sense of liability to censure or punishment. Actually being
guilty and thereby deserving of censure or punishment requires the
satisfaction of three conditions: the person held accountable must be
the same person as the one who did the act, the act must have been that
person's, and he or she must have had some understanding of the
moral quality of the act. While not in a position to provide a
philosophical opinion on questions concerning personal identity or what
constitutes an action, the ordinary person nevertheless recognizes
cases in which an accused person was "not himself" or
"did not mean to do it" or acted under duress, and sees
these as mitigating circumstances. In sum, the ordinary person's
view, as Bradley presents it, is Aristotelian: for the purposes
of determining moral responsibility an act has to be the agent's
in that its origin (*arche*) lies with or in the agent in some
sense--and the agent must not be acting under coercion or in a state
of non-culpable ignorance. These last conditions reflect the
common view that one cannot, in justice, hold someone accountable
unless she had a measure of control over the situation and thereby
could be viewed as acting of her own free will.




If we turn to the theories of philosophers we find differing
opinions about whether we enjoy this sort of freedom from external
influences, and Bradley is interested in how the theories of
Determinism and Indeterminism differ from the views of the ordinary
people; not because he thinks the ordinary people will always be
correct about such matters--indeed, they likely have not thought much
about such things--but because examining what the ordinary people say
about moral matters reveals the deep structures of a society's
moral thinking as that is embedded in its language and social
institutions. This is also important, as we will see
later, because Bradley believes morality is relative to a communal
setting, and sees a child's moral development as dependent on
membership in a community.




In the matter of the free will debate the ordinary people believe
neither side. Against Determinism they hold that they can and
often do initiate actions--and on this point Bradley portrays the
ordinary person as accepting the thesis now called "agent
causality." What is omitted by the Determinists are
explanations of behavior which appeal to the reasons of the agent,
thereby ignoring Aristotle's notion of final causality, or
purposely reducing it to efficient causality. The Indeterminist
presents herself as the friend of freedom but when she claims that
people are so free that they could choose any act at any time the
ordinary people object. They think it often possible to predict
what someone will do, because she has a formed moral character and can
be counted on to act a certain way when faced with moral
questions. Moreover, the ordinary person thinks character is
developed by the choices people make and the kind of life they have
led. Bradley notes, however, that character is malleable to
a degree and it is often difficult to determine the extent to which
someone's character is more or less fixed and resistant to
change. Those matters aside, the key result of the
discussion of moral responsibility is the portrayal of moral agents as
not only acting in the world in ways that shape that world--especially
the social world--but also in ways that shape the agent's moral
character. From the perspective of morality both the act
and the doing of it are equally important.



But Bradley does not stop at character formation, claiming that human
nature itself is evolving. He rejects the traditional view that
one's essential human nature remains unchanged even though there
will be some differences in people that are only historical
accidents. The contrary position is a metaphysical doctrine,
often called *historicity*, which claims that human beings are
self-making within the limits of their natural and social
contexts. There is a dialectical relationship between these
aspects of the human condition: we are not only constrained by
natural and social contexts but can often alter natural conditions and
social arrangements, thereby influencing how they impact on our
choices. For example, my ability to think certain things possible
will be a function of my conception of the social institutions of my
society. If marriages are defined as being between a male and a
female, I may not even contemplate the possibility of being in a
same-sex marriage leave alone feel free to act on the idea. Yet,
change is possible because human beings have the ability to represent
states of affairs that do not exist. In its most familiar form
this happens when you plan tomorrow's dinner.




The task, now, is to elaborate the logical structure of this
self-making process, for Bradley's moral thesis is not merely
that the aim of moral action is to generate a better, superior self,
and ultimately a perfect self, but that this is to be achieved by the
agent herself, for it is a process of
'*self*-realization.' Eventually this theory must
supply an account of how anything we might recognize as moral content
gets included in the picture, but the first task is to articulate the
formal structure of "volitional choice" (*Ethical
Studies*, p.71). Bradley begins this task by noting the
different aims we have in pursuing theoretical knowledge versus our
aims in practical reasoning:



> 
> 
> What we want in theory is to understand the object; we want neither
> to remove nor alter the world of sensuous fact, but we want to get at
> the truth of it. The whole of science takes it for granted that
> the 'not-ourself' is really intelligible; it stands and
> falls with this assumption. So long as our theory strikes on the
> mind as strange and alien, so long do we say we have not found truth;
> we feel the impulse to go beyond, we alter and alter our views, till we
> see them as a consistent whole. There we rest, because then we
> have found the nature of our own mind and the truth of the facts in
> one. And in practice again, with a difference, we have the same
> want. Here our aim is not, leaving the given as it is, to find
> the truth of it; but here we want to force the sensuous fact to
> correspond to the truth of ourselves. (*Ethical Studies*,
> p.73)




This presents two very different kinds of intentional mental
states. In the case of empirical knowledge we have a subject in
the psychological state of believing that something is true of the
world; his belief has a propositional object as its *content* as
Bradley would call it. Since the goal is to correctly understand the
world, the subject is committed to altering his belief set until it
accurately represents the external physical world. By contrast,
when I wish or desire to become a better person I must first have
represented the self or person I wish to be under some
description. This sort of mental state also has a
propositional object; e.g., in the statement, "I wish that *I
were a more patient person"* the italicized proposition
following the "that" is the object of the mental state we
call wishing*.* What we have here, in Bradley's
terminology is an *ideal* object which is the *content*
of the wish. This is ideal because it is a mental representation
of a state of affairs that does not exist at the point the wish is
made.




An ideal object can represent a possible different state of
the person contemplating it, which presupposes, in addition to the
ability to represent possible future states, a degree of
self-awareness. An example of this sort of self-consciousness is
found in the addict who may be very aware of how his desires are
ruining his life. Once this sort of self-reflective awareness is
achieved it is then possible to think of changing things. In
Bradley's language this addict has pictured a better self that he
might be, and if he comes to identify his satisfaction with realizing
this better self there is a possibility of change. This situation
sets up a conflict between the actual person the addict now is and the
represented better person he wishes to be and this generates disharmony
or what Bradley often calls a "felt contradiction".
The pain of this conflict moves the individual toward resolving
it. It is important to note that the addict cannot move forward
without having a determinate ideal object, a definite conception of the
ideal self being represented. Without this, identifying his
satisfaction with realizing that state would be impossible.




This gives us a way to see what Bradley means when he says, in a
later article, that "volition is 'the self-realization of
an idea with which the self is identified'" (*Collected
Essays*, p. 476). In *Ethical Studies* the
claim made is that the only thing we can aim at in acting is to realize
ourselves--or, better, the structure of practical reasoning and the
facts of moral psychology make it impossible that we could aim at
anything other than self-realization. If volitional choice has a
possible state of oneself as its object, and if one has identified
one's satisfaction with achieving this, then acting so as to
realize the superior self that has been pictured is an advancing of
oneself or realizing oneself. In fact, this would also be true of
a case in which the intentional object represents a state of affairs
not directly involving a change in oneself, for having identified
one's satisfaction with a possible state of affairs would mean
that its coming to be would be also a case of advancing oneself, for in
this case the agent has forced the world to conform to us. What
is crucial is that the represented state be taken as the agent's
end. As Bradley notes, "all my thoughts are not my
ends" and if self-realization meant no more than having an idea
of a future event in our mind which later happens, "then I should
realize myself practically when I see that the engine is going to run
off the line, and it does so" (*Ethical Studies*, p.
67).


## 2. The Perfect, Ideal Self




Volitional choice therefore has a built-in normative feature in the
form of an idea of a better state or self. But self-realization
means more than this for ethical theory, for it purportedly represents
the over-arching, ultimate goal of moral action, which entails some
idea of a perfect, ideal self that is being aimed at. This raises
an epistemic problem. With individual cases, such as the addict
contemplating his situation, it may be that he gets an idea of how he
might change by observing other people or considering how he used to be
before becoming an addict. But how can anyone know what the ideal
self is, the superior self that is not merely better, but best?
Answering this is crucial if Bradley's ethical theory is not to
fall victim to a criticism he made of Mill's thesis about the
qualities of pleasures (*Utilitarianism*, Chapter 2).
Bradley leveled a barrage of criticisms against any theory, Utilitarian
or otherwise, that proposed the maximization of pleasure as the
ultimate moral goal. The central objection was that since
pleasures are a "perishing series," with each one passing
away once it has been experienced, it is not possible to accumulate a
sum of pleasures, and since there are always more pleasures available
than anyone has experienced, Mill's moral goal of maximizing
pleasant states was meaningless. But introducing the idea of
qualitatively different kinds of pleasures that can be ranked suggests
that perhaps the hedonist can, after all, successfully articulate the
self we should be aiming at. Perhaps the best self--the ideal
moral self--is the one that pursues the highest type of pleasure.




 In evaluating this Bradley stresses the relative,
comparative nature of terms such as 'higher' and
'lower'. Contrast terms such as
'superior' and 'inferior' invite us to ask,
"in respect of what is *A* higher than, or superior to,
*B*?" Bradley insists that if I say Sally is superior
to Joan I must first be comparing them in terms of some characteristic
they share--for example, both are beautiful--and, second, I am
positioning them on a scale, which is conceived in terms of two
determinate termini. We can perhaps see the point here by
imagining what happens when, having said Sally is superior to Joan, we
are next asked to rank Mary. If Mary is judged superior (in
beauty) to both, then she is being placed between Sally and someone who
is right at the top of the scale. Mill's account of
superior pleasures fails because he never explains what the scale is
that is being used and so never explains what the 'highest'
kind of pleasure is. Whether this criticism survives
scrutiny does not matter all that much as far as the fate of hedonism
is concerned, for Bradley's attack on qualitative hedonism is
nothing short of thorough and he thinks there is no convincing case
Mill can make in support of it. For example, Mill's
competent judges cannot say that this ranking just "feels"
right, for that is to confess that the talk of ranking is meaningless
since one could have just as well "ranked" them
differently. And the ranking cannot be made in terms of
Mary's beauty, because that is the quality that makes Mary a
candidate for placement on the scale in the first place; which leads
Bradley to hold, as did most of Mill's critics, that unless the
whole business really is nonsense, there must some criterion other than
pleasure being used and so Mill has given up hedonism. These, and
some other arguments are independent of the issue about knowing the
upper limit end of the scale of pleasures That issue *is*
important, however, because it marks a problem Bradley's theory
of self-realization should also have to face: namely, that talk
of a 'superior' or 'better' or 'more
perfect' moral person would require an explication of the upper
limit of the scale these evaluations are employing. This seems a
reasonable demand, for even apart from the question of whether judging
something to be better than something else entails knowing what is
best, Bradley's thesis is not just that we try to become better
with each choice and action, but that we want to be the best possible,
to be perfect moral agents.




Fortunately, Bradley has an answer. In the passage from
*Ethical Studies* quoted above Bradley said that in our
theoretical attempts at understanding the world we want to make our set
of empirical beliefs coherent, and since we assume as a working
hypothesis that the external world is systematic, a contradiction in
our beliefs would indicate we have not yet arrived at the coherence and
consistency that is demanded. In addition, our empirical belief
set has to include all the facts, has to be comprehensive.
Bradley claims a similar objective applies to intentional agents.
We look to produce a self that is an organic whole in which all is
related so as to render it a system rather than a mere collection of
random acts and characteristics. Yet it must also seek to be all
it can become rather than living "the life of an
oyster." These two aspects he calls
'homogeneity' and 'specificity' respectively
(*Ethical Studies*, p.74), and they appear to parallel
"coherent" and "comprehensive" as applied to a
set of beliefs.




To show that we aim at being a whole, Bradley first offers some
empirical evidence.




To the extent that people consider the consequences of their actions
they demonstrate that they do not see their actions as disconnected
from other things they have done and might do, and they subordinate
some ends to wider goals. That is, ordinary people not only
display a degree of prudence in making choices but also recognize that
the value of some actions is that they are means to more important
goals. In fact, he claims that most people act with some "ideal
of life," or some idea of what would make them perfectly happy,
however vaguely expressed, and this orders their lives, governing their
choices and actions. In a word, normal lives of mature adults are
at least relatively systematic. Moreover, if a person has become
habituated to act in certain ways, has developed a disposition to act
thus and so, then her actions will tend to be relatively
consistent. This sort of person has what Bradley calls a
"standing will" and it explains why those who know someone
well can predict what this person will do with a considerable
degree of certainty and why that person feels pleased that others know
she can be counted on to act appropriately. There is, in other words, a
structure to her actions suggesting her inner life--her desires,
dispositions, values and so on--is unified. She is like an
organism in that all these features work together as one unit, (= a
"whole").




 Moving beyond empirical evidence,
Bradley claims that in volitional action "the self as a whole is,
in the end, the content of our wills" (*Ethical Studies*,
p. 71). In other words, in self-realization the ideal object with
which the self will identify its ultimate satisfaction is a whole.
There are two articulations of this notion of a "whole
self." First, Bradley notes that we find it natural to
speak of someone willing this or that, and we often speak of
someone's will, as in "her will to live."
This reveals two aspects of the will, of the individual person
deliberating and choosing a course of action. First, when Sally
wills something there is a particular process that occurs in which
Sally deliberates, experiences certain desires or leanings toward one
thing or another, eventually terminating in her doing such and
such. Bradley calls this the *particular* aspect of the
will to indicate that volitional choice is geared toward specific
actions in the world. Even if Sally cannot carry out her plans,
say because she is paralyzed, her willing still targets doing something
specific. On the other hand, when we say Sally has a will we are
conceiving of her as persisting beyond any single specific choice, and
seeing her as the owner and author of what she wills. Bradley
calls this the *universal* aspect of the will. The
"volition as a whole E is the unity of both these factors,
and the projection or carrying of it out into external existence; the
realization both of the particular side, the this or that to be done,
and the realization of the inner side of the self in the doing of
it" (*Ethical Studies*, p.72). The moral
thesis of self-realization reflects the importance of both, for
creating our moral character through our choices and actions entails
both particular acts of will and a subsisting will that is
developed through these choices.



In his later articles on the will a volition is defined as "the
self-realization of an idea with which the self is
identified." Again, this pictures a self that can identify
with an ideal object and can through action *realize* (bring
about) the state of affairs represented by the ideal object. When
this occurs the self is also realized because of its identification
with this object. The full analysis reveals five necessary
components:



> 
> 
> There is (1) existence, (2) the idea of a change, and (3) the actual
> change of the existence by the idea to (4) the idea's content.
> And (5) in this change the self feels itself realized. (*Collected
> Essays*, p. 477)




The self that entertains the ideal object (the intentional object)
and identifies its satisfaction with that object and that feels
satisfaction when that object has become real in the world, must all be
the same self. This is the main point of saying that the will has
a universal aspect.




The thesis that we aim at being a whole is further illuminated by
considering volitional choice from the inner perspective of the
individual moral agent. This agent is aware of being the same
person throughout specific acts of choosing--an awareness of being the
"I" that wills to do this or that. But at the same
time there is--or should be--some uncertainty about who or what this
"I" is, for there is a dualism built right into the logical
structure of volitional choice in that it requires awareness of both
the existing state of the self and a superior state represented as a
possible future state. Since both are felt to represent this
person a tension arises along with a desire to resolve the tension; so
there is, right at the heart the matter a kind of movement toward
restoring the unity of the self by overcoming the dualism that
necessarily exists in any volition. Later this sort of conflict
gets introduced in Bradley's moral theory in terms of the
development of, and the conflict between, the good self and the bad
self.



Bradley next says that what we really desire is not merely to be a
whole, but an *infinite* whole. This introduces a
particular, and perhaps to some minds a peculiar, metaphysical
doctrine: that if A is dependent on B then A is not real in and
of itself--because it is defined by, or can only function
through, its relationship to B. The real is independent; it is
what it is in terms of its own features and functions. . (On this
view 'real' is a normative term.) Something
which has no external relations that impinge on what it is and can do
is infinite. By contrast, a finite entity has something that
limits it. This relates to the analysis of the self of
moral action because, given this conception of what it means to be
'real'--as requiring total independence from anything else
and thereby being free of all relations--it would be analytic that the
goal of self-realization can be attained only if one could become an
infinite whole in Bradley's this technical sense of
'infinite'. Of course, it is unlikely that the
everyday moral agent has thought of her situation in these
terms. But that is not necessary because each has a
*felt impulse* which points her in the right direction.
Explaining this introduces yet another metaphysical doctrine,
Bradley's theory of immediate experience.




The best way to appreciate this theory is to consider the nature of
the most primitive stage of sensory experience. Some philosophers
have held that in our initial sensory states we have a subject or self
confronting and receiving information from an object--which might be
either a physical object or a sense-datum. The mistake here, in
Bradley's view, lies with the dualism this picture endorses, with
the idea that the initial experiences are ones in which the
experiencing self's consciousness is focused on an object.
In other words, these views see the initial stage of experience as
cognitive (meaning there is an object before one's conscious
awareness); in other words they are intentional mental states.
Bradley rejects this, arguing that there is level of a non-cognitive
experience at the foundation of all cognitive experiences. At
this logically prior level conscious experiences have no objects.
Being in pain is often offered as an example of this sort of mental
state. Bradley calls this level of experience
"feeling" to remind us that we are dealing with a
non-cognitive mental state below the level of thought; and it is also
called "immediate experience" because it is as yet
unmediated by any mental operations such as attention and
abstraction. The reason Bradley advances this view of immediate
experience lies with his analysis of the structure of thought.
Put roughly, he claims that in judging that "The wolf is eating
the lamb," for example, we separate various aspects of what is
immediately given and assert a relationship between them, which
involves mental operations such as attention and abstracting.
Operations of this sort must be working on experience that is a
non-relational unity. (In a sense then, the argument for
immediate experience is transcendental, in the Strawsonian sense that
it can be shown to be a necessary condition of the mental operations we
can and do perform.) Finally, at some point the subject-object or
experience-experienced dichotomy has to arise.



The details of Bradley's doctrine of immediacy need not detain us
here, but one point is of central importance: when we move to the
higher level of consciousness that entails intentional mental states
there supposedly remains a residual "feel" of the unity of
immediate experience, and some residual sense of the
"contents" of immediate experience. This is relevant to
the question of why there is an impulse to become an infinite whole:
it is because we carry a residual feel that all reality is a
systematic non-relational unity. In other words, there is a residual
trace of the primitive level of immediacy or feeling that moves us
toward wholeness in the sense that we feel at odds, incomplete, when
we conceive of ourselves as defined by our relations to
'things' and 'other selves'. And when we
consider this along with the theory of the nature of thought, we
recognize that these experiences as they are expressed in statements
actually leave out other aspects of the given and so are
incomplete. In this way judgments are never completely accurate and
only partly true. (This is Bradley's theory of the degrees of truth.)
The consequence of this line of thinking for moral theory is that we
have a test by which to determine whether we have realized ourselves
in a particular case: namely, have we arrived at a greater unity,
which means fewer felt contradictions or explicit contradictions in
our desires, our dispositions and the like? The ideal moral self is
achieved when we arrive at a point at which it has no limiting
relations, which is to say, when we are an infinite whole, a
systematic organic unity. That we can be part way along in this
progress toward the ideal moral self, and in our understanding of what
the ideal moral self demands, reflects what will later become his
theory of degrees of reality. In the case of morality, one step on the
road to perfection occurs when we stop thinking of other people in our
community as forces or wills pitted against us--that is, when we
stop seeing our relations to them as external--and begin to see
others as internally related to us. Being internally related to others
in our community means that our relations to others are essential to
us, in the sense of defining who and what we are. By contrast,
external relations make no difference to their terms. For example, my
being in front of the Eiffel Tower is usually said to be an external
relation I bear to that object--it does not make me a different
person. Put roughly, the difference between a mere collection of
people--such as those who went to the parade yesterday--and
a community or social unit such as a family--lies in whether the
relationships each person bears to the others in the group makes a
difference to who and what they are. This internal bond is observed
whenever a member of the community talks of what "we"
believe, value, and so on. Here is the appearance of what has been
called "we-intentionality."


## 3. The Content of Volitional Choices




The next task is to show what provides the moral content for
practical deliberations and choices about how to act. Most
importantly, we want to know what specific types of actions or goals
will allow us to realize ourselves. Here Bradley turns to historical
ethical theories to determine whether they can supply what is
wanted. Bradley examines teleological hedonism and deontological
theories and finds both unacceptable. Deontological theories fail
because they place no constraints on what can be willed by a moral
agent and so no specific end is indicated and none barred.
Deontology is one-sided and abstract: it has focused on the
universal aspect of the will and disregarded the other, equally
important particular element. What is in fact missing is any
adequate psychological account of desire which explains how we are
motivated to do specific things, to make specific choices. By
contrast, ethical hedonism makes the opposite mistake of focusing on
the particular to the detriment of the universal side. Classical
Utilitarianism, for example, sees particular pleasant states as the
goal of action but cannot present any of these as having any intrinsic
value, for they are only means to the maximization of pleasure and
could be replaced by any other means that were more, or equally,
effective. Moreover--and this is an objection raised by all the
British Idealists against hedonism--since pleasant states perish
there is no sense in which a number of them can be enjoyed together as
felt states rather than merely remembered. So, a sum of pleasures
or a maximum of pleasures cannot be the end moral agents are to aim
for.




There is another reason the British Idealists believed that pleasure
could not be the end of moral action. Henry Sidgwick correctly
expressed this objection: "It is said ... by Mr. Green
that 'pleasure as feeling, in distinction from its conditions
which are not feelings, cannot be conceived'; and, therefore, of
course, cannot be taken as an end of rational action"
(*Hedonism and the Ultimate Good*, p.36). The debate Green
is weighing in on concerns what can and cannot be the intentional
objects of desires. Sidgwick claims that Green's argument
trades on an ambiguous use of 'conceive'. We might
not be able to "form the notion of an angle without the notion of
the sides containing it," says Sidgwick, but we can see
that an angle is greater than or equal to another "without any
comparison of the containing sides" (*loc. cit*.).
This misses the point. It is not that I have to compare sides in
order to ascertain the size of an angle, but rather that our
*conception* of an angle entails the notion of a space
contained, as it were, between two lines that meet at a point and we
cannot 'think' of a 'mere angle' in the sense
of an unbounded spatial quantity. Applied to pleasures, the issue
is whether there are naked pleasures, as it were, and whether one can
attach any meaning to the idea of a pleasure detached from the activity
or whatever it is that is the pleasant experience. Bradley made a
similar point in *Ethical Studies*: pleasure and pain are
feelings which "*are* as they are felt to be, but they
tell us nothing. In a word they have no content: they are states
of us, but they have nothing for us (*Ethical Studies*, p.
94). If we cannot characterize pleasures--because they
have no meaning or content in and of themselves--then we cannot
identify with them and so they could not be the objects aimed at in
rational choice, as Green had said.




Mill had in effect rejected this view by accepting that pleasures
display qualitative differences. Bradley recognizes that we
*talk* as though they do, using expressions which appear to
entail that pleasures and pains have immediately given felt qualities
but he offers an explanation of why this is. He starts with the
observation that while it is uncertain whether all sensations are
"coloured by pain and pleasure" it is certain that
"without sensation we never have pleasure or pain"
(*Collected Essays*, p. 244). Just as sensations never occur
apart from some psychic context, which may make a significant
difference to the sensation, neither do pleasures and pains
"exist apart from sensation" (*Collected Essays*,
p. 245). He goes on to assert that "pains and pleasures have no
qualities of their own," it being "the quality of the
sensations, or arrangements of sensations, which we place to their
credit. The kinds of pains which have been urged in disproof of the
above, the feelings that shoot or that burn or gnaw, are each due to
the special sort of sensations, together with the rhythm of intensity
in the pain" (loc cit). If this is true, it offers a reason why
we might mistake a quantitative for a qualitative difference, namely,
that we mistake variations in sensory intensities and
intensity-patterns over time, with which pleasure is attached or
attendant, for qualitative differences in the pleasures
themselves. Given that further features of the overall experience are
said to be attributable to the powers of the sensations,
these--rather than the pains and pleasures--appear to be the
causal agents. If this interpretation is correct, pains and pleasures
are epiphenomena. For present purposes the importance of this is that
it bolsters the Idealists' argument that pleasure cannot be the end of
rational action, leave alone the ultimate end of moral action. It also
explains the so-called Paradox of Hedonism.



Both of these views--hedonism and deontology--approach morality from
the perspective of the individual person. This individual is
treated as a fully formed moral agent independent of any social
relations. Each is able to decide what is morally required by
consulting a formal principle in their mind (e.g., the Kantian
categorical imperative) or their own feeling states. In
responding to individualism, which he thinks ultimately rests on a
false theory of human nature, Bradley's worry as far as morality
is concerned is that it reflects a kind of egoistic antagonism to other
people that makes morality impossible: if the self we are
"to realize is an atom, a unit which repels other units, and can
have nothing in itself but what is exclusively *its*, its
feelings, its pleasure and pain--then it is certain that it can stand
to others, with their pleasures and pains, only in external relation;
and since it is the end, the others must be the means, and nothing but
the means. On such a basis morality is impossible
E" (*Ethical Studies*, p, 115). It is
impossible because, since morality requires being an organic whole,
social relations that are external defeat that goal. The sort of
confrontational individualism in which each asserts his or her will
against the wills of others generates the intolerable situation that
contract theories take to be the motivation for creating the social
contract, which in its turn becomes another form of external constraint
on individuals that prevents the community from becoming anything other
than a mere collection of egoistic, atomic individuals.




In opposition to individualism Bradley endorses the thesis of
holism. Debates pitting individualism and holism against each
other usually focus either on questions about explanations or on
questions about the essential nature of social creatures such as human
beings. Methodological individualism takes a position on the
first of these, claiming that the explanation of the behavior of
collective or corporate entities requires reduction to the beliefs,
aims, and desires of individuals making up that collective. There
has recently been some interesting literature on this debate, expressed
in terms of whether corporations and other groups can be said to have a
perspective (a set of beliefs and values) such that it would be
appropriate to say that the collective itself has beliefs, desires, and
so on, thereby exhibiting a form of collective intentionality
(we-intentionality) that is not reducible to the intentional mental
states of its members (e.g., French and Wettstein's *Shared
Intentions and Collective Responsibility*). Bradley at times
talks of society and the state in ways which suggest he would accept
the position of the proponents of collective intentionality, and
perhaps he must commit to it if the argument for metaphysical holism,
which is his main concern, goes through.




The metaphysical thesis claims that individuals are what they are
because of their social relations. To the extent that Bradley
offers anything in the way of argument for this position he tends to
lean rather heavily on empirical evidence which shows us that people
born at different times and places, and born into this or that cultural
or religious or ethnic group, will tend to inherit the practices and
attitudes of those by whom they are raised. He does think of
children as born with certain natural needs and desires and with
certain aptitudes and latent possibilities; but these need nurturing
and some of these tendencies need to be "civilized", the
effect being: "These 'civilized tendencies', if
we may use the phrase, are part of the essence of the
child: he would only partly (if at all) be himself without
them; he owes them to his ancestors, and his ancestors owe them to
society" (*Ethical Studies*, p. 170). Against the
individualist who objects that there was, nevertheless, a point at
which there were no societies but only individuals, he elicits the aid
of Darwin in support of the view that humans have always been
social, having evolved from social animals. But Bradley has a
more interesting argument for holism which enters on language.
The language a community speaks has to be truly public, with understood
and accepted meanings for its central terms, on pain of ending with
nobody ever understanding what anyone else is talking about. The
language also has, embedded in it as it were, the values and beliefs of
the community that speaks it. In passing on its language to the
children a society is passing on its values, its understanding of its
institutions and so on. As Bradley says, for each child, learning
to speak the language "carries into his mind the ideas and
sentiments of the race E and stamps them in indelibly"
This child also observes and comes to participate in the practices of
the society: he "grows up in an atmosphere of example and
general custom" (*Ethical Studies*, p.
172).



Holism has ramifications for the theory of self-realization, because if
one's social relations are constitutive of what one is then the
self is only realized when it recognizes and endorses the duties it has
as a member of a community--a family, a state, and so on. At
this point the self's perspective shifts from the subjective
feelings and goals of the individual to the idea of moral
obligations that are objective, in that they hold for all in the
community, and also objective in that one has them no matter what
personal desires one might have. Of course, with the recognition that
one is a member of the community the situation will not be construed as
"them" forcing "me' to behave a certain way;
but will give rise to genuine collective intentionality, to viewing
things in terms of what *we* believe and value.



One key thing that happens at this stage is that the idea of realizing
the self is now given specific content. Earlier we saw the moral
agent, the moral self, in terms of the formal structure of volitional
action, but here we see a self that has specific content attached to
its realization or perfecting of itself, for the communal morality
indicates what is expected of someone if they wish to be regarded as a
virtuous member of that moral community. Moreover, society offers
the homogeneity and specificity that moral development demands:
social life not only provides a greater degree of homogeneity, in that
it removes the dualism of oneself and others, but it provides an
expansion of the self through the greater diversity (specificity) found
in living with others, since that communal life expands one's
experience beyond what is available to her as a mere, isolated,
individual. Again, we have movement in the direction of being an
infinite whole because relations previously thought to be external to
the individual--and thereby limiting factors--are now seen as
internal to the self.




In passing, it is interesting to consider why Bradley approves of
following the feelings of the *phronimos*--the person of
practical wisdom--when he has no faith in the judgments of Mill's
competent judges who are said to be able to rank pleasures and no
confidence in Mill's Moral Almanac (*Utilitarianism*, Chapter
2). The difference is that Mill's experts are simply reporting their
own personal feelings--which are not authoritative, for anyone
else could disagree and there is no test available to determine who is
right--and the *Moral Almanac* is merely a collection of
these sorts of experiences; while, by contrast, the *phronimos*
has, through long experience within his society, come to identify with
the values of that society and so his judgments and choices reflect
these values. The social norms have become such a part of who he is
that he need not think about what to do but has an intuitive
"feel" for what morality demands (*Ethical
Studies*, p. 196). If this is correct, it seems then that
the *phronimos* no longer feels any conflict between the
particular self he is and the self he ought to be as a member of
society. Bradley noted Goethe's directive to "Be a
whole *or* join a whole," which he amended to, "You
can not be a whole, *unless* you join a whole"
(*Ethical Studies*, p.79). This is what the
*phronimos* has done, thereby transforming his external
relations to others in society into the internal relations
characteristic of parts of an organic unity. (Whether this means that
the *phronimos* is therefore not able to be an inspiration
or a spur to initiating social change, or is unable himself to rise to
the level of Ideal Morality, is a question Bradley does not
address. But it should be the case, for the *phronimos* no
longer retains the degree of residual individuality which is required
by the next level of morality, Ideal Morality.)



Bradley has two reservations about the morality of the community.
First, there are some ways of realizing or perfecting oneself that
appear to have nothing to do with morality proper or with society,
which raises a question about the limits of morality, about whether the
demands of self-realization go beyond the moral obligation to perfect
oneself as a member of society. Does the artist have an
obligation to perfect her talents? If so, is this a moral
obligation? Bradley notes that it seems reasonable to say that we
will not realize ourselves if we fail to develop our talents and
abilities and he even feels some temptation to call this a moral
obligation--or at least an obligation of some sort--while at the same
time admitting that there are spheres of activity that are or should be
free of obligation, where we are left to our own devices.
In saying this he is admitting that individualism is not totally wrong,
for even members of a community remain individuals pursuing their own
separate plans and projects, albeit within the framework of the
community's social and political institutions and its normative
understandings and commitments. The second reservation is that the
reflective individual may come to feel that her society is wrong in
some respect or is in what Bradley calls a "rotten"
condition. While it may not be clear what 'rotten'
would mean or how one would determine whether a society was in this
condition or not, it is clear that change can be urged if we discover a
contradiction in the moral views of our society. For example, if
the constitution claimed all are equal before the law yet specific laws
denied benefits or access to the institutions of the state to some
group, then we would have a contradiction. Denying same sex
partners the opportunity to marry and enjoy whatever rights and social
benefits that go along with that status may be relevant contemporary
example. Given this possibility, there has to be some scope for
revising social rules and political institutions, which means one would
be opposing society's moral values and in doing this, more or
less opposing oneself in that one's moral perspective has been
inherited from members of that society, from the ancestors. In this
case the opposition between the subjective self and the superior moral
self identified with the community breaks out again, which then becomes
the impetus to a change in moral values.




This illuminates Bradley's remark that social morality is both
absolute and relative. The morality of one's society has a
*prima facie* claim on individual members and so is absolute in
the sense that no one is free simply to go her own way; yet the social
morality may change for the same reasons the perspective of an
individual might change--for example, because of the discovery of new
facts or with the revelation of a contradiction which forces a
re-thinking of present values--and so they are only relative.
Thus, while the individual has a *prima facie* obligation to be
as good as his society he also has the obligation to be reflective
about social morality and to determine whether it requires
modification.


## 4. The Psychology of Moral Development




What remains to be explained is how the moral consciousness arises,
and Bradley's account, not surprisingly, depends on the fact that
children are raised in a social environment and will learn by
experience. At an early stage of mental life the child will experience
pleasure from some object--say an apple--and transfers the
pleasant sensation to the object, so that it becomes part of the
content of the apple, a part of what that object means to the child,
or, better, a part of what the child sees in that object. The child
generates an appetite for objects of this sort and in the presence of
an apple the child will have a mixed reaction: a pleasant feeling
because the object is seen as pleasant, but a painful feeling because
she is not in possession of, or enjoying, the apple. This produces a
felt tension--"felt" because it is occurring at a
pre-cognitive level, before the child has beliefs about the object is
or able to make inferences about the object based on past
experience. This felt tension is desire and it moves the child to
action, to try to take physical possession of it. Bradley's
psychological account differs from the hedonist's in that whereas
hedonism holds that a particular pleasure is willed, Bradley claims
that the ideal object willed is a particular thing which has had a
pleasant quality transferred to it and thereby attributed to the thing
itself. Moreover, on Bradley's account the will--once we get to
the stage of having a fully developed self capable of having a
will--is actually seeking the object willed because it represents
the satisfaction of the self following the process of
identification. However, at this stage we have at best a very
primitive precursor of the self and it can only be said to affirm
itself. That is, it lacks the developed consciousness necessary to
representing ideal objects. Moreover, the child at this stage lacks
the higher-order consciousness needed to see itself as realizing
itself by attaining an ideal object with which it has identified its
satisfaction. It only "affirms" itself in that it puts its
will into the world as its appetites and desires respond to sensible
objects and in this its unarticulated objective is to possess the
thing it desires. At this early stage the child desires the object
only when it is present; at a later stage the child will gain a sense
of these things as independent external objects that persist,
*ceteris* paribus, and so can be desired in their
absence.




The child also experiences other people and is eventually going to
recognize them as individuals with independent wills--i.e., as
others who have their own plans and projects and as selves attempting
to realize themselves through their actions, and who, because of these
facts, may oppose or confirm its own desires, oppose its will. Since
initially these others are going to be family members or care-givers
there will be a pre-conscious bond of affection between them and the
child. When the child acts in accord with the will of another,
pleasure results from the affirmation from that other person, while
opposition is experienced as painful because it negates the bond of
affection. This produces the felt tension similar to that which occurs
in the case of an inaccessible desired object: a tension between the
pleasure associated with the presence of the care-giver and the pain
of being without the approval of that person. The main point here is
that the child will tend to be good (i.e., fit in with the norms and
expectations of the caregivers) solely because not doing so is
painful, not because the child has, at this stage, any goal it is
trying to achieve by being good, nor even the ability to articulate
why it acts as it does. As Bradley says, "The child is taught to
will a content which is universal and good, and he learns to identify
his will with it, so that he feels pleasure when he feels himself in
accord with it, uneasiness or pain when his will is contrary thereto,
and he feels that it is contrary. This is the beginning of personal
morality" (*Ethical Studies*, p. 178).



As the child develops it learns the language of morality and thereby
the moral perspective embedded in it. In this process the child
learns the meaning of normative concepts and in doing so learns what
they mean to others in the shared linguistic community. In this
way the social community imparts a moral perspective. In fact,
the community introduces the child to two levels of moral
reflection: it imparts specific moral values and norms through
its institutions and practices, and; it provides the moral concepts
that are necessary to the task of conceiving of ways to improve
society, in this way making possible the move to the more comprehensive
level of Ideal Morality.



The above rehearsal glosses over several identifiable stages of moral
development set out in Bradley's moral psychology. These
details can be ignored here, for the important point to note is that
Bradley attempts to supple a psychological account of moral development
that fills in the final part of his exposition of the theory of
self-realization by explaining how one comes to identify one's
satisfaction with the achieving or realizing of particular moral
ends. It is also important to note the roles he assigns to
pleasure and pain. That these have a place in his moral theory
indicates that the ethical hedonists were not totally wrong about their
importance, their mistake being to think that promoting pleasure and
diminishing pain marks the ultimate goal of moral
activity. By contrast, Bradley argues that in acting
morally we choose and will and act in terms of the idea of a state of
affairs which represents a superior self to be realized. We feel
pleasure at the thought of that self with which we have identified
because we feel affirmed by the thought of its realization. We
feel pain at the felt contradiction between this and our actual self
and pain at the thought of not being the superior self we desire.


## 5. The End of Morality




Bradley's excursion into moral psychology represents an
effort to explain the process whereby one identifies one's
satisfaction with a particular ideal object, which is an essential
element in the structure of volitional action. He traces the
transitions from a very primitive state of mental life through to the
sort of consciousness exhibited by a mature moral agent. From
primitive appetites which involve a precursor self that affirms itself
through its desires we arrive at a variety of types of actions and of
objects of volition and different relations between the self and the
objects. Children move from the simple desire to possess the
object to the pleasure taken in the approval of others, to
self-conscious moral action and its pleasures. These stages also reveal
the development of feelings and emotions and an increasing range of
types of object that one might take pleasure in. In other words,
there is an extension of the individual's range of interests and
these move out beyond desired objects to an interest in other people
and future events and so on. In this process the self is
developing its conception of itself and once it recognizes that its
fate is tied to that of society we have a social self that does not see
itself as being indifferent to the interests of others.



An important feature of this developmental process is gaining knowledge
of good and bad and the capacity to will both. The need for this
arises, first, at the formal level of the structure of volitional
action, which entails the dualism of inferior and superior selves (or
conceptions of these). To get beyond formal necessary conditions
to an account of specific actions this formal structure has to be
filled in with some determinate content which explains what the nature
of these two selves is. At the level of social
morality this may involve no more than knowledge of what society
demands of me--which I will identify as the superior, good self I
should be--alongside my tendencies to go my own way which marks the
bad self that opposes the social norms. But there must be more
than mere knowledge, for it is also necessary, psychologically, that we
actually feel the tension produced by the conflicting tendencies to be
both good and bad. It is not simply that one fails to comprehend
fully the nature of moral action without this, but that we also cannot
feel the contradictions that will move us to action, and without action
there is no morality. Hence, the common notion that moral agents
are often viewed as having to expend a great deal of effort on the
internal struggle between the desire to be good and a propensity to do
things known to be bad is correct. In Bradley's theory the
ultimate moral end of self-realization presents two pictures of the
self, labels one of these "superior" and sets the moral
task as realizing that superior self in the face of the actual,
inferior self. In this way moral conflicts are always internal
struggles. In acting morally I aim at realizing my good self,
which I see as my true self. Yet I cannot in good faith say that
my bad self is not myself, with the result that, as Bradley rather
picturesquely puts it, "when I enter the lists against it, it is
at my own breast that I lay my lance in rest" (*Ethical
Studies*, p. 277).




Unfortunately, this also marks the final tension that renders
morality a self-contradiction. To the extent that people have both a
good and a bad self, they are a "self-contradiction," and
if these are necessary to morality as Bradley's suggests they are
then the ultimate moral end of action--self-realization as an infinite
whole--cannot be achieved. As he puts it, "we are a
self-contradiction: we never are what we feel we really are; we really
are what we know we are not; and if we became what we are, we should
scarcely be ourselves" (*Ethical Studies*, p. 234).
Morality really seeks its own demise for were the ideal self realized
there would be nothing that remains to be actualized, at which point
morality is at an end. "Morality aims at the cessation of
that which makes it possible" (*loc. cit.*) This
parallels Bradley's metaphysical position: if thought actually
were to capture the supra-relational unity that is Reality, thought
would have to have passed beyond itself, committing what Bradley calls
"thought's happy suicide." Because thought by
its very nature analyzes and abstracts it cannot ever express the unity
that Reality is and which is only dimly felt in immediate
experience. Similarly for morality: "it is the effort after
non-morality, and it presses forward beyond itself to a super-moral
sphere where it ceases to exist as such" (*loc.
cit.*). Indeed, some writers think we can pass beyond
morality into the sphere of religion. One advantage of this is
that we might find an ideal moral type--say the Jesus of Christianity
- which provides an example of the ideal self we should be aiming
at. In fact it could be claimed that in religion the self that is
only ideal in morality is actual in the religious experience. But at
the end of the day Bradley believes that the old moral dichotomy
between good and bad will break out again, with 'sin'
replacing the 'bad' of morality. Thus,
disharmony arises necessarily, and the moral self is not realized in
religious experience.




None of this should surprise us. Bradley's view is that
every study, whether it is of morality or the natural world or religion
or whatever, begins from some working hypotheses. It is the job
of metaphysics to lay bare these hypotheses and show how they all fit
together. Were the final picture put together we would have an
absolute and finished view of reality. But attaining this
comprehensive and coherent view is impossible because of the nature of
thought, and so the role of the notion of the Absolute--a coherent,
comprehensive conception of Reality--has the logic of a limiting
case. In morality we similarly seek an ideal self, one that is
homogeneous (coherent) but also fully specified (comprehensive),
but this is not attainable, as we have seen, thereby demonstrating that
the notion of an ideal self that is an infinite whole also has the
logic of a limiting case. It may guide our moral thinking and our
practical reasoning, but it does not represent a condition anyone can
achieve. Once we recognize that the end is not attainable,
that is the end of morality, and this is not a result of weakness on
the part of moral agents but a result of the logical structure of
volitional choice.


## 6. Bradley's Political Philosophy




Bradley never produced a book on political philosophy and the few
published papers touching on social and political themes present views
that do not diverge from the position he set out in
*Ethical Studies*, in particular, in the fifth essay, *My
Station and its Duties*. From that text we can see that Bradley
would have sided with the Twentieth Century communitarians who opposed
the individualistic political theories of Rawls and Nozick (see
Kymlicka, Chapter 4). In terms of the more recent debates about
Liberal neutrality (see Wall and
Klosko's*Perfectionism and Neutrality*)--in
which the liberals advance the claim that that political institutions
and society's laws and institutional structures are not to
reflect any particular conception of the good--Bradley would
undoubtedly have sided with the opponents of neutrality who think
cultural, ethnic, religious and other such groups have a set of values
that are central to who they are and which they rightly feel need
protecting. Similarly, Bradley's views on individual rights
are consistent with the social holism of "My
Station." He opposed natural rights, taking rights to be
social constructs. Indeed, in a paper in 1894 he allied himself
with the Utilitarians in claiming that the general welfare takes
precedence over the rights of individuals and went so far as to say
that "the right of the moral organism is absolute" over and
against the rights of its members (*Collected Essays*, p.
158). In one discussion of punishment he takes seriously the
"principle of social surgery" taken as "the right and
the duty of the organism to suppress its undesirable growths"
(*Collected Essays*, p. 152). All of this is consistent
with the claim in *Ethical Studies* that the moral standards and
demands of the society--and by implication, acceptance of
society's political institutions--have a prima facie claim on
the individual members of that society.


Bradley also recognized the importance of social nurturing and teaching
that raise a human being from the level of its basic desires and
impulses to the level at which she becomes, and is recognized as, a
rational moral agent. Only if one has learned the normative
language of the community and shows by one's behavior that the
values and standards are understood, and that one is able to act with
them in mind, does a person get recognized as a member of the moral
community and treated as a full and equal member who can be reasoned
with and who will take the values embedded in, and reflected in,
society's social and political institutions into consideration in
her volitional action. Social and political institutions are not
created by atomic individuals out of some pre-social primordial
material, and this marks the place that contract theories of the state
go wrong. Their basic error is to think that talk of individuals
abstracted from all social relations would have any meaning. This error
is compounded by assuming that individuals are pure rational
calculators without emotional attachments to others around them who
enter into social cooperation only for personal gain. This error
then gets connected to the earlier error in theories such as
Locke's when it is claimed that these abstract atomic individuals
enter the contracting situation with a bundle of natural rights which
they hold as perpetual constraints on what others can do. Bradley
and all the British Idealists thought that contract theories and
individualistic approaches to social and political relations were
grounding their political philosophies on false views of human nature
and human society. In a word, their basic errors were mistakes in
metaphysics.


Although it is not a topic for this occasion, it would be of some
interest to consider what his contemporaries had to say regarding the
interplay of ethics and political theory. On this issue, Green's work
on ethics and his lectures on political obligation would be worth
consulting. Moreover, the student of this period in the history of
British moral philosophy would also do well to compare the writings of
Green, Bradley and Sidgwick. All three published around the same
time: Sidgwick's *Methods* in 1874, Bradley's *Ethical
Studies* in 1876 and Green's *Prolegomena to Ethics*
posthumously in 1883. Taken together, these works provide important
assessments of the writings of earlier moral theorists, such as Kant
and J. S. Mill, as well interesting discussions of moral psychology,
central moral concepts, and the role of moral theory. These are all
difficult and complex texts - which makes comparative studies of their
views rather daunting. Fortunately, some studies have recently
appeared that offer useful introductions to such a comparative study -
especially, Mander's studies of the British Idealists and Irwin's
chapters on Sidgwick, Green and Bradley in his history of ethics (see
the bibliography, below).