2. Since moral choice is (one kind of) choice, whatever applies to choice as such, must apply to moral choice. And a point already strongly stressed is that we cannot choose to succeed; we can choose only to attempt.

a. With moral choice the risk of failure is considerably increased since there are more predictions involved. In any choice there must be the assumption that the course of action we take will culminate in the desired result. It may not; the man who chooses to reach for the cup of tea rather than the cup of coffee may knock it over and spill the tea - so that he has to settle for the coffee. There is also the risk that when he gets (drinks) the tea he finds that he does not enjoy it (as he had anticipated that he would) and wishes that he had chosen the coffee. All predictions are fallible and, to choose, we must predict both what action of ours will achieve what particular given end and what state of affairs we will most enjoy.

But, with moral choices, we must also predict what will give pleasure or pain to somebody else. Suppose Jones does choose to help with the washing up (to give pleasure to Brown) but -

i) he clumsily breaks the cups and saucers - or

ii) Brown (though he is too polite to say so) would much rather Jones left it to him.

Now i) is simply parallel with knocking over the teacup; he has attempted to achieve the desired state of affairs - but failed. But ii) is different. Here think again of the conceivable state of affairs which renders a value-assertion intelligible - that somebody is responding with pain or pleasure to the situation about which the value-judgement is made. Jones has achieved one aimed-for state of affairs - washed crockery. But he has failed to achieve the other (the `value' state of affairs) - Brown being pleased by the washed crockery. And, of course, it is more complex than this. Brown may think `How very nice that Jones has stayed to help me with the dishes' but Mrs Brown, waiting in the room next door, may be fuming - `What is my husband thinking of to let a guest do his own washing-up!' - and give poor Brown a very hard time about it. So Jones would not have done Brown a good turn even though both Jones and Brown thought that he was doing so.

We must also realise that, just as we may gain pleasure from other people's pleasures, so may they gain pleasure from ours. As the Christmas card inscriptions might put it: giving can be more fun than receiving. An over-generous neighbour who, from real enough other-caring motivations, showers gifts upon you but will accept nothing in return can be a source of considerable guilt and anguish - `How I wish he were not so kind!'.

b. It must now be quite clear that the morality of any choice cannot reside in the outcome of that choice; this would make morality dependent, initially, upon intelligence (the capcity to make far-reaching, accurate predictions) and, ultimately, on what we call chance - since no prediction could be all-embracing (any belief could be wrong). And, however vague or confused people may be about what morality is, it is unlikely that anybody would accept that it is mere cleverness or that it is a matter of luck. So the morality of a choice can reside only in the intention of the chooser.

Here it is interesting to consider the old saying: The road to Hell is paved with good intentions. If we assume that Hell is for immoral people, then this is really a very silly saying; the road to the workhouse might well be paved with good intentions, but not the road to Hell. We have all met people who mean well but are totally calamitous. We may regard them as stupid, irresponsible, to be avoided like the plague - but we do not, surely, consider them immoral. We have also met likeable scoundrels - people who (so far as we can judge) are totally unconcerned about the pains and pleasures of other people most of the time, yet who do give considerable pleasure just because people happen to find them amusing. Few of us choose the company we keep on the basis of who behaves morally and who does not. And think about those accidental benefactors like, for instance, the `developer' who creates employment for dozens of people who would otherwise be unemployed simply as a by-product of making his own fortune. They are no less pleased to have a job at last because he did not do what he did for their benefit. It is quite possible to do good (or to do harm) accidentally - but it is not possible (unthinkable) to behave morally accidentally. [But note 1. c. ii above - this is not to say that we choose to behave morally - only that we can behave morally (or immorally) only in choosing].

c. Let us, then, state quite unequivocally that morality is concerned with people's choices affecting the pain/pleasure balances of other people - BUT - morality is not a matter of WHAT people do; it is a matter of WHY they ATTEMPT to do what they attempt to do. And let us accept, as we must, the implications of this. One of these implications, which we have touched on already, is that, in making moral judgements, we can rarely be certain that a particular choice was moral, immoral or whatever; we must be content with certainness of a high probability. Another is that to ask whether a given choice was moral/immoral is not to ask whether it was a good thing that it was made. From which it follows that `X was a morally-good choice' is in fact a value-neutral assertion. We shall return to this latter point later.

Very little thought shows us that, such is the complexity of human inter-relations, it is extremely difficult to increase the pleasure/reduce the pain of one person without having a reverse effect on some other person. If Jenkins employs Jones and Brown and decides, when it is not essential for him to do so, to give Jones a substantial pay rise because he feels he deserves it, this may very well upset Brown, who will feel himself to be unfairly treated. To make any moral judgement about Jenkins's action we would have to decide whether he took it in order to help (please) Jones or in order to punish (give pain to) Brown (who he regards as a rather lazy fellow) - or for altogether other reasons. And this would not only be difficult for us to achieve certainness about; if Jenkins is aware that he likes Jones and dislikes Brown, it could be very difficult for him to be certain about - since the net result, what he actually chooses to do, is the same by whatever motivation-mix. Has it ever occurred to Jenkins that Brown would be put out about it? We can be motivated only by what we do believe, whatever might be the case - so if it had not occurred to him, the chances are that he was motivated by the desire to please Jones. But, even if he had thought about Brown, he may have thought `Well, that's unfortunate - but he'll get over it and I shouldn't fail to help Jones just because, in doing so, I accidentally upset Brown'. He may have wanted both to please Jones and to displease Brown. He may have wanted simply to secure Jones's future loyalty and continued support - and been quite happy that Jones would derive pleasure in the process. All of these possibilities (and a great many more) are relevant to any moral judgement of his action.

d. But what is definitely not relevant to the moral judgement is that Jones deserves to be helped and Brown does not. As we saw when we examined value as such, pain is what is bad, pleasure is what is good - and it is totally irrelevant to the goodness or badnesss of specific individual person's pains or pleasures, as such, how or why they were achieved. That the same circumstances which gives Jones pleasure gives Brown pain does not in any way reduce the goodness of Jones's pleasure or the badness of Brown's pain. We have seen that morality is concerned with the deliberate promotion (or attempt to promote) the pains/pleasures of other people - and these just are what they are; we cannot promote other people's greater pleasure by contriving what we feel ought to be their pleasures. This is simply imposing our preferences upon them - a situation they are likely to find painful. Moral judgements are irrelevant to moral behaviour; assessment of the worthiness of the recipient, insofar as it is a motivating force in choice- making, must be a counter-force to the straightforward desire to please the recipient. To see him as unworthy precisely is to reject his wants, to argue that he should be denied his pleasures (because they conflict with yours). It follows, then, that the moral response to a thief is to let him rob you, to a seducer to let him seduce you, to a bully - to do as he bids you, to a braggard - to pretend admiration..........

It also follows that such concepts as justice and rights, far from being moral concepts, are in conflict with morality. Punishment would not be punishment if it were not

i painful to the recipient -

ii deliberately imposed upon (chosen for) the recipient by somebody else.

Rights are intelligible only on the assumption that somebody's pleasures (wants) are denied by the enforcement of those rights. If there were no conflicts of interests between people, the concept of rights could never arise. For Jones to assert his rights vis-a-vis Brown can only be for Jones to choose to advantage himself by disadvantaging Brown. If Brown wanted to do what Jones wanted him to do, there would be no thought of rights.

It should be noted, however, that, whilst to punish (simply as vengeance) is (by definition) immoral, notions of justice, equity, rights and so on are moral-neutral; we judge that our action is just or equitable, or that somebody does or does not have the right to do something, by totally different criteria from those by which we judge the morality of our action. It may be just to punish a wrongdoer, and society may, therefore, have the right to do so - but the wrongdoer in question cannot want to be punished; if the action taken were what he wanted (i.e. least dis-wanted) then it could not be punishment. [It is interesting to reflect that all of this was clearly understood two thousand years ago by Jesus of Nazareth - who has been terribly misunderstood by most of those who have believed themselves to be his followers].

e) We have been examining moral judgements - which is, of course, the business of moral philosophy - to determine just what we are judging when we judge behaviour to be moral or immoral and by what criteria we are so judging it. But there is a constant danger of confusion between the judgements and the behaviour judged. It must be clearly understood that there is nothing moral (or immoral) per-se about making moral .judgements, nor yet about studying morality; a moral- philosopher is not, thereby, a moral person. Nor does morally commendable behaviour require that the agent make any moral judgements at all. There is no more need to think about morality in order to behave morally than there is to think about believing in order to believe [refer back to Topic 2]. Moral philosophy is descriptive, not prescriptive and, indeed, one major problem (to which we shall return) is that awareness of morality tends to inhibit moral behaviour - simply by establishing a set of potential motivating factors which can only fall on self-caring side. To desire to `be moral' (as some kind of end-in-itself) is simply to desire (the appetite-pleasure of) self-approval.

It is largely because of a confusion between moral-awareness and moral behaviour that people have assumed that what we call conscience is in some important way connected with the latter - that moral acts are those we feel proud of and immoral acts, those we feel ashamed of. But pride and shame have much more to do with competing with other people than with simple auto-responsive concern about the well-being of other people (which is what morality is about). Pride and shame are real enough - and they are simply felt (observed) responses to a perceived set of circumstances (involving ourselves) like any other so-called emotions . We discover whether we are proud or ashamed by observing our behaviour - in the same way as we discover whether we are angry, or amused. And what we discover is that we are, not why we are; the `why' is always a demand for explanation [refer back to Topic 13]. The explanation may be that we feel we have been acting immorally (and assume that this is a bad thing - and therefore demeaning to ourselves) or it may, just as likely, be that we have been clumsy or stupid or weak in a way that we feel demeans us. The shame which Jones feels when he has `let Brown down' (and, thereby, made him unhappy) is no different at all, as shame, from the shame he feels when Brown has unexpectedly beaten him at chess (and is very pleased about it). The pride he feels when he has helped Brown out of some difficulty, at considerable `sacrifice' to his own bodily comfort, is no different, as pride, from the pride he feels when he comes top of the class (to his fellow students' chagrin - indeed, the more chagrin, the more pride!).

So conscience is not a special kind of pride/shame; it is simply that pride/shame which we attribute to moral judgements about our own conduct. And, since we cannot choose to be proud or ashamed, being so cannot, in itself, be either moral or immoral. But the interesting question is why we should feel that we have demeaned ourselves by acting less morally than we might have done. We can see that it is demeaning to fail (to win a game, pass an exam, gain somebody's affection....) because success (as we saw in Topic 15) is necessarily a good thing. So, here, the assumption must be (when we are `prey to conscience') that acting morally is necessarily a good thing - something we must strive for - and that, therefore, not to act morally is a failure - as a human being. But can this assumption stand examination?

3. This is where we return to the question: Are moral-judgements value-judgements at all? It is understandable that this could seem a strange question because morality is so plainly dependent, as a concept, upon value; if there were no pains and pleasures there could be no morality. But, if there were no colours, there could be no vision - and this does not imply that vision is coloured (that is a patent nonsense). To talk of morality can only be to talk of people's intentions (to promote pain or pleasure); to talk of pain or pleasure (of value) is to talk of actual states of affairs - which simply are as they are, whatever anyone may have intended. Thus moral judgements are not judgements of actual pain/pleasure balance (that which has value irrespective of how or why it is achieved); they are judgements only of attempts to achieve pains and pleasures which, as such, are good or bad only in the `efficiency sense' (refer to Topic 14) - and this irrespective of whether what is sought is pleasure or pain (compare a `good torturer'). Thus we are forced to the conclusion that `Jones behaved morally in attempting to help Brown over the stile' is quite intelligible (we know what counts as its being true) - but only as a value-neutral assertion; it is also intelligible to ask `And was that a good thing?'

a. We are not, therefore, looking at pain and pleasure when we make moral judgements; we are looking at the (dependent yet quite distinct) concepts - cruelty and kindness. Indeed, in the same way as we identified pain/pleasure as the paradigm of value, we can say that kindness/cruelty is the paradigm of morality. Moral discourse, to be intelligible, must be about people deliberately seeking to promote the pain or pleasure of other people. And, just as there can't be bad pleasures or good pains, so there can't be well-intended cruelty or ill- intended kindness. When people speak, as they often do, of `being cruel to be kind' they are being deliberately paradoxical to stress that, though they may seem to be ill-intentioned, they are in fact well-intentioned. You can give pain in the course of being kind - but that is not being cruel. You can give pleasure in the course of being cruel - as when somebody gets a colleague drunk so that he will make a fool of himself - and that is certainly not being kind. You can fail in your purpose - when Brer Rabbit told Brer Fox that he was terrified of the bramble bushes so that Brer Fox would throw him into them and he could escape, he (Brer Rabbit) was not pained at all, but that does not imply the Brer Fox was any less cruel in throwing him into the brambles. [It should also be noted here that, in mocking Brer Fox after he had escaped, Brer Rabbit was being cruel. As we saw earlier, the worthiness of the recipient is irrelevant to the morality of the action].

b. So - we can accidentally achieve results we had not intended but we cannot be kind or cruel accidentally. And it must also be clearly understood that - although, in order to be kind or cruel, we must be choosing (one course of action rather than another) , we cannot choose to be kind or choose to be cruel; we can merely observe, and make moral assessments of, our choices when we have made them. We are sometimes shocked to discover, in retrospection, how cruel we have been!

From which it follows that, whereas we must act on purpose for the question of morality to arise, we cannot be moral on purpose. As already observed - a choice made in order to be moral cannot be moral since its motivation is not an automatic response to the (assumed) wishes of another person but a conformity to the agent's own rules of conduct - an avoidance of (the pain of) guilty conscience. As such it is amoral.

c. Let us, then, examine the concept of amorality. The point has been made that the existence of a moral-choice-situation does not imply that a moral choice will be made; the chooser may be unaware that anybody else will be affected one way or the other by his choice. But what if he is aware of this but simply finds that he is not motivated by it one way or the other; it could influence his decision but it does not happen to? This, as we have seen, is not something over which he has any control; we do not choose our motivations.

It should be plain that there are a number of relevant distinctions -

i) between a non-moral-choice-situation and a moral-choice- situation - where the distinguishing factor is whether or not another person (or creature) could be affected by the choice made in pain/pleasure terms -

ii) between a moral-choice-situation recognised as such by the chooser and one not so recognised - the distinguishing factor here is simply whether the chooser is aware that his action would affect someone else's pain/pleasure balance -

iii) between a situation in which the chooser is aware that what he does will give pain or pleasure to somebody else and finds himself influenced by this and one in which he is so aware but finds himself not influenced by this.

To act amorally, therefore, is to make a choice within a moral- choice-situation which is not in fact motivated by any considerations of the affects of one's action on anybody but oneself. Whether this is because the chooser is unaware of these potential affects or because he is (finds himself) indifferent to them is quite irrelevant. And it cannot be moral or immoral to behave amorally.

d. So that, whilst it is a kind of moral judgement to judge a choice to be ,amoral, it is not to be confused with judging it to be moral or immoral. It is rather like the situation where a judge of terriers at the dog show decides that, though a particular animal is a dog, it does not qualify as a terrier for the purpose of judging - and cannot, therefore, be judged to be a good terrier or a bad one (by whatever criteria are established).

But it should not be assumed from this (as, alas, it so often is) that it is in some necessary way `a bad thing' to be amoral. Since, as we have seen, morality ( `moral-goodness') and immorality ( `moral-badness') are, in fact, value-neutral, it follows that amorality, as such, is also value-neutral. it is, therefore, a perfectly intelligible question, and indeed one deserving of quite serious consideration, whether a wholly amoral society (a society in which everybody behaved amorally at all times) would be a better or worse society than a moral society (one in which choices are made morally and/or immorally). Since we are speaking of societies, the `better', and `worse' can be understood only in terms of `sum total' pain/pleasure balance and it might well be argued that a society, in which everybody's conduct were governed solely by what is generally called enlightened self-interest (provided they were enlightened - i.e. bright enough to recognise what is their own (total) interest - consider, for example, Huxley' s Brave New World)- could be a happier society (more achievement of wants, less frustrations) than the moral society we have.

Any such considerations must, however, be academic - since we are moral beings (our pains and pleasures do happen to be influenced by what we believe to be the pains and pleasures of other people) and we cannot (as has now been pointed out many times) choose our motivations. We might wish for an amoral society; we cannot want one.

e. A further difficulty that we are running into here is that we are thinking of morality in `society' terms (as indeed most people do) when the analysis we have given (not `from choice' but because it is the only intelligible and coherent analysis one can give) makes it extremely difficult for any social engineering to be eligible for moral judgement at all - since it must be concerned with rights and equity rather than with morality, must involve the deliberate disadvantaging of some people for the advantage of others.

The only unequivocally moral (`morally-good') action is that which is taken as a compulsive response to the perceived needs of another person - the situation where all other considerations are simply swept aside - i.e. whether we are aware of them or not, we find that they simply have no motivating force upon us. And, in value terms, such actions tend to be disastrous. Imagine that a small child is returning from the corner shop carrying a bottle of methylated spirits to light the stove. He meets a disreputable old drunk who indicates very clearly that he wants to take and drink the metho. There can be no doubt that the moral response by that child is to hand it over. If he is aware, as most likely he is, that he will cop it from his mum for doing so (and regrets both his mum's pain and his own but is prepared to live with this regret - and pain) then he is certainly behaving very morally - but (we would surely all agree) very foolishly. Now, an adult person in the same situation, however sorry he or she may be for the old man, would be inhibited from behaving in the same way by the awareness of the evil effects of metho-drinking. As soon as we concern ourselves about long-range effects and side-effects on other people and think in terms of general social desirabilities, it becomes very unlikely that we can ever find ourselves responding in a moral-choice-situation with that spontaneous, compulsive urge to please (give pleasure to) some other person which is the whole basis of morality. To say `But it would not be a good thing to do so' is to make a sound value-judgement - but what that judgement amounts to is simply the recognition that moral behaviour can well be harmful behaviour (in value, non-moral, terms).

4. All of this might seem somewhat paradoxical - even a little upsetting, threatening to people's cherished beliefs. But we are not denying that there is such a thing as morality, very plainly there is such a thing. Nor yet are we denying that human beings do admire morally-good behaviour; they also admire good looks. We are simply investigating what that morality which they admire is. The trouble is that most people are not satisfied to accept that people do behave morally at times (as they accept that people do behave cleverly at times); they feel that, in some sense, people ought to behave morally.

a. Now, it makes sense to say that people ought to work hard if they want to pass their exams. But does it make sense to say that they ought to be clever? Is there anything they can do about it? We might wish that people were cleverer, but neither we nor they can make them cleverer.

So - what kind of `ought' are we using when we say that people ought to be moral? If - what? If they want to (try to!) do good to other people. But that is simply what being moral is. The whole confusion arises from the (nonsensical) assumption that we can choose our motivations - that we choose to be the kind of people that we are when, quite patently, it is our being the kind of people that we are which determines everything which we choose - including our moral-choices. [Think back to Topic 14 - we discover our characters by observing our choices]

b. In any given moral-choice-situation a person will choose in a way which could be judged amoral, moral or immoral. Insofar as he or she is choosing (behaving) amorally, he or she is not`playing the game' and the rules of the game cannot, therefore, apply. To make the moral judgement (note - it is not a value-judgement) that people should behave morally is rather like enacting a rule of football that everybody should play football. What we can say is `I think that the world would be a happier place if everyone did behave morally' which would be a value-judgement (though, as we have seen, a rather dubious one) but that is far from saying that people ought to behave morally. The world would probably be a happier place if there were no earthquakes - but this does not imply that there ought not to be earthquakes; it is hard to conceive what anyone could mean by that.

As stressed at the outset of this Topic treatment, a moral-choice is still a choice and, as such, subject to all the `rules' of choosing. If Jones finds that, in a given instance, he has chosen amorally this is just an interesting fact; he could not have chosen to choose differently. If he also finds that his self-esteem is thereby diminished, this is another interesting fact; he cannot choose for it to be or not to be so.

c. Here it is useful to imagine a person who always chooses amorally, a totally amoral person. It is doubtful that there has ever been such a person - indeed what we are considering is a monster. It is worth noting that Frankenstein's monster was not monstrous because it looked like a badly-made Guy Fawkes as the Hollywood versions suggest, but because it was wholly amoral - incapable of empathetic response, governed solely by appetite-motivations. It could not, therefore, behave morally or immorally - and was regarded, accordingly, as inhuman, not as a wicked human. So - when the monster threw the little girl into the river and drowned her, this was surely a bad thing - but it was not a morally bad action (any more than is the action of the mosquito which bites you).

But, as stressed earlier, morality is a characteristic not of people but of the specific actions (choices) of people. All of us behave amorally at times and, at those times, the only moral judgement that can intelligibly be made about our choices is that they were not moral choices - and this must be a value-neutral judgement, like judging that the window is or is not open.

This is another occasion where a schematization might be useful. Think of a motivation-mix scale from `totally amoral' (wholly appetite-motivated) to `totally moral/immoral' (wholly empathy-motivated) - with the position of any particular choice on that scale dependent upon the relative forces of the two motivation kinds. Now think of another scale, crossing this one at right angles, from wholly sympathetic (kind) motivation to wholly antipathetic (cruel) motivation. Since, at the amoral end of the first scale, there is no empathy (therefore no sympathy or antipathy), the diagram produced will be triangular -

This diagram should draw your attention to the very important, and frequently overlooked, fact that cruelty is no less empathetic (as we are using that term - other-care influenced) than kindness is. Just as we may find ourselves gaining pleasure from the (assumed) pleasure of others and pain from the (assumed) pain of others, so we may find ourselves gaining pleasure from the (assumed) pain of others and pain from the (assumed) pleasure of others. And, as we saw in the `Jenkins promoting Jones and not Brown' example, both factors can be involved, and frequently are, in a given choice of action. Thus, to use the term `moral' straightforwardly as the opposite of amoral is to use it in a way that encompasses both moral-goodness and immorality. When we say that it just is the case that human beings' pain/pleasure balances are affected by their beliefs about the pain/pleasure balances of other human beings (and other animals), we are speaking of ill-will as well as of good-will; those who are capable of love are equally capable of hate. Indeed it would be at least strange to love a person without thereby hating (wanting to thwart the desires of - i.e. to promote the pain of) those people believed to be anxious to harm that person. This does not imply that we do in fact choose to (attempt to) harm such people; but it does imply that the desire to do so is always a potential motivating factor. Thus moral-goodness may be manifested in the suppression of hates as well as in the response to loves. The morality is in the choice made, not in the potential motivations. Hurting people may be deliberate, but hating people is wholly involuntary.

d. It can be seen that a (coherent and intelligible) moral judgement about any choice made can in effect, be `plotted' in the schema presented above. Firstly, to what extent was it appetite-motivated and to what extent empathy-motivated (where does it lie along the horizontal line) - and then, assuming that it is on the line (not wholly amoral), to what extent was it motivated by kindness and to what extent by cruelty (irrespective of to whom the kindnesses or cruelties are directed). Thus what we think of as a saintly act is in the top right-hand corner (wholly motivated by sympathy with no appetite influence at all) and what we think of as a demonic act is in the bottom right-hand corner (wholly motivated by antipathy without any appetite influence at all). So that `ultimate wickedness' may be exemplified by the obsessive pursuit of revenge - even if this involves the revenger's destruction! [It is interesting that such behaviour has frequently been portrayed in literature as heroic].

But it should now be seen very clearly just how shaky is the ground on which we make most moral judgements. Did at least some of the Spanish Inquisitors really believe that the only way to save certain people from eternal damnation was to burn them alive? Could the late and unlamented Heinrich Himmler have been convinced (however misguidedly) that a world without Jews would be so much better for everybody in it that, however sad it may make him, he had a moral duty to rid the world of Jews? How could we tell? How could they tell? Yet we can no more help making moral judgements, however wild they may sometimes seem, than we can help making judgements about the state of the weather. It is pointless to ask whether we should; we do.

5. Philosophical analysis can be disquieting; it is not a pursuit for human ostriches. It demands some re-thinking about things that we have always assumed - and, in moral philosophy, even the little ground-clearing we have been able to do here throws up a nest of vexing questions - questions which, once posed, cannot be ignored however hard they may be to answer.

a. We do think, and talk, of people being virtuous or wicked and we seem to understand what we mean by this. But what do we mean? All of us do some virtuous things and some wicked things and many amoral things - and, since we cannot choose to choose this or that, how many of each we do is simply something that we, and other people, must discover (insofar as this is discoverable). So it is no more the case that Jones is a `morally-good man' because he most often behaves morally than that Jones generally behaves morally because he happens to be a `morally good man'. There is something oddly Calvanistic about this - but it is a Calvinism without the religious overtones and, without the benefit of a deity, it is hard to see how it can be any more just to praise or blame, or reward or punish, people for being virtuous or wicked than for being beautiful or ugly. Yet we feel that we must in order to maintain any order and progress in our society. It is not Jones's fault that he is ugly but it is his fault that he is wicked. OK - but to accept this is to commit ourselves to considerable re-thinking about what we really mean by `fault', about what counts for us as being responsible, about precisely what we are judging when we judge that we, or society, should behave in particular ways. Certainly he chose to do it - but his choice was what it was because he is what he is and he didn't choose to be the way he is; he just happens to be.

b. And, plainly, nothing that we or he can do will make the universe other than it is - and what (how) he is is part of that universe. From which it follows that morality cannot be taught. We can teach people what morality is - that is what moral philosophy attempts to do - but we cannot teach people to be moral. All we can do is show them (persuade them) that it is in their own interests to behave in certain ways rather than other ways - i.e. engender a more enlightened self-interest. But this is simply making people aware of more factors which might influence their choices- how they influence them, in terms of appetite/empathy conflicts and, within the empathetic, kindness/cruelty conflicts, must always remain to be seen. We can teach boy scouts to help old ladies across the road in order to be good (praiseworthy) boy scouts - but we can't teach them to find themselves wanting to help old ladies across the road simply because they believe that the old ladies want to be across the road. The trouble with all teachable so-called moral rules is that they lead to choices being made because it is the rule without reference to whether or not it is the kind thing to do in this instance - so that what people think of as taught moral ity is really conditioned amorality. The only unassailable moral rule is BE KIND! - but being kind, by its very nature, is something we can wish for but not something we can strive for.

c. Here, however, we strike the strange paradox of morality - it is only because (or insofar as) we are well-disposed to our fellow beings that we do wish to be kind - to behave morally. But, unlike our small child with his bottle of methylated spirits, we cannot respond in simple one-person-at-a-time ways - we just are conscious of the inter-relationships of people's pains and pleasures and therefore cannot but think socially. And to think socially is to think in terms of rules. We are aware that giving people what they now want will often lead to a situation which they actually will not want when they have it - and also that it will inevitably deny other people what they want. So, except in quite minor personal contacts, the most we can aim for in other-caring terms is a society which will tend to maximise the general level of pain/pleasure balances. So that, because of our natural capacities for morality (sympathetic empathy), we become political, rather than moral, animals.

Yet, to the extent that we are good-willed towards our fellows, the impetus to be political animals - not only to formulate rules of conduct for ourselves but also to attempt to instill them in other people - is essentially moral; we find ourselves choosing to work out what codifiable patterns of behaviour will predictably maximise human pleasures (minimise human pains) and to commit ourselves to and propagate these codes of behaviour. And this is the only possible general response we can make to a genuine sympathy with our fellow beings. So we have the odd situation that, notwithstanding that the adherence to moral rules could be seen as our abdication from the responsibility for making moral choices, the setting up of such rules is itself a moral compulsion.

If we were `noble savages' we would have no moral problems - we would just be moral, or immoral, or amoral without thinking about it - but we are not. So we find ourselves morally compelled to make promises which we (morally) cannot keep, to commit ourselves to codes of conduct which we may feel morally compelled to set aside whenever they conflict with here and now sympathetic responses to other people's perceived wants.

Moral (sympathetic) motivations compel us to establish rules of conduct which moral (sympathetic) motivations will inevitably compel us to break - insofar as we do continue to make moral choices. And this is simply a matter of how we find ourselves choosing in each given situation. We cannot (intelligibly) make resolutions and make additional resolutions to keep them. What this amounts to is that the initial choice to conduct ourselves politically rather than morally may well be a moral compulsion to try to be amoral in our choices because -

i) we do find ourselves seeking (i.e. wanting) the greatest possible pleasure/least possible pain for other people (for people in general) and

ii) we realise that this can be achieved only by judicious assessments of total situations and the optimum achievable pain/pleasure balances - not by spontaneous sympathetic reactions to particular persons' assumed wants without reference to the wants of any other people, or even the long-term effects for the persons in question, of gaining their present wants.

The oddity of this, of course, is that our rejection of spontaneous sympathetic reaction to the perceived wants of other people (as individuals) occurs only as a spontaneous sympathetic response to the assumed wants of other people (as societies). But, as we have seen, any choice can only be the choice to attempt - and in this case we cannot succeed - or we would not have made that choice! Yet this in no way detracts from the morality of the choice - since, as pointed out earlier, morality resides, not in what is achieved, but in why we attempt to achieve what we attempt to achieve.