CHAPTER 6 My Station and Its Duties. I argue that taking a religious point of view signifies abandoning the moral point of view. These are conditional duties which apply only if I agree to be a part of this institution. Oxford Scholarship Online requires a subscription or purchase to access the full text of books within the service. F.H. For more on the moral self in ES, see Babushkina (2016). I do not find this satisfactory because Bradley sees moral progress as self-realization (i.e. Box 24, 00014, Helsinki, Finland, You can also search for this author in Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. The concept of religion in ES and its relation to morality is a topic for separate research. Moral goodness is “goodness not of any particular time and country” (ES, 205) and it is incompatible with an obvious cultural relativism of morals (ES, 204). Article  In addition to being a social requirement, an act must also be required from the ideal point of view. This is the stage of ideal morality. While the universalizability principle holds that what is required from me under specific conditions is required from anyone in the same situation, the particularization principle reads that an action that is required from everyone in a given situation is also required from me when I am in that situation.Footnote 25. Mander takes a similar stance, saying that Bradley, albeit admitting “‘very serious objections’ to his theory” because “there is more to ethics than just my station and its duties”, claims that it is the most important content of the good self, to which are ‘added’ social ideals or aspirations and the pursuit of truth and beauty (2011, pp. Macintyre (1994) compares Bradley and Pincoff. There is an approach better equipped to address these problems; it downplays the moral significance of “my station and its duties” in ES, identifying the moral with the ideal point of view. The MSID theory is one of four responses to the question about the ultimate moral goal (Essay II). Bradley Studies Vol. MY STATION AND ITS DUTIES* In taking this opportunity, which your committee has given me, of addressing the London Ethical Society, in the honor- able but gravely responsible position of their president, I have thought that I could best fulfil the duties of my station by laying before you one or two difficulties which have occurred to my mind, in thinking how we are to realize the declared aims of our … ‘ “My station and its duties”: Social role accounts of obligation in Green and Bradley The ideal is social because it reflects existing social practices. 80-81, n. 38). [Counter thesis: the top-down ideal thesis, according to which what ought to be is irreducible to what is (moral ideals are irreducible to existing models, the ideal self is irreducible to social relations (ES, 205)), and reality is altered to become ideal (e.g., the moral goal consists in the realization of the ideal of human nature). In Essay V, duties are social because they are authorised by existing social institutions; in Essay VI, because their realization is conditional upon our relations with other people: “They directly involve relation to other men, and, if you remove others, you immediately make the practice of these virtues impossible” (ES, 221). The secretary receives and documents payments received from clients. ), Collected Works of F.H. All Rights Reserved. An individual user may print out a PDF of a single chapter of a monograph in OSO for personal use. are conditional upon the existence of social institutions. 1. (ES, 201-202). This paper compares the central theses of Edmund M. Pincoffs’s Quandaries and Virtues with those of F. H. Bradley’s Ethical Studies. The Development of Ethics. More specifically, there are two important aspects of moral obligation. It is hard to answer these questions based only on Bradley’s description of the moral ideal in ES, as it is not detailed enough. Mander distinguishes between “dimensions” of “my station and its duties”, i.e. My Station and Its Virtues. MacNiven, Don (1987). (1996). the progress of the self towards the ideal) and not as the perfection of the state. Ilodigwe, D. (2004). Continuing his critique of individualism and atomism in Principles of Logic (1883), Bradley attacked the method of Mill's inductive logic by holding that judgment and inference cannot begin with isolated, particular facts. Ross, R. London: Oxford University Press. Irwin identifies Bradley’s position with the claim that a person achieves her self-realization through the station, “specified by true morality” (2009, p. 571) or “correct moral principles” (2009, p. 569). Brink (2007) points to problems with Bradley’s Essay V, demonstrating the difference between Green and Bradley. In W. Sweet (Ed. California: University of California Press. The moral point of view is not supplemented by the ideal; it is the ideal point of view. . An essential part of this justification is the connection between the required act and the conception of myself as the embodiment of the truth of human nature. Here ideal which (for faith is) is realized in me by faith” (214). Ideals and Illusions. Determining whether our society is in a corrupt state involves evaluation, which must be conducted with reference to a normative system which is external to the evaluated normative system and subjects it. ), Ethics and Basic Rights. Bradley never produced a book on political philosophy and the fewpublished papers touching on social and political themes present viewsthat do not diverge from the position he set out inEthical Studies, in particular, in the fifth essay, MyStation and its Duties. Bradley’s Idealist Ethics. a possible world in which reality is a complete expression of the value. In my view, Bradley rejects the MSID theory’s normative claims as well as its claim that the individual is reducible to her social relations. 190-1). Brink, D. O. Bradley. Here the station which is, is realized in me. ), The Impact of Idealism. This fact is often overlooked. Dina Babushkina. As a rule, commentators believe that moral duties in ES are either duties to others or that some of them are duties to oneself (see, e.g., Candlish 1978, p. 164). Finally, Bradley separates his own voice from that of the doctrine’s adherent in a full-fledged criticism. 60-1). When morality is reduced to institutionalised traditional norms, “unless morals varied, there could be no morality; that a morality which was not relative would be futile, and I would have to ask for something ‘more relative than this’” (ES, 189). Analysis, 18, 69-72. As applied to my example, this means that, being a part of such a tradition, the parent may not know whether honour killing is morally justified and obligatory, but she has a prerogative of doubt and must use it. 100-1), James Bradley suggests that the MSID theory, which “represents the first theoretical elaboration of the nascent vocational ethic of service which went hand-in hand with the newly emergent ‘professions’” and is based on “the ethical self-definition of the expanding professional middle-classes in order to secure … the ‘organic’ interpretation of self and society” is “condemned” in ES, inter alia, because Bradley “finds it impossible ethically to legitimate any prevailing social order” (1996, pp. He says one cannot obey blindly, because the society may be in a corrupt state. [Counter claim: the only criterion of moral evaluation is a person’s striving for her ideal (ES, 247 ff.).]. Oxford: Clarendon Press. utilitarianism, or the view that identifies “my station and its duties” as expressive of Bradley’s ultimate position.11 8 Although Richard Wollheim recognises this point, and has persistently drawn attention to it, it strikes one as strange that he nevertheless characterises Bradley as merely negative thinker in … Note another implication of Bradley’s words: if one judges that a particular social demand is bad, one ought not to perform this act, despite its being one’s positional duty. It is most usually assumed that in tying obligations to social roles, the British Idealists were offering what the chapter calls an identificatory account of obligation: that is, acting in a certain way has an obligatory force because it relates to a role which constitutes your identity. Bradley replies that knowing the right course of action in each particular case is a matter of convention and not that of an ethical theory. My Station and Its Duties Hardcover – December 31, 1846 by By The Author Of "The Last Day Of The Week" (Author) Banchetti, M. (1992). Please, subscribe or login to access full text content. 1) and which claims are associated with it (Sect. 6 Does ‘Ought’ Imply ‘Can’? ‘My Station and Its Duties’: Social Role Accounts of Obligation in Green and Bradley. Moreover, the state may be in “a confused or rotten condition, so that right and might do not always go together” (ES, 204). ), British Idealism and the Concept of the Self. And this is indeed limitation” (ES, 201). I am thankful to Timo Airaksinen, William Mander, Elizabeth Frazer, Peter Nicholson, and James Connelly for their comments on the drafts of this paper. Irish Theological Quarterly, 30(1), 3‑22. In MacEwen, Ph. In terms of the more recent debates aboutLiberal neutralit… Bradley Ethical Studies. A society can only be said to be corrupt in the light of an external standard representing a value of a higher order. (2011). Wright, C. (1984). 13 ‘Duty and Virtue Are Moral Introversions’. From these descriptive claims the MSID theory infers its normative thesis: since the individual is fully reduced to a social function, this determines what she should be. It engages with Sidgwick's remarks on the kind of ethical expertise that the moral philosopher possesses and on his approach to practical ethics generally. 39-49). Bradley. (1958). To troubleshoot, please check our Many, e.g., Nicholson (1990) and Keene (2009), presuppose that the first element of the moral ideal is based on bottom-up idealization.