The Moral Philosophy of Josiah Royce by Peter Fuss
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Aesthetics As the Foundation for Morality

One of Josiah Royce’s earliest memories was the assassination of Abraham Lincoln. Royce was only 9 years of age in remote California, but the event was decisive for the direction and focus for his life: the reduction of political violence. That he failed utterly has no bearing on either the quality of his thinking or its continuing relevance. Peter Fuss’s book captures both remarkably well.

‘Harmony’ is the central term in Royce’s moral philosophy. This is remarkable because it is not a term usually associated with ethics or morals, but with aesthetics. It refers to the beautiful, not to the good. And harmony, while clearly a desirable thing, hardly carries with it an obvious connotation of moral obligation. Nonetheless, Royce builds his entire philosophy around it.

Harmony for Royce is an end in itself not a means for achieving other human ends, although it facilitates that as well. Hedonism is the antithesis of harmony and is Royce’s precise moral term for any sort of utilitarian ethics. So harmony does not imply happiness or individual contentment. It is a social concept that describes a relationships among people, not psychic states or intentions. As Fuss writes: “Royce argues that the very fact that our ends do conflict both intrapersonally and interpersonally, is reason enough for the reflective moral agent not to derive from any one of these a definitive moral standard.”

This seems at first run an innocuous or even a facile assertion. ‘Sure’, one could respond, ‘there are many possible human goods, and sometimes these appear to be in conflict, even in my own mind. But that only means I have to sacrifice a little of one good to get a bit more of another one. Isn’t that what compromise is about?’ Well no, says Royce, that is exactly what utilitarian obfuscation is all about. There is no rational way to determine how much of one good is equivalent to how much of another. It can’t be done; and even considering it undermines all subsequent moral choice.

Harmony is not just another human good, one among many other warring goods. Harmony is the goal of achieving all other human goods, in full, without compromise, and without the charade of a utilitarian calculus to cloud the moral waters. It is Royce’s contention that anyone who has ever experienced the pull of conflicting obligations - work vs. family, justice vs. mercy, indeed rights vs. obligations - knows implicitly that harmony, the reconciliation of all possible goods, is something more than just another good.

Harmony is the ideal of ideals, therefore. Royce’s key moment of moral insight is the recognition that faith in the possibility of harmony is an essential condition for human morality itself. Without such faith, it is clear that human disagreement can only result in universal disappointment and dissatisfaction. Whether one agrees with this conclusion or not, it is obviously not vacuous. It creates a very different focus for moral discussion than had been available before: we ought to want what is beautiful, and what is beautiful is the goods we all want. Not the goods we hold or have in common, or the goods of the least common denominator, or what’s good for most of us, but all goods.

Somewhat strangely perhaps, harmony need not be a desire of anyone; yet it still plays this pivotal role in moral discussion. In a sense, this is a sort of ‘objective’ endorsement of harmony. It is grinding nobody’s axe, it is not partisan, it isn’t judgmental. All goods have a moral right to be recognised and achieved. As Fuss summarises the position: “If we are ever to discover a ...summum bonum we must first come to know the plurality of human aims in all their vividness and in all their conflict.”

The uniqueness of harmony as a moral standard lies in its relational quality. It demands a singular virtue for its achievement: Loyalty. Loyalty is the manifestation of faith in the community by its members that harmony is possible. Loyalty is, as it were, the 'organisational' form of love. This too is a remarkable conclusion. Loyalty obviously implies a number of other necessary virtues like patience, fortitude, even courage. But loyalty is a social virtue; it has to do with one's relationship to one’s fellow not to a state of the soul or one’s character. In later work Royce develops this concept with inspiring articulateness.

What Royce wants to establish is that there is no morality independent of a moral community. And the existence of a moral community is dependent upon the degree of commitment that the members of that community have to each other, not necessarily in emotional terms, but certainly in terms of respect for each other’s aims, goals, and ambitions as worthy of fulfillment. It is the habit of widening our attention to what others want that is critical for the existence of the moral community.

More than a century later, the core of Royce’s thought is still visible in the work of philosophers like Juergen Habermas, particularly in his influential Theory of Communicative Action. The idea of a community held together by a commitment to serving each other with a very individualistic agenda seems on the face of it contradictory. But thanks to Royce the false dialectic between the individual and the collective is neither necessary nor accurate.

This is a moral lesson of enduring significance during a time of dramatic increases in both neo-liberal and fascist sentiments as well as political polarisation on many fronts. Royce's is a philosophy of profoundest respect and regard for everything that is human.

View all my reviews