efforts to resolve conflicts of human interests-are not merely inherently
vague but completely irrelevant to the actual tasks of settling value
conflicts as they empirically arise.
Our task in these difficult times, over which Mr. Vivas wrings his
hands, is not to find or agree upon criteria of human perfection but to
take our point of departure from concrete differences within the given
historical situation in order to develop specific institutional rules and
devices within which compatible interests can be broadened and shared,
and incompatible interests negotiated with a minimum of violence.
Imagine trying to settle a collective bargaining dispute by finding the
pre-existent ontic hierarchy
of
a priori values to which all human beings
should be committed! Not only do ideals of human perfection them–
selves reflect the differences in interests which are the occasion of con–
flict, they tend to exacerbate these differences, since their absolute non–
empirical character invites endless dialectical dispute resolved, if at all,
by ultimata and bulls of excommunication of the kind Vivas looses on so
many pages. His tone makes one glad he hasn't the power to back them
up.
That men are members of the same biological species does not
guarantee that they will always succeed in composing their differences
satisfactorily. And still less if they are considered theologically as child–
ren of a God who, according to a few of his representatives, has doomed
some of his infant offspring to eternal damnation. It is not the pre–
sumed origins of men, in this world or any other, which are relevant to
human morality but their present nature and the consequences of their
contemplated actions upon each other. Today their interests are so in–
timately intertwined that it requires no metaphysics to prove that their
survival depends upon recognizing it. Intelligence can show that what
unites them, the common bonds of need, hope, and fear of sudden death,
is more important than what divides them.
Nonetheless naturalists have always recognized without flinching
that after intelligence has done its work there may still remain interests
so deep-rooted, and so much a part of natures in conflict, that they are
inarbitrable. This is less often true than is believed. But only someone
craving for cosmic harmony can deny it is ever true. The conflict be–
tween good and good, between species and species, between gods and
devils
if
they exist, is a practical challenge to a naturalist but not a
theoretical embarrassment as it
is
to a supernaturalist. Even when we
have to fight for our life against them, it is possible
to
recognize the
necessities of natures different from our own which impel them to take
the course they do. Nor need this intellectual chivalry or courtesy weak–
en our resolution in the struggle for what we believe right.
