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Englim moralists who have accepted Moore's criticism of utilitarianism,
and so he not only feels obliged to expound Bentham but also to pro–
tect him from those who accuse him of committing the dreaded natural–
istic fallacy. Unlike many defenders of ethical naturalism, Baumgardt
seems willing to admit that the alleged fallacy
is
a fallacy and his job,
therefore, is the heroic one of saving Bentham after he has dealt
Bentham's critics every trump card. What he tries to do, as I interpret
him, is to show that Bentham never maintained the
synonymy
of "right"
and a descriptive term like "conduces to the greatest happiness of the
greatest number," but only the more modest thesis that these predicates
happen to apply to the same actions. According to Baumgardt, therefore,
Bentham treats the predicate "right" as the modest physicist treats the
predicate "yellow," not claiming that he has produced an analysis of
its meaning but rather that he has discovered a "scientific" correlation
between rightness and the attribute of leading to happiness.
In support of his interpretation Baumgardt leans on an unpublished
manuscript in which Bentham refers to the principle of utility as an
"hypothesis," but Baumgardt finds it exceedingly difficult to explain
away those passages in the
Introduction to the Principles of Morals and
Legislation
where Bentham
explicitly says
that those who have contested
the principle of ut.ility "have not known what they have been meaning"
and where Bentham
explicitly says
that the words "right" and "wrong"
either have the meaning assigned to them by Utilitarians or no meaning
at all. To justify his discounting of these damaging passages-and it
must be said that Dr. Baumgardt is admirably honest, almost Darwinian,
in citing the very powerful evidence against his thesis-Dr. Baumgardt
appeals to Bentham's avowed desire to distinguish between "ought" and
"is." Baumgardt appears to think that the acceptance of a naturalistic
translation
of ethical terms (as opposed to a correlation) is tantamount
to accepting some variant of "whatever is, is right," but isn't this the
result of a muddle? Naturalists are not bound to be followers of Pope,
Hegel, and Pangloss. Bentham's sound insight into the fact that some
things are not as they ought to be hardly drives him from the camp of
ethical naturalism. On the other hand,
if
Bentham had abandoned
naturalism in the manner suggested by Baumgardt, Bentham's views
become startlingly like those he is usually supposed to have fought. A
glance at the evolution of recent ethical theory will bring out what I
have in mind.
Even after logical positivists had risen to challenge the Platonism
of the early Moore and Russell, they continued to cry "Death to Utili–
tarianism!" They hooted at Moore's theory that "good" had a non-
