The Other

A reflection on ‘Why Should I be Moral?’ By F. H. Bradley

In this series of essays we are exploring the root causes of the social isolation that has come to dominate western life. We have elsewhere contended that the break from the humanism of the Renaissance effected by René Descartes presumes a subtle falsehood, one that we seek to understand and correct. Thought is for no-one a unitive process with a single identity, but a dialogue, in which a ‘listener’ deliberates on a stream of thought bubbling up from a ‘speaker’ neither of which can be ‘doubted’ without the erasure of it’s complement. To posit thought as the atom of being one must begin with cogito ergo sumus. I think, therefore We are. The full statement of this argument will not be made here, instead we turn for illumination to one of the few minds in the 19th century to break from the dogmatic utilitarianism of his contemporaries, and recover a teleological view of ethics that is not entirely Hegelian. While his thought seems in places to be an almost reactionary Neo-Platonism, there are hints at a vision of man beyond the individual that are of use to our present work.

The first necessary idea in understanding Bradley is his notion of ‘self-realization.’ Bradley places ‘self-realization’ at the pinnacle of human existence. To be virtuous is to realize oneself, and by virtue, he means the capacity to fulfill the end of human existence. So far we have a circularity, one which Bradley himself acknowledges, but one that bears fruit if we can persist in dissecting it. His logic begins by demonstrating that by virtue we must mean that in which end and means coincide. To have an end is to not be the final end, and for a ‘means’ to be virtuous, we cannot merely suppose the end to be good as Aristotle is sometimes read as doing, the means must be ‘moral activity,’ action that is itself an end. We do not merely wish to accomplish ‘moral’ ends, we wish to ‘be’ moral. This wish demonstrates that moral activity is its own end, apart from what is accomplished in the world, as it brings about the state of mind that ‘desire for goodness’ moves us towards. (Bradley prefaces this by leading the reader through the absurdity of asking a question like ‘why should I be moral,’ as so doing posits a morality other than morality, as if the end of morality were but a means for an end that is ‘true’ morality, and so on, and so on.) Said another way, for a moral act to be moral, it must be done by ‘me.’ It is not that externalities do not exist in moral activity, but it is the ‘me’ of the action that expresses it’s moral character. Moral quality cannot be evaluated for action in an economic sense, (praxeologically), that is, relative to efficacy in reaching external ends (even if those ends are objective goods). Consider a world in which all activity was done by automatons, and humans had no role in ‘doing.’ Such a world would not be immoral, but a-moral, beyond the reach of moral analysis. Virtue would lose its meaning in contrast with ‘efficiency’.

There is not only something to be done, there is something to be done by ‘me’ - I must do the act, must realize the end. Morality implies both the something to be done, and the doing of it by me.

This may seem like a relatively insignificant assertion, but its impacts on Bradley's ethical system are profound. Since moral activity must have as its subject the self, moral activity is a transformation of the self. If I say ‘the cat must put on the hat,’ it is the cat that we identify as the ‘doer’. If we say ‘the water has become cold,’ we suggest a transformation in the water, not in ‘cold’. Thus if all moral statements must be statable as ‘I must do X’ or ‘I must be A’ it is clear that the goal of moral activity is some kind of motion by ourselves as a subject towards some reality, which we perceive as a state of mind specific to ourselves. This is what Bradley means by the ‘self-real.’ The observant reader will note that one solution to Bradley’s system (as described up to this point) would be relativism, or even solipsism. If morality is simply the movement from one state of mind to another, with no necessary reference to an empirical or external reality, action at all seems suspect. Bradley counters this possibility by noting that the builders of a steam-engine are ‘realizing’ a state of mind (that of the engine’s inventor), but that there really ‘is’ a steam engine. That is, action that we perceive internally as a motion from one state of mind to another has an external counterpart that ‘persists’ beyond the state of mind that conceived it.

We do not want the reader to say, ‘Oh yes, of course, relativity of knowledge - everything is a state of consciousness,’ and so dismiss the question. If the reader believes that a steam engine, after it is made, is nothing but a state of the mind of the person or persons who have made it, or who are looking at it, we do not hold what we feel tempted to call such a silly doctrine; and would point out to those who do hold it that, at all events, the engine is a very different state of mind after it is made to what it was before.

Bradley’s idealism is clear here, he observes a strict co-existence between objects in the world and objects in the mind. This will cause difficulties if taken too seriously. However it is not defending Bradley’s system that interests us, but rather an insight he develops in the next evolution of Why Should I be Moral? Bradley continues to expand his concept of the ‘self-real’ by refuting the notion that any thought ‘I’ have that becomes real is an example of ‘self-realization.’ Rather it is only when thoughts that are my ends become real that self-realization occurs. Thus we can sort thoughts that are mere expressions of perceived reality (the train is about to run off the tracks) from thoughts that are perception of ends (I want to prevent the train from running off the tracks). Bradley asserts that these latter states of mind are what is meant by ‘desire.’ A desire is a perceived end, something we want for ourselves to do or be. ‘I want to be rich’, ‘I want to save the lives of those on the train,’ ‘I want to kill my enemy.’

A desired object (as desired) is a thought, and my thought, but it is something more and that something more is, in short, that it is desired by me… what is desired in all cases must be self.

It is of interest to point out the similarity between Bradley’s concept of desire and that of the ancient Greeks. Eros is precisely this wanting for a thing outside self to be (had by) the self. The difference is Bradley’s radical assertion that what is wanted is not the ‘object of desire’, but the state of being that has attained the ‘object of desire.’ Desire (in this sense) is actually the feeling that a given end (state of being) presented to us as an object of desire is an affirmation of our ‘true’ self in something ‘not’ ourself.

The essence of desire for an object would thus be the feeling of our affirmation in the idea of something not ourself, felt against the feeling of ourself as, without the object, void and negated; and it is the tension of this relation which produces motion. If so, then nothing is desired except that which is identified with ourselves, and we can aim at nothing except so far as we aim at ourselves in it. (Emphasis added)

This notion, of a tension between ourselves and the ‘real’ as necessarily flowing from an ethical framework where morality is self-realization, and desire is recognition of what the self ought to be but is not, can be taken a step further. While Bradley himself moves towards a monistic (almost stoic) absolutism, contending that conjoining the ‘self’ to an ‘infinite whole’ that is the union of all the individual ends desired by the self is the goal of morality, we will pause here to propose a different conclusion. If we assume as Bradley does that virtue is both an end and a means, then desire (in Bradley’s sense) is the fuel of virtue. We would not need to realize ourselves if we were born fully ourselves. The fact that we come into the world full of desire signals to us that we have at hand not simply goods to acquire (and God forbid we replace goods in the Aristotelian sense with ‘goods’ in the utilitarian materialistic sense, as though life were one long errand for the acquisition of commodities to sate our ‘desires.’) but a being to ‘become’. A ‘self’ to ‘make real’. Bradley has given us, out of the ashes of an insular idealism, a necessary part of any ethical foundation confirming the deepest suspicions of human nature, one that lays waste to an anthropocentric utilitarianism that posits ‘the greatest happiness for the greatest number’ as our only guiding star. This sentiment is remarkably similar to that expressed by Solzhenitsyn in an address given to Harvard in 1978:

If as is claimed by humanism, man were born only to be happy, he would not be born to die. Since his body is doomed to death, his task on earth evidently must be more spiritual: not a total engrossment in everyday life, not the search for the best ways to obtain material goods and then their carefree consumption, it has to be the fulfillment of a permanent, earnest duty so that one’s life journey may become above all an experience of moral growth: to leave life a better human being than one started it.

Great effort it would seem has been spent to obscure man’s desires from himself. Advertisements are everywhere confounding desire with a base materialistic ‘need to have.’ What is then needed for the maintenance of true desire? How can we manage the ‘relation which produces motion’. If man’s capacity to desire is unlimited (A point Bradley stresses towards the end of this essay), then he must seek (In Bradley’s system) integration within an infinite whole, one which is always folding into itself the ongoing expression of individual will, such that submission to the infinite is possession of the particular, yet without exclusion of another particular. Firstly, we must point out the absurdity of the kind of leap-in-identity sometimes suggested by spiritualists in the Neo-Platonic genre whereby the self radically identifies itself with ‘The One’. ‘I am truth,’ ‘I am God’, ‘I am the One.’ This erasure of distance makes virtue un-necessary, and solves the tension by breaking the cord. It may have utility as a meditative practice, but it is deadly as an ethic. Rather what we must assert and firmly maintain is the identity of the ‘self’ and the ‘other’. If man ceases to carefully cultivate that respect and admiration for that which is not himself, and yet is an expression of what he ought to become, (An activity we may term ‘adoration’) the fire of moral being risks extinguishment. I think, therefore We are. What the ‘other’ is, that is the work of a lifetime to discover. But as Bradley has explained, discovery of ends produces desire, a desire for a better expression of ourselves than we have yet managed, and the more-realized self has further ability to perceive what being better expresses itself than itself. This is to say, as the self becomes more real, so does it’s appreciation of, and desire for, the other. If the self should reach out at this point, and attempt to ‘have’ the other, or seek to make itself the other by sheer will, it will find that the wellspring of the desire that has moved it towards it’s object thus far has dried up. Psyche will find herself banished from the arms of Cupid. The self (or soul) will fall into motionless apathy, thus the need to learn and grow that essential skill, adoration.

References

1. Bradley, F H. “Why Should I Be Moral?” Essay. In Ethical Studies (Selected Essays). New York City, New york: The Liberal Arts Press, 1951.

2. “A World Split Apart.” Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn Center. Accessed July 20, 2025. https://www.solzhenitsyncenter.org/a-world-split-apart.