25 Rashdall Does the Anthropologists One Better (or Worse)
Jeremy Waldron, “Dignity, Rank, and Rights,” The Tanner Lectures on Human Values (2009)
“In 1907, the Clarendon Press at Oxford published the following in a two volume treatise on moral philosophy by the Reverend Hastings Rashdall, concerning trade-offs between high culture and the amelioration of social and economic conditions:
It is becoming tolerably obvious at the present day that all improvement in the social condition of the higher races of mankind postulates the exclusion of competition with the lower races. That means that, sooner or later, the lower Well-being--it may be ultimately the very existence--of countless Chinamen or negroes must be sacrificed that a higher life may be possible for a much smaller number of white men. [140]
That is what passed for moral philosophy at Oxford a few generations ago. As far as I can tell there is nothing ironic in Rashdall’s observation.[141] For Rashdall, this is one of our considered judgments in what would now be described as reflective equilibrium. “Individuals, or races with higher capacities ...have a right to more than merely equal consideration as compared to those of lower capacities.[142] This comes close to accepting a distinction among humans, analogous to that which we accept as between humans and animals.”
fn140 Hastings Rashdall, The Theory of Good and Evil: A Treatise on Moral Philosophy, 2nd ed. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1924), 1:237–38. Rashdall appends a footnote: “The exclusion is far more difficult to justify in the case of people like the Japanese, who are equally civilized but have fewer wants than the Western.” The author continued: “If we do defend it” (and he had no doubt that we would), “we distinctly adopt the principle that higher life is intrinsically, in and for itself, more valuable than lower life, though it may only be attainable by fewer persons, and may not contribute to the greater good of those who do not share it” (238).
fn 41 It rests explicitly on what he calls “our comparative indifference to the welfare of the black races, when it collides with the higher Well-being of a much smaller European population” (ibid., 241).
fn142 Ibid., 242.
Waldron continues:
“We might have moved in the opposite direction. Edmund Burke feared that we were doing so. Lamenting the violation of the serene and beauteous dignity of the queen of France, in his Reflections on the Revolution in France, Burke lamented:
The age of chivalry is gone. That of sophisters, economists, and calculators, has succeeded.... Never, never more shall we behold that generous loyalty to rank and sex, that proud submission, that dignified obedience.... [N]ow all is to be changed.... All the decent drapery of life is to be rudely torn off. All the superadded ideas, furnished from the wardrobe of a moral imagination, which the heart owns, and the understanding ratifies, as necessary to cover the defects of our naked, shivering nature, and to raise it to dignity in our own estimation, are to be exploded as a ridiculous, absurd, and antiquated fashion. On this [ ]scheme of things, a king is but a man, a queen is but a woman; a woman is but an animal, and an animal not of the highest order. [144]
This is what reactionaries always say: if we abolish distinctions of rank, we will end up treating everyone like an animal, “and an animal not of the highest order.” But the ethos of human dignity reminds us that there is an alternative: we can flatten out the scale of status and rank and leave Marie Antoinette more or less where she is. Everyone can eat cake, or (more to the point) everyone’s maltreatment — maltreatment of the lowliest criminal, abuse of the most despised of terror suspects — can be regarded as a sacrilege, a violation of human dignity, which (in the words of Edmund Burke) ten thousand swords must leap from their scabbards to avenge.
fn144 Edmund Burke, Reflections on the Revolution in France, edited by Leslie Mitchell (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993), 77.
NOTE: you can buy Rashdall's book on Amazon: 2 volumes, about 850 pages, and it will set you back about $35 in paperback. My advice: don't do it. There seem to be no used copies available. I wonder why.
Jeremy Waldron, “Dignity, Rank, and Rights,” The Tanner Lectures on Human Values (2009)
“In 1907, the Clarendon Press at Oxford published the following in a two volume treatise on moral philosophy by the Reverend Hastings Rashdall, concerning trade-offs between high culture and the amelioration of social and economic conditions:
It is becoming tolerably obvious at the present day that all improvement in the social condition of the higher races of mankind postulates the exclusion of competition with the lower races. That means that, sooner or later, the lower Well-being--it may be ultimately the very existence--of countless Chinamen or negroes must be sacrificed that a higher life may be possible for a much smaller number of white men. [140]
That is what passed for moral philosophy at Oxford a few generations ago. As far as I can tell there is nothing ironic in Rashdall’s observation.[141] For Rashdall, this is one of our considered judgments in what would now be described as reflective equilibrium. “Individuals, or races with higher capacities ...have a right to more than merely equal consideration as compared to those of lower capacities.[142] This comes close to accepting a distinction among humans, analogous to that which we accept as between humans and animals.”
fn140 Hastings Rashdall, The Theory of Good and Evil: A Treatise on Moral Philosophy, 2nd ed. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1924), 1:237–38. Rashdall appends a footnote: “The exclusion is far more difficult to justify in the case of people like the Japanese, who are equally civilized but have fewer wants than the Western.” The author continued: “If we do defend it” (and he had no doubt that we would), “we distinctly adopt the principle that higher life is intrinsically, in and for itself, more valuable than lower life, though it may only be attainable by fewer persons, and may not contribute to the greater good of those who do not share it” (238).
fn 41 It rests explicitly on what he calls “our comparative indifference to the welfare of the black races, when it collides with the higher Well-being of a much smaller European population” (ibid., 241).
fn142 Ibid., 242.
Waldron continues:
“We might have moved in the opposite direction. Edmund Burke feared that we were doing so. Lamenting the violation of the serene and beauteous dignity of the queen of France, in his Reflections on the Revolution in France, Burke lamented:
The age of chivalry is gone. That of sophisters, economists, and calculators, has succeeded.... Never, never more shall we behold that generous loyalty to rank and sex, that proud submission, that dignified obedience.... [N]ow all is to be changed.... All the decent drapery of life is to be rudely torn off. All the superadded ideas, furnished from the wardrobe of a moral imagination, which the heart owns, and the understanding ratifies, as necessary to cover the defects of our naked, shivering nature, and to raise it to dignity in our own estimation, are to be exploded as a ridiculous, absurd, and antiquated fashion. On this [ ]scheme of things, a king is but a man, a queen is but a woman; a woman is but an animal, and an animal not of the highest order. [144]
This is what reactionaries always say: if we abolish distinctions of rank, we will end up treating everyone like an animal, “and an animal not of the highest order.” But the ethos of human dignity reminds us that there is an alternative: we can flatten out the scale of status and rank and leave Marie Antoinette more or less where she is. Everyone can eat cake, or (more to the point) everyone’s maltreatment — maltreatment of the lowliest criminal, abuse of the most despised of terror suspects — can be regarded as a sacrilege, a violation of human dignity, which (in the words of Edmund Burke) ten thousand swords must leap from their scabbards to avenge.
fn144 Edmund Burke, Reflections on the Revolution in France, edited by Leslie Mitchell (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993), 77.
NOTE: you can buy Rashdall's book on Amazon: 2 volumes, about 850 pages, and it will set you back about $35 in paperback. My advice: don't do it. There seem to be no used copies available. I wonder why.
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