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Ethical Studies
First published in 1876, this forceful and vigorous classic of English moral philosophy, written in opposition to Utilitarianism by one of England's most eminent philosophers, is now available for the first time since 1977.
- GenresPhilosophyNonfiction
360 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1876
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167 people want to read
About the author
F.H. Bradley
22 books35 followersFrancis Herbert Bradley OM (30 January 1846 – 18 September 1924) was a British idealist philosopher. His most important work was Appearance and Reality (1893).
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Displaying 1 - 5 of 5 reviews
May 12, 2025
MAYBE YOU’LL GET A REPLACEMENT -
THERE’S MANY LIKE ME TO BE FOUND -
MONGRELS, WHO AIN’T GOT A PENNY,
SNIFFIN’ FOR TEARS, JUST LIKE YOU, ON THE GROUND.
- Yellow Brick Road
WHERE THERE IS CARRION, THERE, THE VULTURES WILL GATHER.
- Jesus of Nazareth
This book arrived yesterday evening in the mail. In a COVID-19 era, delivery is perforce erratic. So how come I’m already reviewing it today?
Well, the last time I read it, in 1970, I was floored by its ambling intensity.
It didn’t help at all that I was concurrently reading Richard Wollheim’s anecdotal and largely inconclusive - due to its metaphysical wooliness - biographical study of Bradley.
Now, F.H. Bradley was a phenomenally Epochal Victorian professor at Oxford whose own mind was ANYTHING but woolly.
His adamant Certainty in the matter of philosophical absolutes made him a towering professorial force to be reckoned with.
And his contentious attitude was scathing! With good reason. His critics were everywhere...
I gave much deep reflection to Bradley’s thoughts - AFTER I had experienced a multitude of hard knocks and low blows in life. For everyone’s a critic these days. I had had more than my share.
So many of us nowadays take a blasé approach to deep books - a naïve, similarly circumstantial approach to great philosophers. Moral philosophy is not a collection of cute historical anecdotes.
It is Ammunition - meant for us! - in the RAGING BATTLEFIELD OF MODERN LIFE.
We’re gonna need ALL of it, to avoid life’s Mucky Sloughs ‘n Traps. And, even more so, to give us the strength to GET UP OFF THE GROUND AGAIN - as perpetual victims - in life's Nonstop Slugfest.
Now, many of us have had at one point in our lives a SOLID INTUITION OF ABSOLUTE BEING IN OUR LIVES. You know, that moment when we’re suddenly free of mental spiderwebs - preferably in a natural setting, relaxed and attentive. A timeless moment of endless wonder.
And total freedom from anxiety...
But we have enemies (for they lurk about us most in moments of liberation):
The BOTTOM FEEDERS.
Bottom feeders are, as Elton John sang, “mongrels who ain’t got a penny, sniffin’ for tears on the ground.” And they’ll close in like that biblical symbol of those Vultures.
Make no mistake.
Once we find an answer in life, they’ll find US.
But these bottom feeders will reap their grim reward in life. It’s like a Sourdough Starter - if you use a natural leaven in life, you’ll end up with sourdough forever. And these guys end up getting nothing but a dry, sour taste in their mouths from their misdeeds.
And that’s what this book is about. The straight and narrow road is best. It’s tough, but it yields optimally fresh, tasty bread every time.
The chapter I loved most is Our Station and Our Duties - that really says so much, because whatever the awful roadblock we're facing right now, we can turn it around for Positive Good in the lives of those we love.
In a quagmire over the bottle? Turn it around to help your friends who are bearing its pains and embarrassments, too. Can't see through he miasmal gloom of depression? Make friends on social media with people who daily brave its onslaught. That's me to a T, by the way!
The bullies’ day will come.
And the rest of us?
We will:
Walk on, walk on
With hope in our heart
And we’ll never walk Alone.
And that, friends, is why I reviewed this book the day after I received it!
THERE’S MANY LIKE ME TO BE FOUND -
MONGRELS, WHO AIN’T GOT A PENNY,
SNIFFIN’ FOR TEARS, JUST LIKE YOU, ON THE GROUND.
- Yellow Brick Road
WHERE THERE IS CARRION, THERE, THE VULTURES WILL GATHER.
- Jesus of Nazareth
This book arrived yesterday evening in the mail. In a COVID-19 era, delivery is perforce erratic. So how come I’m already reviewing it today?
Well, the last time I read it, in 1970, I was floored by its ambling intensity.
It didn’t help at all that I was concurrently reading Richard Wollheim’s anecdotal and largely inconclusive - due to its metaphysical wooliness - biographical study of Bradley.
Now, F.H. Bradley was a phenomenally Epochal Victorian professor at Oxford whose own mind was ANYTHING but woolly.
His adamant Certainty in the matter of philosophical absolutes made him a towering professorial force to be reckoned with.
And his contentious attitude was scathing! With good reason. His critics were everywhere...
I gave much deep reflection to Bradley’s thoughts - AFTER I had experienced a multitude of hard knocks and low blows in life. For everyone’s a critic these days. I had had more than my share.
So many of us nowadays take a blasé approach to deep books - a naïve, similarly circumstantial approach to great philosophers. Moral philosophy is not a collection of cute historical anecdotes.
It is Ammunition - meant for us! - in the RAGING BATTLEFIELD OF MODERN LIFE.
We’re gonna need ALL of it, to avoid life’s Mucky Sloughs ‘n Traps. And, even more so, to give us the strength to GET UP OFF THE GROUND AGAIN - as perpetual victims - in life's Nonstop Slugfest.
Now, many of us have had at one point in our lives a SOLID INTUITION OF ABSOLUTE BEING IN OUR LIVES. You know, that moment when we’re suddenly free of mental spiderwebs - preferably in a natural setting, relaxed and attentive. A timeless moment of endless wonder.
And total freedom from anxiety...
But we have enemies (for they lurk about us most in moments of liberation):
The BOTTOM FEEDERS.
Bottom feeders are, as Elton John sang, “mongrels who ain’t got a penny, sniffin’ for tears on the ground.” And they’ll close in like that biblical symbol of those Vultures.
Make no mistake.
Once we find an answer in life, they’ll find US.
But these bottom feeders will reap their grim reward in life. It’s like a Sourdough Starter - if you use a natural leaven in life, you’ll end up with sourdough forever. And these guys end up getting nothing but a dry, sour taste in their mouths from their misdeeds.
And that’s what this book is about. The straight and narrow road is best. It’s tough, but it yields optimally fresh, tasty bread every time.
The chapter I loved most is Our Station and Our Duties - that really says so much, because whatever the awful roadblock we're facing right now, we can turn it around for Positive Good in the lives of those we love.
In a quagmire over the bottle? Turn it around to help your friends who are bearing its pains and embarrassments, too. Can't see through he miasmal gloom of depression? Make friends on social media with people who daily brave its onslaught. That's me to a T, by the way!
The bullies’ day will come.
And the rest of us?
We will:
Walk on, walk on
With hope in our heart
And we’ll never walk Alone.
And that, friends, is why I reviewed this book the day after I received it!
March 1, 2016
Bradley sets up his ethical system by countering hedonism (pleasure) and Kant (abstract duty). Hedonism proper, self-pleasure, and hedonism as utilitarianism (greatest pleasure for all) cannot constitute the ethical good, he argues. Pleasure is an infinite series of perishable states. Pleasure states are not enduring; ends are illusory. Pleasure is not and cannot be an end-in-itself, though it is a particular good and inseparable from life. Kant fares no better. Here Bradley describes Kant’s categorical imperative in a Hegelian-like formulation: the “outer,” the abstract End-in-itself, molds the “inner,” the particular will, transforming the latter into the former. The problem for Bradley is that Kant’s End-in-itself is an empty abstraction. As such, it is powerless to move or transform the individualized will and that will fills the abstract universal with its particularized content.
Where Bradley now goes with his ethical theory makes little sense unless it’s seen through the lens of Hegelian theory. The End for Bradley is “self-realization,” which can only occur through the individual’s merger with society. Society is “an organism.” The individual, standing alone, is a fiction.* In this state, the contradiction between the individual and society, the particular and the universal, is resolved. The individual ceases to be individual for it has become universalized. In this state of organic wholeness and unity, the individual identifies with a universal ethos, and this motivates the individual to follow its dictates. There is no Kantian duty for duty’s sake. Rather, we perform our duty willingly because we are one with the whole and to be that is to be happy in an enduring sense.**
“Self-realization,” though, is not a permanent state as the above description might suggest. Bradley discusses “evolution,” which is also Hegelian-like in the sense that the individual’s merger with society has a progressive quality to it because there’s a contradiction between the individual and society. “Morality develops” (“morality, the process of realization”) and therefore it is “not absolute.”
And now, entering onto the stage, Bradley brings in God (if not a person,*** then it’s an abstract Idea or the impersonal divine). God is perfect and by that standard we are imperfect. We fall short. Evolution for Bradley is a dialectical exchange between imperfection and the ideal of the perfect, as expressed by the divine. Self-realization, at any point in time, as well as throughout historical development, is a progressive “dying of the private self,” and that dying occurs through faith, not through good works or through imperfect sensuous knowledge. By faith, the self is “made one with the ideal….you must put your whole self, your entire will, into the will of the divine.” ****
Bradley’s ethical vision soars. Its anchor point is the divine, however defined. Though Bradley’s system incorporates it, the divine is external. It, initially, stands apart from us and is brought inside so that in Bradley’s terminology the outer and the inner become one. Remove the divine, though, and Bradley’s system collapses. Then one is left with a this-world, materialistic foundation for ethics that has its origins in our biology. We are private selves seeking our individual, particular good (survival, well-being), and success is indicated by pleasure (without the negative connotation of hedonism). Kant’s self-motivating End-in-itself can be reformulated to state that it’s in our own self-interest to respect the interests of others (the others as Ends) because that contributes to the order necessary for others to satisfy their particular ends. In this way, private ends become (in theory) universalized. The ideal is neither divine nor external to us. Rather, it’s embedded in our souls. It is a logic built into our biology and, ironically, it can be said that here too the ideal is real.
*The Hegel view of the state sounds familiar. As Bradley writes, “the state is not put together, but it lives…..in the community” the “individual is realized….They (the individuals) are aware in themselves that they possess this individual independent being because of the sacrifice of their individuality, because the universal substance is their soul and essence….”
**Bradley refers often to “My station and my duties.” It is not clear what is meant by this expression. There’s an element of Plato in it as the organic merger of the individual with society requires that each has a place and that one’s role is performed willingly and happily.
***Bradley writes that “We are to take the religious consciousness as an existing fact, and to take it as we find it now in the modern Christian mind, whether that mind recognizes it or whether it does not.”
****Bradley quotes from another writer that “‘in the man Christ, in his passion, his dying, his death, and uprising, in his own humanity, is reckoned for righteousness, so that the man becomes Christ, that is after the spiritual man….He who teaches and wills otherwise is yet in the whoredom of Babylon.’”
Where Bradley now goes with his ethical theory makes little sense unless it’s seen through the lens of Hegelian theory. The End for Bradley is “self-realization,” which can only occur through the individual’s merger with society. Society is “an organism.” The individual, standing alone, is a fiction.* In this state, the contradiction between the individual and society, the particular and the universal, is resolved. The individual ceases to be individual for it has become universalized. In this state of organic wholeness and unity, the individual identifies with a universal ethos, and this motivates the individual to follow its dictates. There is no Kantian duty for duty’s sake. Rather, we perform our duty willingly because we are one with the whole and to be that is to be happy in an enduring sense.**
“Self-realization,” though, is not a permanent state as the above description might suggest. Bradley discusses “evolution,” which is also Hegelian-like in the sense that the individual’s merger with society has a progressive quality to it because there’s a contradiction between the individual and society. “Morality develops” (“morality, the process of realization”) and therefore it is “not absolute.”
And now, entering onto the stage, Bradley brings in God (if not a person,*** then it’s an abstract Idea or the impersonal divine). God is perfect and by that standard we are imperfect. We fall short. Evolution for Bradley is a dialectical exchange between imperfection and the ideal of the perfect, as expressed by the divine. Self-realization, at any point in time, as well as throughout historical development, is a progressive “dying of the private self,” and that dying occurs through faith, not through good works or through imperfect sensuous knowledge. By faith, the self is “made one with the ideal….you must put your whole self, your entire will, into the will of the divine.” ****
Bradley’s ethical vision soars. Its anchor point is the divine, however defined. Though Bradley’s system incorporates it, the divine is external. It, initially, stands apart from us and is brought inside so that in Bradley’s terminology the outer and the inner become one. Remove the divine, though, and Bradley’s system collapses. Then one is left with a this-world, materialistic foundation for ethics that has its origins in our biology. We are private selves seeking our individual, particular good (survival, well-being), and success is indicated by pleasure (without the negative connotation of hedonism). Kant’s self-motivating End-in-itself can be reformulated to state that it’s in our own self-interest to respect the interests of others (the others as Ends) because that contributes to the order necessary for others to satisfy their particular ends. In this way, private ends become (in theory) universalized. The ideal is neither divine nor external to us. Rather, it’s embedded in our souls. It is a logic built into our biology and, ironically, it can be said that here too the ideal is real.
*The Hegel view of the state sounds familiar. As Bradley writes, “the state is not put together, but it lives…..in the community” the “individual is realized….They (the individuals) are aware in themselves that they possess this individual independent being because of the sacrifice of their individuality, because the universal substance is their soul and essence….”
**Bradley refers often to “My station and my duties.” It is not clear what is meant by this expression. There’s an element of Plato in it as the organic merger of the individual with society requires that each has a place and that one’s role is performed willingly and happily.
***Bradley writes that “We are to take the religious consciousness as an existing fact, and to take it as we find it now in the modern Christian mind, whether that mind recognizes it or whether it does not.”
****Bradley quotes from another writer that “‘in the man Christ, in his passion, his dying, his death, and uprising, in his own humanity, is reckoned for righteousness, so that the man becomes Christ, that is after the spiritual man….He who teaches and wills otherwise is yet in the whoredom of Babylon.’”
October 9, 2013
Hegelian response to Sidgwick and Mill's utilitarianism. Argues that happiness comes from absence of contradiction between one's ideals and social practices. Occasionally powerful and lucid, but prose too frequently rivals Hegel's turgid style.
October 12, 2024
THE BRITISH IDEALIST DISCUSSES SOME “LEADING QUESTIONS” IN ETHICS
Francis Herbert Bradley (1846-1924) was a British idealist philosopher (e.g., his main work was “Appearance and Reality”). He wrote in the Preface to this 1876 book, “The object of this volume is not the construction of a system of Moral Philosophy. It is very far from attempting either an exhaustive or a systematic treatment of ethical questions… The writer’s object in this work has been mainly critical. He sees that ethical theories rest in the end on preconceptions metaphysical and psychological… These Essays are a critical discussion of some leading questions in Ethics…”
He says in the first essay, “What then is the end which we do set before us? It is a threefold undertaking: to ascertain first, if possible, what it is that… the vulgar mean when they talk of being responsible; to ask, in the second place, whether either of the doctrines of Freedom and Necessity … agrees with their notions; and, in case they do not agree, lastly to inquire in what points or respects they are incompatible with them.” (Pg. 1)
He summarizes, “Our result so far is this: we have seen what punishment is for the vulgar and for the Determinist respectively; and to see that is to see that the two are altogether incompatible; and so in like manner the responsibilities, which correspond to them, are not the same. And our conclusion must be, that neither the one nor the other of our ‘two great philosophical modes of thought’, however excellent they may (or may not) be as philosophies, each by itself and the one against the other, does in any way theoretically express the moral notions of the vulgar mind, or fail in some points to contradict them utterly.” (Pg. 32-33)
He explains, “What remains is to point out the most general expression for the end in itself, the ultimate practical ‘why’; and that we find in the word self-realization… How can it be proved that self-realization is the end?... let us frankly confess that, properly speaking, we have no such views to develop, and therefore we cannot PROVE our thesis. All that we can do is partially to explain it, and try to render it plausible.” (Pg. 64-65)
He suggests, “If I am asked why I am to be moral, I can say no more than this, that what I can not doubt is my own being now, and that, since in that being is involved a self, which is to be here and now, and yet in this here and now is not, I therefore can not doubt that there is an end which I am to make real; and morality, if not equivalent to, is at all events included in this making real of myself.” (Pg. 84)
He rejects Hedonism [“the seeking happiness in pleasure”]: “the Hedonist knows that happiness is a whole. How, then, if pleasures make no system, if they are a number of perishing particulars, can the whole that is sought be found in them? It is the old question, how find the universal in mere particulars? And the answer is the old answer, In their sum. The self is to be found, happiness is to be realized, in the sum of the movements of the feeling self.” (Pg. 96-97) Later, he adds, “If you are to prefer a higher pleasure to a lower without reference to quantity… you can not get any result… And what are the higher pleasures? We find higher pleasures means nothing but the pleasure which those who have experienced both it and others do as a fact choose in preference. Higher then… has no meaning at all, unless we go to something OUTSIDE pleasure… But, if we go outside pleasure, not only have we given up the greatest amount theory, but we have thrown over Hedonism altogether.” (Pg. 119-120)
He suggests, “my moral self is not simply mine; it is not an inner which belongs simply to me; and further, it is not a mere inner at all, but it is the soul which animates the body and lives in it, and would not be the soul if it had not a body and ITS body. The objective organism, the systematized moral world, is the reality of the moral will; my duties on the inside answer to due functions on the outside.” (Pg. 180)
He asserts, “What is duty? It is simply the other side of right… It is the relation of the particular to the universal, with the emphasis on the particular. It is MY will in its affirmative relation to the objective will. Right is the universal, existing for thought alone or also carried out… It implies the consciousness… of the relation of my will to the universal as the right… Right is the universal will implying particular will. It is the objective side implying a subjective side.” (Pg. 208)
He states, “Reflection on morality leads us beyond it. It leads us, in short, to see the necessity of a religious point of view… Morality issues in religion… our object is to show that religion… does give us what morality does not give; and our method is simply… to point to the facts of the religious consciousness… We are to take the religious consciousness as an existing fact, and to take it as we find it now in the modern Christian mind, whether the mind recognizes it or whether it does not.” (Pg. 314) He continues, “In the very essence of the religious consciousness we fine the relation of our WILL to the real ideal self. We find ourselves… against the object as the real ideal will, which is not ourselves, and which stands to us in such a way that. though real, it is to be realized, because it is all and the whole reality.” (Pg. 320)
He contends, “in the object the reconciliation of the divine and human is real… Yes, mine is there if only I can take hold of it, if only I can make it my own; but how…. can the human-divine ideal ever be my will?... You must believe that you too really are one with the divine, and must act as it you believed it. In short, you must be justified not by works but solely by faith. This doctrine, which Protestantism, to its eternal glory, has made its own and sealed with its blood, is the very centre of Christianity…” (Pg. 325) But he also insists, “We maintain that neither church-going, meditation, nor prayer, except so far as it reacts on practice and subserves that, is religious at all.” (Pg. 337) But also, “Neither against the clergy, nor the sacraments, nor private devotion am I saying one word… It is the abuse, and the excess of them, against which we have to protest.” (Pg. 340)
Bradley’s philosophy is far from the philosophical “mainstream” today; but for those interested in metaphysical philosophies such as his, this book will likely be of some interest.
Francis Herbert Bradley (1846-1924) was a British idealist philosopher (e.g., his main work was “Appearance and Reality”). He wrote in the Preface to this 1876 book, “The object of this volume is not the construction of a system of Moral Philosophy. It is very far from attempting either an exhaustive or a systematic treatment of ethical questions… The writer’s object in this work has been mainly critical. He sees that ethical theories rest in the end on preconceptions metaphysical and psychological… These Essays are a critical discussion of some leading questions in Ethics…”
He says in the first essay, “What then is the end which we do set before us? It is a threefold undertaking: to ascertain first, if possible, what it is that… the vulgar mean when they talk of being responsible; to ask, in the second place, whether either of the doctrines of Freedom and Necessity … agrees with their notions; and, in case they do not agree, lastly to inquire in what points or respects they are incompatible with them.” (Pg. 1)
He summarizes, “Our result so far is this: we have seen what punishment is for the vulgar and for the Determinist respectively; and to see that is to see that the two are altogether incompatible; and so in like manner the responsibilities, which correspond to them, are not the same. And our conclusion must be, that neither the one nor the other of our ‘two great philosophical modes of thought’, however excellent they may (or may not) be as philosophies, each by itself and the one against the other, does in any way theoretically express the moral notions of the vulgar mind, or fail in some points to contradict them utterly.” (Pg. 32-33)
He explains, “What remains is to point out the most general expression for the end in itself, the ultimate practical ‘why’; and that we find in the word self-realization… How can it be proved that self-realization is the end?... let us frankly confess that, properly speaking, we have no such views to develop, and therefore we cannot PROVE our thesis. All that we can do is partially to explain it, and try to render it plausible.” (Pg. 64-65)
He suggests, “If I am asked why I am to be moral, I can say no more than this, that what I can not doubt is my own being now, and that, since in that being is involved a self, which is to be here and now, and yet in this here and now is not, I therefore can not doubt that there is an end which I am to make real; and morality, if not equivalent to, is at all events included in this making real of myself.” (Pg. 84)
He rejects Hedonism [“the seeking happiness in pleasure”]: “the Hedonist knows that happiness is a whole. How, then, if pleasures make no system, if they are a number of perishing particulars, can the whole that is sought be found in them? It is the old question, how find the universal in mere particulars? And the answer is the old answer, In their sum. The self is to be found, happiness is to be realized, in the sum of the movements of the feeling self.” (Pg. 96-97) Later, he adds, “If you are to prefer a higher pleasure to a lower without reference to quantity… you can not get any result… And what are the higher pleasures? We find higher pleasures means nothing but the pleasure which those who have experienced both it and others do as a fact choose in preference. Higher then… has no meaning at all, unless we go to something OUTSIDE pleasure… But, if we go outside pleasure, not only have we given up the greatest amount theory, but we have thrown over Hedonism altogether.” (Pg. 119-120)
He suggests, “my moral self is not simply mine; it is not an inner which belongs simply to me; and further, it is not a mere inner at all, but it is the soul which animates the body and lives in it, and would not be the soul if it had not a body and ITS body. The objective organism, the systematized moral world, is the reality of the moral will; my duties on the inside answer to due functions on the outside.” (Pg. 180)
He asserts, “What is duty? It is simply the other side of right… It is the relation of the particular to the universal, with the emphasis on the particular. It is MY will in its affirmative relation to the objective will. Right is the universal, existing for thought alone or also carried out… It implies the consciousness… of the relation of my will to the universal as the right… Right is the universal will implying particular will. It is the objective side implying a subjective side.” (Pg. 208)
He states, “Reflection on morality leads us beyond it. It leads us, in short, to see the necessity of a religious point of view… Morality issues in religion… our object is to show that religion… does give us what morality does not give; and our method is simply… to point to the facts of the religious consciousness… We are to take the religious consciousness as an existing fact, and to take it as we find it now in the modern Christian mind, whether the mind recognizes it or whether it does not.” (Pg. 314) He continues, “In the very essence of the religious consciousness we fine the relation of our WILL to the real ideal self. We find ourselves… against the object as the real ideal will, which is not ourselves, and which stands to us in such a way that. though real, it is to be realized, because it is all and the whole reality.” (Pg. 320)
He contends, “in the object the reconciliation of the divine and human is real… Yes, mine is there if only I can take hold of it, if only I can make it my own; but how…. can the human-divine ideal ever be my will?... You must believe that you too really are one with the divine, and must act as it you believed it. In short, you must be justified not by works but solely by faith. This doctrine, which Protestantism, to its eternal glory, has made its own and sealed with its blood, is the very centre of Christianity…” (Pg. 325) But he also insists, “We maintain that neither church-going, meditation, nor prayer, except so far as it reacts on practice and subserves that, is religious at all.” (Pg. 337) But also, “Neither against the clergy, nor the sacraments, nor private devotion am I saying one word… It is the abuse, and the excess of them, against which we have to protest.” (Pg. 340)
Bradley’s philosophy is far from the philosophical “mainstream” today; but for those interested in metaphysical philosophies such as his, this book will likely be of some interest.
June 23, 2016
Essential reading for anyone who thinks they think seriously about ethics. The chapter on Pleasure is justifiably famous. The chapter on My Station and Its Duties is too, but requires the supplementation of the later chapters to be rightly understood.
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