THE PHENOMENOLOGY OF MORAL EXPERIENCE.
By Maurice Mandelbaum '29.Glencoe, Illinois: The Free Press, 1955.338 pp. $5.00.
I have often suspected that many writers on the moral life seek to raise their works to heights of importance by contriving to give the impression that, if the world does not heed their advice, civilization will utterly collapse. It is refreshing to find an author who not only admits but rejoices that the quality of man's moral consciousness does not depend upon the advance of philosophic ethics, (p. 42) Professor Mandelbaum, who currently chairs the Department of Philosophy at Dartmouth, has written on the moral life with fine sensitivity and with penetrating human wisdom. Though he declines, as I have suggested, the role of the savior of man's moral nature, he has written a serious and scholarly work which will contribute to the constantly recurring task of seeking to understand our moral life.
Whatever theory one might espouse concerning the ultimate foundations of morality, he may learn much from this volume. One reason for this is that, as the word "phenomenology" in the title suggests, the author remains at all times in close contact with ordinary moral experience. His method is to begin with "a direct examination of the data of men's moral consciousness," in contrast to an approach which seeks to solve the problems of ethics on the basis of hypotheses drawn from other fields, (pp. 30-31) On the one hand, Professor Mandelbaum is able to do justice to the immense variety of moral situations and judgments. On the other hand, he is able to relate them as members of one genus by means of his well-defended and documented argument that all moral judgments, of whatever kind, "are grounded in our apprehension of relations of fittingness or unfittingness between the responses of a human being and the demands which inhere in the situation by which he is faced." (p. 181)
Perhaps the most widespread appeal of the book will consist in its fresh approach to the thorny issue of ethical norms. Is there a norm tor conduct which is universal? The author suggests that absolutism has had its appeal in the unquestionable fact that, when we make a moral judgment, we do believe that we are responding to an objective demand which is independent of our personal desires. On the other hand, relativism appears to be strengthened by the persistence of what appear to be genuine moral disagreements in spite of all attempts to win agreement. The author's position differs from both traditional absolutism and traditional relativism. While he denies that any universal contentual norm for human conduct can be established, he makes a strong case for the view that there are universal canons by which the validity of moral judgments may be estimated. (Ch. 6)
