What I Believe

What I Believe by Bertrand Russell

Bertrand Russell argues that man belongs wholly to Nature: human bodies and thoughts depend on physical organization, and there is no scientific basis for believing that a personal mind survives the destruction of the brain at death. God and immortality may be imagined, but they lie outside probable knowledge. Religion springs chiefly from fear of nature and death, offering comforting myths of providence and eternal life. Russell rejects such consolation, maintaining that happiness, thought, and love retain their worth even though they end. He separates the philosophy of nature from the philosophy of value. Nature is indifferent to human hopes and is neither good nor bad; it must not be distorted into a human-centred cosmic optimism or pessimism. Yet human desires create value. In the realm of value, people are entitled to determine the good life rather than submit to Nature or God. Russell defines the good life as one inspired by love and guided by knowledge. Love includes delight in what is beautiful, benevolence toward others, and the understanding needed to escape loneliness and promote another’s happiness. It cannot be extended equally to every being, since instinct and selective delight have legitimate claims, but it should seek harmony rather than conflict. Knowledge supplies the means to achieve desired ends, while love supplies the motive to seek such knowledge for human benefit. Neither love without knowledge nor knowledge without love can produce good results: ignorant piety can spread disease, while knowledge used without benevolence can bring destruction. Russell denies that ethical knowledge or absolute moral duties exist. Conduct is judged by its probable consequences in satisfying or thwarting desires. Moral approval and disapproval influence desire, but traditional rules often operate independently of their actual effects. Prudence is part of morality because it helps a person secure greater satisfaction over time, but it is insufficient where desires conflict between people. Law and social censure can impose an external peace through punishment, yet the better method is to change desires so that one person’s success can coexist with another’s. Love is superior to hatred because love joins fortunes while hatred makes each person’s gain another’s loss. Russell attacks traditional morality as a mixture of utility and superstition, with superstition dominant. Religious ideas of sin forbid acts because they are supposedly displeasing to God rather than because they cause harm. He argues that this produces needless cruelty, especially in sexual matters. Stigma against children of unmarried parents, opposition to birth-control, ignorance about sex, restrictions on women teachers, harsh divorce laws, and criminal penalties for private sexual conduct all inflict suffering without serving human welfare. He advocates sex education, mutual inclination and liberty, birth-control, knowledge of venereal disease, and the principle that children should be born only when they can receive health, care, and good surroundings. He similarly rejects nationalism, which limits concern to compatriots and contradicts love and enlightened self-interest. Criminals should not be treated as wicked beings who deserve suffering, but as public dangers to be prevented and cured with the least necessary harm. Punishment justified by vindictive moral indignation is cruelty; education and kindness should be preferred when effective. The religious ideal of individual salvation is inadequate because the good life depends on social conditions: education, health, income, useful work, friendship, knowledge, and political arrangements. A person cannot genuinely flourish independently of society. Aristocratic societies may foster art or friendship, but cannot sustain full benevolence when comfort rests on slavery, exploitation, or indifference to others’ suffering. Nor can sudden conversion or revolution create a good world. Improvement must be gradual, through intelligence, self-control, sympathy, early training, and educational experiment. Russell sees ignorance and malevolent desire as the main causes of harmful action. Malevolence is nourished by fear, insecurity, envy, disappointment, and life-and-death competition. A scientific morality should reduce fear by increasing universal security, health, justice, and courage. Security cannot be built by one group oppressing another; only recognition of equal human claims can reduce terror. Courage must be democratized and expanded beyond battle to include resistance to poverty, ridicule, herd hostility, panic, and irrational rage. Envy is best reduced by making lives fuller and by encouraging common enterprises rather than destructive competition. Science could greatly increase happiness by improving health, intelligence, artistic capacity, benevolence, and the harmony of human desires, if used wisely. Appeals to “nature” are often merely attachments to childhood custom. Physical nature should be studied and used for human ends, with experimental caution; artificial practices are good when they satisfy human desires without harm. Human impulses should likewise have free play unless destructive, rather than being crushed by authority, economic necessity, or ascetic rules. The final hope is that science, guided by humane desires, may enable future generations to possess knowledge, self-control, and characters fitted for harmony, allowing humanity to master its passions and attain freedom.

By Bertrand Russell · First published 1925 · Genre: Philosophical Essay, Ethics, Secular Humanism · 5 chapters · 13,628 words

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Man is a part of Nature, not something contrasted with Nature. His thoughts and his bodily movements follow the same laws that describe the motions of stars and atoms. The physical world is large compared with Man――larger than it was thought to be in Dante's time, but not so large as it seemed a hundred years ago. Both upward and downward, both in the large and in the small, science seems to be reaching limits. It is thought that the universe is of finite extent in space, and that light could travel round it in a few hundred millions of years. It is thought that matter consists of electrons and protons, which are of finite size, and of which there are only a finite number in the world. Probably their changes are not continuous, as used to be thought, but proceed by jerks, which are never smaller than a certain minimum jerk. The laws of these changes can apparently be summed up in a small number of very general principles, which determine the past and the future of the world when any small section of its history is known.

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philosophy · ethics · rationalism · skepticism · humanism · secularism · religion · morality · science · reason · individualism · social criticism

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