If what I have been saying is in the main correct, it follows that the methods used by a moral philosopher must be entirely different from the methods used by the natural and social scientists for the sake of introducing order into the complex phenomena with which they respectively deal. In no illuminating sense can it be maintained that there is in principle, even if we have not been able to discover it, a moral theory that can be directly applied to practice. The ordinary methods of deduction are inapplicable. I here take for granted, because I have not time to discuss their assumptions, that scientists who think they have found the all-sufficient principles of ethics in the laws of biological evolution are sheerly mistaken. Moral philosophy, I repeat, is not a science.
What method, then, can we use? None that has been labelled or described in detail; no method that a self-respecting pure logician can find joy in pursuing. When I think of the neat, trim, tidy problems of logic and philosophy of science and then turn to these sprawling, tangled problems of moral philosophy I shudder with distaste and long for a logically elegant procedure. Most philosophers, I think, must have felt as I do. How else can we explain the fact that so many of them have been more abstract than was necessary? Some, for example Kant, have tried to find a single ethical principle, a single moral motive; others have sought a single good, for example, the Hedonists; others again have taken refuge in a huge abstraction, for example, self-realization. All alike have failed. Often they have illuminated some problems, partly solved some difficulty, or have laid bare some of the essentials, but always in spite of, not because of, the method they have used. It is a mistake to suppose that pure hearts or clear intellects suffice for the task. Out of the mouths of babes and sucklings we cannot hear any moral truths relevant to our lives, for these innocents do not know what it is like to live. We cannot by merely thinking, however brilliantly, solve any problems at all, for thought alone deals only with abstracta. It is as useless as it is profoundly unphilosophical to formulate moral ideals without taking note of the manner of men we are. Whatever may be the case with politicians making week-end speeches in time of war, philosophers cannot afford to ignore the conditions of the problems set by the situations in which we live.
(L. Susan Stebbing, Men and Moral Principles, L. T. Hobhouse Memorial Trust Lectures No. 13 [London: Humphrey Milford, Oxford University Press, 1944], 18-9, reprinted in Hobhouse Memorial Lectures 1941-1950 [London: Geoffrey Cumberlege, Oxford University Press, 1952] [lecture delivered on 12 May 1943] [italics in original])
