Bernard Shaw's Remarkable Religion: A Faith That Fits the Facts

The Will and Its Responsibilities 59
it on her own; she quails before the act of saying “I did it because I wanted
to do it.” Her failure is the failure to take full responsibility for her actions.
The battle of ideals is at heart a battle between different expressions of the
will; only when it is fought honestly, when each appeals to no higher authority
than the promptings of his own soul, will spiritual growth proceed
at its proper pace. The charge against all ideals, progressive and retrogressive,
is that they evade responsibility. For a realist, that is sufficient to condemn
them.
An Example of Realist Moral Persuasion
Ideals are pernicious to the realist, even if she acknowledges their necessity
as crutches for crippled souls, because she has no other method of ethical
persuasion than to appeal to an individual’s own unprotected conscience.
Ideals serve more often to shield tender eyes from the glare of conscience
than to protect a higher conscience from outmoded duties. The limited
tools of a moral realist can be seen clearly whenever Shaw undertook to
persuade his readers on an issue that was confined purely to values. There
is no question that moved him more passionately than the humane treatment
of animals, yet he never let his passion move him to idealism; he
remained always a realist. A short time before he died he looked back on a
lifetime of impassioned opposition to vivisection. In characteristic fashion,
he is impelled to point out first of all what one cannot say against vivisection.
It is a mistake to argue that vivisection does not produce useful results.
“I had long discarded this defense, pointing out that even if every
claim made by the vivisectors were completely disproved, some real discoveries
might be made at any moment.” And he was not an enemy of
research. “Progress depends on experiments: without them we can neither
learn anything nor, what is often more important, forget anything. But
experiments, like other human activities, must be lawful and humane.” He
claimed the right, nevertheless, to call the vivisector a “scoundrel.”
The vivisector, I declared, is actually that worst of scoundrels, a
scoundrel on principle; for no thief nor murderer attempts to justify
theft or murder as such and claims not only impunity but respect and
protection for them, whereas the vivisector maintains that knowledge
as such is so supremely sacred that in its pursuit the professional
man of science may commit the most revolting atrocities merely to
satisfy his curiosity. (Shaw on Vivisection 55–56)