It remains to consider how, from the doctrine that affection is the proper object of approbation, we are to deduce moral rules or “natural laws” prescribing or prohibiting outward acts. It is obvious that all actions conducive to the general good will deserve our highest approbation if done from disinterested benevolence; but how if they are not so done? In answering this question, Hutcheson avails himself of the scholastic distinction between “material” and “formal” goodness. “An action,” he says, “ismateriallygood when in fact it tends to the interest of the system, so far as we can judge of its tendency, or to the good of some part consistent with that of the system, whatever were the affections of the agent. An action isformallygood when it flowed from good affection in a just proportion.” On the pivot of this distinction Hutcheson turns round from the point of view of Shaftesbury to that of later utilitarianism. As regards “material” goodness of actions, he adopts explicitly and unreservedly the formula afterwards taken as fundamental by Bentham; holding that “that action is best which procures the greatest happiness for the greatest numbers, and the worst which in a like manner occasions misery.” Accordingly his treatment of external rights and duties, though decidedly inferior in methodical clearness and precision, does not differ in principle from that of Paley or Bentham, except that he lays greater stress on the immediate conduciveness of actions to the happiness of individuals, and more often refers in a merely supplementary or restrictive way to their tendencies in respect of general happiness. It may be noticed, too, that he still accepts the “social compact” as the natural mode of constituting government, and regards the obligations of subjects to civil obedience as normally dependent on a tacit contract; though he is careful to state that consent is not absolutely necessary to the just establishment of beneficent government, nor the source of irrevocable obligation to a pernicious one.
An important step further in political utilitarianism was taken by Hume in hisTreatise on Human Nature(1739). Hume concedes that a compact is the natural means of peacefully instituting a new government, and may therefore be properly regarded as the ground of allegiance to it at theHume.outset; but he urges that, when once it is firmly established the duty of obeying it rests on precisely the same combination of private and general interests as the duty of keeping promises; it is therefore absurd to base the former on the latter. Justice, veracity, fidelity to compacts and to governments, are all co-ordinate; they are all “artificial” virtues, due to civilization, and not belonging to man in his “ruder and more natural” condition; our approbation of all alike is founded on our perception of their useful consequences. It is this last position that constitutes the fundamental difference between Hutcheson’s ethical doctrine and Hume’s.34The former, while accepting utility as the criterion of “material goodness,” had adhered to Shaftesbury’s view that dispositions, not results of action, were the proper object of moral approval; at the same time, while giving to benevolence the first place in his account of personal merit, he had shrunk from the paradox of treating it as the sole virtue, and had added a rather undefined and unexplained train of qualities,—veracity, fortitude, activity, industry, sagacity,—immediately approved in various degrees by the “moral sense” or the “sense of dignity.” This naturally suggested to a mind like Hume’s, anxious to apply the experimental method to psychology, the problem of reducing these different elements of personal merit—or rather our approval of them—to some common principle. The old theory that referred this approval entirely to self-love, is, he holds, easy to disprove by “crucial experiments” on the play of our moral sentiments; rejecting this, he finds the required explanation in the sympathetic pleasure that attends our perception of the conduciveness of virtue to the interests of human beings other than ourselves. He endeavours to establish this inductively by a survey of the qualities, commonly praised as virtues, which he finds to be always either useful or immediately agreeable, either (1) to the virtuous agent himself or (2) to others. In class (2) he includes, besides the Benevolence of Shaftesbury and Hutcheson, the useful virtues, Justice, Veracity and Fidelity to compacts; as well as such immediately agreeable qualities as politeness, wit, modesty and even cleanliness. The most original part of his discussion, however, is concerned with qualities immediately useful to their possessor. The most cynical man of the world, he says, with whatever “sullen incredulity” he may repudiate virtue as a hollow pretence, cannot really refuse his approbation to “discretion, caution, enterprise, industry, frugality, economy, good sense, prudence, discernment”; nor again, to “temperance, sobriety, patience, perseverance, considerateness, secrecy, order, insinuation, address, presence of mind, quickness of conception, facility of expression.” It is evident that the merit of these qualities in our eyes is chiefly due to our perception of their tendency to serve the person possessed of them; so that the cynic in praising them is really exhibiting the unselfish sympathy of which he doubts the existence. Hume admits the difficulty that arises, especially in the case of the “artificial” virtues, such as justice, &c., from the undeniable fact that we praise them and blame their opposites without consciously reflecting on useful or pernicious consequences; but considers that this may be explained as an effect of “education and acquired habits.”35
So far the moral faculty has been considered as contemplative rather than active; and this, indeed, is the point of view from which Hume mainly regards it. If we ask what actual motive we have for virtuous conduct, Hume’s answer is not quite clear. On the one hand, he speaks of moral approbation as derived from “humanity and benevolence,” while expressly recognizing, after Butler, that there is a strictly disinterested element in our benevolent impulses (as also in hunger, thirst, love of fame and other passions). On the other hand, he does not seem to think that moral sentiment or “taste” can “become a motive to action,” except as it “gives pleasure or pain, and thereby constitutes happiness or misery.” It is difficult to make these views quite consistent; but at any rate Hume emphatically maintains that “reasonis no motive to action,” except so far as it “directs the impulse received from appetite or inclination”;and recognizes—in his later treatise at least—no “obligation” to virtue, except that of the agent’s interest or happiness. He attempts, however, to show, in a summary way, that all the duties which his moral theory recommends are also “the true interest of the individual,”—taking into account the importance to his happiness of “peaceful reflection on one’s own conduct.”
But even if we consider the moral consciousness merely as a particular kind of pleasurable emotion, there is an obvious question suggested by Hume’s theory, to which he gives no adequate answer. If the essence of “moral taste” is sympathy with the pleasure of others, why is not this specific feeling excited by other things beside virtue that tend to cause such pleasure? On this point Hume contents himself with the vague remark that “there are a numerous set of passions and sentiments, of which thinking rational beings are by the original constitution of nature the only proper objects.” The truth is, that Hume’s notion of moral approbation was very loose, as is sufficiently shown by the list of “useful and agreeable” qualities which he considers worthy of approbation.36It is therefore hardly surprising that his theory should leave the specific quality of the moral sentiments a fact still needing to be explained. An original and ingenious solution of this problem was offered by his contemporary Adam Smith, in hisTheory of Moral Sentiments(1759).Adam Smith.Without denying the actuality or importance of that sympathetic pleasure in the perceived or inferred effects of virtues and vices he yet holds that the essential part of common moral sentiment is constituted rather by a more direct sympathy with the impulses that prompt to action or expression. The spontaneous play of this sympathy he treats as an original and inexplicable fact of human nature, but he considers that its action is powerfully sustained by the pleasure that each man finds in the accord of his feelings with another’s. By means of this primary element, compounded in various ways, Adam Smith explains all the phenomena of the moral consciousness. He takes first the semi-moral notion of “propriety” or “decorum,” and endeavours to show inductively that our application of this notion to the social behaviour of another is determined by our degree of sympathy with the feeling expressed in such behaviour. Thus the prescriptions of good taste in the expression of feeling may be summed up in the principle, “reduce or raise the expression to that with which spectators will sympathize.” When the effort to restrain feeling is exhibited in a degree which surprises as well as pleases, it excites admiration as a virtue or excellence; such excellences Adam Smith quaintly calls the “awful and respectable,” contrasting them with the “amiable virtues” which consist in the opposite effort to sympathize, when exhibited in a remarkable degree. From the sentiments of propriety and admiration we proceed to the sense of merit and demerit. Here a more complex phenomenon presents itself for analysis; we have to distinguish in the sense of merit—(1) a direct sympathy with the sentiments of the agent, and (2) an indirect sympathy with the gratitude of those who receive the benefit of his actions. In the case of demerit there is a direct antipathy to the feelings of the misdoer, but the chief sentiment excited is sympathy with those injured by the misdeed. The object of this sympathetic resentment, impelling us to punish, is what we call injustice; and thus the remarkable stringency of the obligation to act justly is explained since the recognition of any action as unjust involves the admission that it may be forcibly obstructed or punished. Moral judgments, then, are expressions of the complex normal sympathy of an impartial spectator with the active impulses that prompt to and result from actions. In the case of our own conduct what we call conscience is really sympathy with the feelings of an imaginary impartial spectator.
Adam Smith gives authority to his moral system by saying that “moral principles are justly to be regarded as the laws of the Deity”; but this he never proves. So Hume insists emphatically on the “reality of moral obligation”; but is found to mean no more by this than the real existence of the likes and dislikes that human beings feel for each other’s qualities. The fact is that amid the analysis of feelings aroused by the sentimentalism of Shaftesbury’s school, the fundamental questions “What is right?” and “Why?” had been allowed to drop into the background, and the consequent danger to morality was manifest. The binding force of moral rules becomes evanescent if we admit, with Hutcheson, that the “sense” of them may properly vary from man to man as the palate does; and it seems only another way of putting Hume’s doctrine, that reason is not concerned with the ends of action, to say that the mere existence of a moral sentiment is in itself no reason for obeying it. A reaction, in one form or another, against the tendency to dissolve ethics into psychology was inevitable; since mankind generally could not be so far absorbed by the interest of psychological hypothesis as to forget their need of establishing practical principles. It was obvious, too, that this reaction might take place in either of the two lines of thought, which, having been peacefully allied in Clarke and Cumberland, had become distinctly opposed to each other in Butler and Hutcheson. It might either fall back on the moral principles commonly accepted, and, affirming their objective validity, endeavour to exhibit them as a coherent and complete set of ultimate ethical truths; or it might take the utility or conduciveness to pleasure, to which Hume had referred for the origin of most sentiments, as an ultimate end and standard by which these sentiments might be judged and corrected. The former is the line adopted with substantial agreement by Price, Reid, Stewart and other members of the still existing Intuitional school; the latter method, with considerably more divergence of view and treatment, was employed independently and almost simultaneously by Paley and Bentham in both ethics and politics, and is at the present time widely maintained under the name of Utilitarianism.
Price’sReview of the Chief Questions and Difficulties of Moralswas published in 1757, two years before Adam Smith’s treatise. In regarding moral ideas as derived from the “intuition of truth or immediate discernment of the nature ofPrice.things by the understanding,” Price revives the general view of Cudworth and Clarke; but with several specific differences. Firstly, his conception of “right” and “wrong” as “single ideas” incapable of definition or analysis—the notions “right,” “fit,” “ought,” “duty,” “obligation,” being coincident or identical—at least avoids the confusions into which Clarke and Wollaston had been led by pressing the analogy between ethical and physical truth. Secondly, the emotional element of the moral consciousness, on which attention had been concentrated by Shaftesbury and his followers, though distinctly recognized as accompanying the intellectual intuition, is carefully subordinated to it. While right and wrong, in Price’s view, are “real objective qualities” of actions, moral “beauty and deformity” are subjective ideas; representing feelings which are partly the necessary effects of the perceptions of right and wrong in rational beings as such, partly due to an “implanted sense” or varying emotional susceptibility. Thus, both reason and sense of instinct co-operate in the impulse to virtuous conduct, though the rational element is primary and paramount. Price further follows Butler in distinguishing the perception of merit and demerit in agents as another accompaniment of the perception of right and wrong in actions; the former being, however, only a peculiar species of the latter, since, to perceive merit in any one is to perceive that it is right to reward him. It is to be observed that both Price and Reid are careful to state that the merit of the agent depends entirely on the intention or “formal rightness” of his act; a man is not blameworthy for unintended evil, though he may of course be blamed for any wilful neglect (cf. Arist.,Eth. Nic., iii. 1), which has caused him to be ignorant of his real duty. When we turn to the subject matter of virtue, we find that Price, in comparison with More or Clarke is decidedlylaxer in accepting and stating his ethical first principles; chiefly owing to the new antithesis to the view of Shaftesbury and Hutcheson by which his controversial position is complicated. What Price is specially concerned to show is the existence of ultimate principlesbesidethe principle of universal benevolence. Not that he repudiates the obligation either of rational benevolence or self-love; on the contrary, he takes more pains than Butler to demonstrate the reasonableness of either principle. “There is not anything,” he says, “of which we have more undeniably an intuitive perception, than that it is ‘right to pursue and promote happiness,’ whether for ourselves or for others.” Finally, Price, writing after the demonstration by Shaftesbury and Butler of the actuality of disinterested impulses in human nature, is bolder and clearer than Cudworth or Clarke in insisting that right actions are to be chosen because they are right by virtuous agents as such, even going so far as to lay down that an act loses its moral worth in proportion as it is done from natural inclination.
On this latter point Reid, in hisEssays on the Active Powers of the Human Mind(1788), states a conclusion more in harmony with common sense, only maintaining that “no act can be morally good in which regard for what is rightReid.has notsomeinfluence.” This is partly due to the fact that Reid builds more distinctly than Price on the foundation laid by Butler; especially in his acceptance of that duality of governing principles which we have noticed as a cardinal point in the latter’s doctrine. Reid considers “regard for one’s good on the whole” (Butler’s self-love) and “sense of duty” (Butler’s conscience) as two essentially distinct and co-ordinate rational principles, though naturally often comprehended under the one term, Reason. The rationality of the former principle he takes pains to explain and establish; in opposition to Hume’s doctrine that it is no part of the function of reason to determine the ends which we ought to pursue, or the preference due to one end over another. He urges that the notion of “good37on the whole” is one which only a reasoning being can form, involving as it does abstraction from the objects of all particular desires, and comparison of past and future with present feelings; and maintains that it is a contradiction to suppose a rational being to have the notion of its Good on the Whole without a desire for it, and that such a desire must naturally regulate all particular appetites and passions. It cannot reasonably be subordinated even to the moral faculty; in fact, a man who doubts the coincidence of the two—which on religious grounds we must believe to be complete in a morally governed world—is reduced to the “miserable dilemma whether it is better to be a fool or a knave.” As regards the moral faculty itself, Reid’s statement coincides in the main with Price’s; it is both intellectual and active, not merely perceiving the “rightness” or “moral obligation” of actions (which Reid conceives as a simple unanalysable relation between act and agent), but also impelling the will to the performance of what is seen to be right. Both thinkers hold that this perception of right and wrong in actions is accompanied by a perception of merit and demerit in agents, and also by a specific emotion; but whereas Price conceives this emotion chiefly as pleasure or pain, analogous to that produced in the mind by physical beauty or deformity, Reid regards it chiefly as benevolent affection, esteem and sympathy (or their opposites), for the virtuous (or vicious) agent. This “pleasurable good-will,” when the moral judgment relates to a man’s own actions, becomes “the testimony of a good conscience—the purest and most valuable of all human enjoyments.” Reid is careful to observe that this moral faculty is not “innate” except in germ; it stands in need of “education, training, exercise (for which society is indispensable), and habit,” in order to the attainment of moral truth. He does not with Price object to its being called the “moral sense,” provided we understand by this a source not merely of feelings or notions, but of “ultimate truths.” Here he omits to notice the important question whether the premises of moral reasoning are universal or individual judgments; as to which the use of the term “sense” seems rather to suggest the second alternative. Indeed, he seems himself quite undecided on this question; since, though he generally represents ethical method as deductive, he also speaks of the “original judgment that this action is right and that wrong.”
The truth is that the construction of a scientific method of ethics is a matter of little practical moment to Reid. Thus, though he offers a list of first principles, by deduction from which these common opinions may be confirmed, he does not present it with any claim to completeness. Besides maxims relating to virtue in general,—such as (1) that there is a right and wrong in conduct, but (2) only in voluntary conduct, and that we ought (3) to take pains to learn our duty, and (4) fortify ourselves against temptations to deviate from it—Reid states five fundamental axioms. The first of these is merely the principle of rational self-love, “that we ought to prefer a greater to a lesser good, though more distinct, and a less evil to a greater,”—the mention of which seems rather inconsistent with Reid’s distinct separation of the “moral faculty” from “self-love.” The third is merely the general rule of benevolence stated in the somewhat vague Stoical formula, that “no one is born for himself only.” The fourth, again, is the merely formal principle that “right and wrong must be the same to all in all circumstances,” which belongs equally to all systems of objective morality; while the fifth prescribes the religious duty of “veneration or submission to God.” Thus, the only principle which ever appears to offer definite guidance as to social duty is the second, “that so far as the intention of nature appears in the constitution of man, we ought to act according to that intention,” the vagueness38of which is obvious. (For Reid’s views on moral freedom see A. Bain,Mental Science, pp. 422, seq.)
A similar incompleteness in the statement of moral principles is found if we turn to Reid’s disciple, Dugald Stewart, whosePhilosophy of the Active and Moral Powers of Man(1828) contains the general view of Butler and Reid,Dugald Stewart.and to some extent that of Price,—expounded with more fulness and precision, but without important original additions or modifications. Stewart lays stress on the obligation of justice as distinct from benevolence; but his definition of justice represents it as essentially impartiality,—a virtue which (as was just now said of Reid’s fourth principle) must equally find a place in the utilitarian or any other system that lays down universally applicable rules of morality. Afterwards, however, Stewart distinguishes “integrity or honesty” as a branch of justice concerned with the rights of other men, which form the subject of “natural jurisprudence.” In this department he lays down the moral axiom “that the labourer is entitled to the fruit of his own labour” as the principle on which complete rights of property are founded; maintaining that occupancy alone would only confer a transient right of possession during use. The only other principles which he discusses are veracity and fidelity to promises, gratitude being treated as a natural instinct prompting to a particular kind of just actions.
It will be seen that neither Reid nor Stewart offers more than a very meagre and tentative contribution to that ethical science by which, as they maintain, the received rules of morality may be rationally deduced from self-evidentWhewell.first principles. A more ambitious attempt in the same direction was made by Whewell in hisElements of Morality(1846). Whewell’s general moral view differs from that of his Scottish predecessors chiefly in a point where we may trace the influence of Kant—viz. in his rejection of self-love as an independent rational and governing principle, and his consequent refusal to admit happiness, apart from duty, as a reasonable end forthe individual. The moral reason, thus left in sole supremacy, is represented as enunciating five ultimate principles,—those of benevolence, justice, truth, purity and order. With a little straining these are made to correspond to five chief divisions of Jus,—personal security (benevolence being opposed to the ill-will that commonly causes personal injuries), property, contract, marriage and government; while the first, second and fourth, again, regulate respectively the three chief classes of human motives,—affections, mental desires and appetites. Thus the list, with the addition of two general principles, “earnestness” and “moral purpose,” has a certain air of systematic completeness. When, however, we look closer, we find that the principle of order, or obedience to government, is not seriously intended to imply the political absolutism which it seems to express, and which English common sense emphatically repudiates; while the formula of justice is given in the tautological or perfectly indefinite proposition “that every man ought to have his own.” Whewell, indeed, explains that this latter formula must be practically interpreted by positive law, though he inconsistently speaks as if it supplied a standard for judging laws to be right or wrong. The principle of purity, again, “that the lower parts of our nature ought to be subject to the higher,” merely particularizes that supremacy of reason over non-rational impulses which is involved in the very notion of reasoned morality. Thus, in short, if we ask for a clear and definite fundamental intuition, distinct from regard for happiness, we find really nothing in Whewell’s doctrine except the single rule of veracity (including fidelity to promises); and even of this the axiomatic character becomes evanescent on closer inspection, since it is not maintained that the rule is practically unqualified, but only that it is practically undesirable to formulate its qualifications.
On the whole, it must be admitted that the doctrine of the intuitional school of the 18th and 19th centuries has been developed with less care and consistency than might have been expected, in its statement of the fundamental axiomsIntuitional and utilitarian schools.or intuitively known premises of moral reasoning. And if the controversy which this school has conducted with utilitarianism had turned principally on the determination of the matter of duty, there can be little doubt that it would have been forced into more serious and systematic effort to define precisely and completely the principles and method on which we are to reason deductively to particular rules of conduct.39But in fact the difference between intuitionists and utilitarians as to the method of determining the particulars of the moral code was complicated with a more fundamental disagreement as to the very meaning of “moral obligation.” This Paley and Bentham (after Locke) interpreted as merely the effect on the will of the pleasures or pains attached to the observance or violation of moral rules, combining with this the doctrine of Hutcheson that “general good” or “happiness” is the final end and standard of these rules; while they eliminated all vagueness from the notion of general happiness by defining it to consist in “excess of pleasure over pain”—pleasures and pains being regarded as “differing in nothing but continuance or intensity.” The utilitarian system gained an attractive air of simplicity by thus using a single perfectly clear notion—pleasure and its negative quantity pain—to answer both the fundamental questions of mortals, “What is right?” and “Why should I do it?” But since there is no logical connexion between the answers that have thus come to be considered as one doctrine, this apparent unity and simplicity has really hidden fundamental disagreements, and caused no little confusion in ethical debate.
In Paley’sPrinciples of Moral and Political Philosophy40(1785), the link between general pleasure (the standard) and private pleasure or pain (the motive) is supplied by the conception of divine legislation. To be “obliged”Paley.is to be “urged by a violent motive resulting from the command of another”; in the case of moral obligation, the command proceeds from God, and the motive lies in the expectation of being rewarded and punished after this life. The commands of God are to be ascertained “from scripture and the light of nature combined.” Paley, however, holds that scripture is given less to teach morality than to illustrate it by example and enforce it by new sanctions and greater certainty, and that the light of nature makes it clear that God wills the happiness of his creatures. Hence, his method in deciding moral questions is chiefly that of estimating the tendency of actions to promote or diminish the general happiness. To meet the obvious objections to this method, based on the immediate happiness caused by admitted crimes (such as “knocking a rich villain on the head”), he lays stress on the necessity of general rules in any kind of legislation;41while, by urging the importance of forming and maintaining good habits, he partly evades the difficulty of calculating the consequences of particular actions. In this way the utilitarian method is freed from the subversive tendencies which Butler and others had discerned in it; as used by Paley, it merely explains the current moral and jural distinctions, exhibits the obvious basis of expediency which supports most of the received rules of law and morality and furnishes a simple solution, in harmony with common sense, of some perplexing casuistical questions. Thus (e.g.) “natural rights” become rights of which the general observance would be useful apart from the institution of civil government; as distinguished from the no less binding “adventitious rights,” the utility of which depends upon this institution. Private property is in this sense “natural” from its obvious advantages in encouraginglabour, skill, preservative care; though actual rights of property depend on the general utility of conforming to the law of the land by which they are determined. We observe, however, that Paley’s method is often mixed with reasonings that belong to an alien and older manner of thought; as when he supports the claim of the poor to charity by referring to the intention of mankind “when they agreed to a separation of the common fund,” or when he infers that monogamy is a part of the divine design from the equal numbers of males and females born. In other cases his statement of utilitarian considerations is fragmentary and unmethodical, and tends to degenerate into loose exhortation on rather trite topics.
In unity, consistency and thoroughness of method, Bentham’s utilitarianism has a decided superiority over Paley’s. He considers actions solely in respect of their pleasurable and painful consequences, expected or actual; and heBentham and his school.recognizes the need of making a systematic register of these consequences, free from the influences of common moral opinion, as expressed in the “eulogistic” and “dyslogistic” terms in ordinary use. Further, the effects that he estimates are all of a definite, palpable, empirically ascertainable quality; they are such pleasures and pains as most men feel and all can observe, so that all his political or moral inferences lie open at every point to the test of practical experience. Every one, it would seem, can tell what value he sets on the pleasures of alimentation, sex, the senses generally, wealth, power, curiosity, sympathy, antipathy (malevolence), the goodwill of individuals or of society at large, and on the corresponding pains, as well as the pains of labour and organic disorders;42and can guess the rate at which they are valued by others; therefore if it be once granted that all actions are determined by pleasures and pains, and are to be tried by the same standard, the art of legislation and private conduct is apparently placed on an empirical, basis. Bentham, no doubt, seems to go beyond the limits of experience proper in recognizing “religious” pains and pleasures in his fourfold division of sanctions, side by side with the “physical,” “political,” and “moral” or “social”; but the truth is that he does not seriously take account of them, except in so far as religious hopes and fears are motives actually operating, which therefore admit of being observed and measured as much as any other motives. He does not himself use the will of an omnipotent and benevolent being as a means of logically connecting individual and general happiness. He thus undoubtedly simplifies his system, and avoids the doubtful inferences from nature and Scripture in which Paley’s position is involved; but this gain is dearly purchased. For in answer to the question that immediately arises, How then are the sanctions of the moral rules which it will most conduce to the general happiness for men to observe, shown to be always adequate in the case of all the individuals whose observance is required? he is obliged to admit that “the only interests which a man is at all times sure to find adequate motives for consulting are his own.” Indeed, in many parts of his work, in the department of legislative and constitutional theory, it is rather assumed that the interests of some men will continually conflict with those of their fellows, unless we alter the balance of prudential calculation by a readjustment of penalties. But on this assumption a system of private conduct on utilitarian principles cannot be constructed until legislative and constitutional reform has been perfected. And, in fact, “private ethics,” as conceived by Bentham, does not exactly expound such a system; but rather exhibits the coincidence,so far as it extends, between private and general happiness, in that part of each man’s conduct that lies beyond the range of useful legislation. It was not his place, as a practical philanthropist, to dwell on the defects in this coincidence;43and since what men generally expect from a moralist is a completely reasoned account of what they ought to do, it is not surprising that some of Bentham’s disciples should have either ignored or endeavoured to supply the gap in his system. One section of the school even maintained it to be a cardinal doctrine of utilitarianism that a man always gains his own greatest happiness by promoting that of others; another section, represented by John Austin, apparently returned to Paley’s position, and treated utilitarian morality44as a code of divine legislation; others, with Grote, are content to abate the severity of the claims made by “general happiness” on the individual, and to consider utilitarian duty as practically limited by reciprocity; while on the opposite side an unqualified subordination of private to general happiness was advocated by J.S. Mill, who did more than any other member of the school to spread and popularize utilitarianism in ethics and politics.
The fact is that there are several different ways in which a utilitarian system of morality may be used, without deciding whether the sanctions attached to it are always adequate. (1) It may be presented as practicalVarieties of utilitarian doctrine.guidance to all who choose “general good” as their ultimate end, whether they do so on religious grounds, or through the predominance in their minds of impartial sympathy, or because their conscience acts in harmony with utilitarian principles, or for any combination of these or any other reasons; or (2) it may be offered as a code to be obeyed not absolutely, but only so far as the coincidence of private and general interest may in any case be judged to extend; or again (3) it may be proposed as a standard by which men may reasonably agree to praise and blame the conduct of others, even though they may not always think fit to act on it. We may regard morality as a kind of supplementary legislation, supported by public opinion, which we may expect the public, when duly enlightened, to frame in accordance with the public interest. Still, even from this point of view, which is that of the legislator or social reformer rather than the moral philosopher, our code of duty must be greatly influenced by our estimate of the degrees in which men are normally influenced by self-regard (in its ordinary sense of regard for interests not sympathetic) and by sympathy or benevolence, and of the range within which sympathy may be expected to be generally effective. Thus, for example, the moral standard for which a utilitarian will reasonably endeavour to gain the support of public opinion must be essentially different in quality, according as he holds with Bentham that nothing but self-regard will “serve for diet,” though “for a dessert benevolence is a veryJ.S. Mill.valuable addition”; or with J.S. Mill that disinterested public spirit should be the prominent motive in the performance of all socially useful work, and that even hygienic precepts should be inculcated, not chiefly on grounds of prudence, but because “by squandering our health we disable ourselves from rendering services to our fellow-creatures.”
Not less important is the interval that separates Bentham’s polemical attitude towards the moral sense from Mill’s conciliatory position, that “the mind is not in a state conformable to utility unless it loves virtue as a thing desirable in itself.” Such love of virtue Mill holds to be in a sense natural, though not an ultimate and inexplicable fact of human nature; it is to be explained by the “Law of Association” of feelings and ideas, through which objects originally desired as a means to some further end come to be directly pleasant or desirable. Thus, the miser first sought money as a means to comfort, but ends by sacrificing comfort to money; and similarly though the first promptings to justice (or any other virtue) spring from the non-moral pleasures gained or pains avoided by it, through the link formed by repeated virtuous acts the performance of them ultimately comes to have that immediate satisfaction attached to it which we distinguished as moral. Indeed, the acquired tendency to virtuous conduct may become so strong that the habit of willing it may continue, “even when the reward whichthe virtuous man receives from the consciousness of well-doing is anything but an equivalent for the sufferings he undergoes or the wishes he may have to renounce.” It is thus that the before-mentioned self-sacrifice of the moral hero is conceived by Mill to be possible and actual. The moral sentiments, on this view, are not phases of self-love as Hobbes held; nor can they be directly identified with sympathy, either in Hume’s way or in Adam Smith’s; in fact, though apparently simple they are really derived in a complex manner from self-love and sympathy combined with more primitive impulses. Justice (e.g.) is regarded by Mill as essentially resentment moralized by enlarged sympathy and intelligent self-interest; what we mean by injustice is harm done to an assignable individual by a breach of some rule for which we desire the violator to be punished, for the sake both of the person injured and of society at large, including ourselves. As regards moral sentiments generally, the view suggested by Mill is more definitely given by the chief living representative of the associationist school, Alexander Bain; by whom the distinctive characteristics of conscience are traced to “education under government or authority,” though prudence, disinterested sympathy and other emotions combine to swell the mass of feeling vaguely denoted by the term moral. The combination of antecedents is somewhat differently given by different writers; but all agree in representing the conscience of any individual as naturally correlated to the interests of the community of which he is a member, and thus a natural ally in enforcing utilitarian rules, or even a valuable guide when utilitarian calculations are difficult and uncertain.
This substitution of hypothetical history for direct analysis of the moral sense is really older than the utilitarianism of Paley and Bentham, which it has so profoundly modified. The effects of association in modifying mental phenomenaAssociation and evolution.were noticed by Locke, and made a cardinal point in the metaphysic of Hume; who also referred to the principle slightly in his account of justice and other “artificial” virtues. Some years earlier, Gay,45admitting Hutcheson’s proof of the actual disinterestedness of moral and benevolent impulses, had maintained that these (like the desires of knowledge or fame, the delight of reading, hunting and planting, &c.) were derived from self-love by “the power of association.” But a thorough and systematic application of the principle to ethical psychology is first found in Hartley’sObservations on Man(1748). Hartley, too, was the first to conceive association as producing, instead of mere cohesion of mental phenomena, a quasi-chemical combination of these into a compound apparently different from its elements. He shows elaborately how the pleasures and pains of “imagination, ambition, self-interest, sympathy, theopathy, and the moral sense” are developed out of the elementary pleasures and pains of sensation; by the coalescence into really complex but apparently single ideas of the “miniatures” or faint feelings which the repetition of sensations contemporaneously or in immediate succession tends to produce in cohering groups. His theory assumes the correspondence of mind and body, and is appliedpari passuto the formation of ideas from sensations, and of “compound vibratiuncules in the medullary substance” from the original vibrations that arise in the organ of sense.46The same general view was afterwards developed with much vigour and clearness on the psychical side alone by James Mill in hisAnalysis of the Human Mind. The whole theory has been persistently controverted by writers of the intuitional school, who (unlike Hartley) have usually thought that this derivation of moral sentiments from more primitive feelings would be detrimental to the authority of the former. The chief argument against this theory has been based on the early period at which these sentiments are manifested by children, which hardly allows time for association to produce the effects ascribed to it. This argument has been met in recent times by the application to mind of the physiological theory of heredity, according to which changes produced in the mind (brain) of a parent, by association of ideas or otherwise, tend to be inherited by his offspring; so that the development of the moral sense or any other faculty or susceptibility of existing man may be hypothetically carried back into the prehistoric life of the human race, without any change in the manner of derivation supposed. At present, however, the theory of heredity is usually held in conjunction with Darwin’s theory of natural selection; according to which different kinds of living things in the course of a series of generations come gradually to be endowed with organs, faculties and habits tending to the preservation of the individual or species under the conditions of life in which it is placed. Thus we have a new zoological factor in the history of the moral sentiments; which, though in no way opposed to the older psychological theory of their formation through coalescence of more primitive feelings, must yet be conceived as controlling and modifying the effects of the law of association by preventing the formation of sentiments other than those tending to the preservation of human life. The influence of the Darwinian theory, moreover, has extended from historical psychology to ethics, tending to substitute “preservation of the race under its conditions of existence” for “happiness” as the ultimate end and standard of virtue.
Before concluding this sketch of the development of English ethical thought from Hobbes to the thinkers of the 19th century, it will be well to notice briefly the views held by different moralists on the question of free-will,—so far, that is, asFree-will.they have been put forward as ethically important. We must first distinguish three meanings in which “freedom” is attributed to the will or “inner self” of a human being, viz. (1) the general power of choosing among different alternatives of action without a motive, or against the resultant force of conflicting motives; (2) the power of choice between the promptings of reason and those of appetites (or other non-rational impulses) when the latter conflict with reason; (3) merely the quality of acting rationally in spite of conflicting impulses, however strong, thenon posse peccareof the medieval theologians.47It is obvious that “freedom” in this third sense is in no way incompatible with complete determination; and, indeed, is rather an ideal state after which the moral agent ought to aspire than a property which the human will can be said to possess. In the first sense, again, as distinct from the second, the assertion of “freedom” has no ethical significance, except in so far as it introduces a general uncertainty into all our inferences respecting human conduct. Even in the second sense it hardly seems that the freedom of a man’s will can be an element to be considered in examining what it is right or best for him to do (though of course the clearest convictions of duty will be fruitless if a man has not sufficient self-control to enable him to act on them); it is rather when we ask whether it is just to punish him for wrong-doing that it seems important to know whether he could have done otherwise. But in spite of the strong interest taken in the theological aspect of this question by the Protestant divines of the 17th century, it does not appear that English moralists from Hobbes to Hume laid any stress on the relation of free-will either to duty generally or to justice in particular. Neither the doctrine of Hobbes, that deliberation is a mere alternation of competing desires, voluntary action immediately following the “last appetite,” nor the hardly less decided Determinism of Locke, who held that the will is always moved by the greatest present uneasiness, appeared to either author to require any reconciliation with the belief in human responsibility. Even in Clarke’s system, where Indeterminism is no doubt a cardinal notion, its importance is metaphysicalrather than ethical; Clarke’s view being that the apparently arbitrary particularity in the constitution of the cosmos is really only explicable by reference to creative free-will. In the ethical discussion of Shaftesbury and sentimental moralists generally this question drops naturally out of sight; and the cautious Butler tries to exclude its perplexities as far as possible from the philosophy of practice. But since the reaction, led by Price and Reid, against the manner of philosophizing that had culminated in Hume, free-will has been generally maintained by the intuitional school to be an essential point of ethics; and, in fact, it is naturally connected with the judgment of good and ill desert which these writers give as an essential element in their analysis of the moral consciousness. An irresistible motive, it is forcibly said, palliates or takes away guilt; no one can blame himself for yielding to necessity, and no one can properly be punished for what he could not have prevented. In answer to this argument some necessarians have admitted that punishment can be legitimate only if it be beneficial to the person punished; others, again, have held that the lawful use of force is to restrain lawless force; but most of those who reject free-will defend punishment on the ground of its utility in deterring others from crime, as well as in correcting or restraining the criminal on whom it falls.
In the preceding sketch we have traced the course of English ethical speculation without bringing it into relation with contemporary European thought on the same subject. And in fact almost all the systems described, fromFrench influence on English ethics.Hobbes downward, have been of essentially native growth, showing hardly any traces of foreign influence. We may observe that ethics is the only department in which this result appears. The physics and psychology of Descartes were much studied in England, and his metaphysical system was certainly the most important antecedent of Locke’s; but Descartes hardly touched ethics proper. So again the controversy that Clarke conducted with Spinoza, and afterwards with Leibnitz, was entirely confined to the metaphysical region. Catholic France was a school for Englishmen in many subjects, but not in morality; the great struggle between Jansenists and Jesuits had a very remote interest for them. It was not till near the close of the 18th century that the impress of the French revolutionary philosophy began to manifest itself in England; and even then its influence was mostly political rather than ethical. It is striking to observe how even in the case of writers such as Godwin, who were most powerfully affected by the French political movement, the moral basis, on which the new social order of rational and equal freedom is constructed, is almost entirely of native origin; even when the tone and spirit are French, the forms of thought and manner of reasoning are still purely English. In the derivation of Benthamism alone—which, it may be observed, first becomes widely known in the French paraphrase of Dumont—an important element is suppliedHelvetius.by the works of a French writer, Helvetius; as Bentham himself was fully conscious. It was from Helvetius that he learnt that, men being universally and solely governed by self-love, the so-called moral judgments are really the common judgments of any society as to its common interests; that it is therefore futile on the one hand to propose any standard of virtue, except that of conduciveness to general happiness, and on the other hand useless merely to lecture men on duty and scold them for vice; that the moralist’s proper function is rather to exhibit the coincidence of virtue with private happiness; that, accordingly, though nature has bound men’s interests together in many ways, and education by developing sympathy and the habit of mutual help may much extend the connexion, still the most effective moralist is the legislator, who by acting on self-love through legal sanctions may mould human conduct as he chooses. These few simple doctrines give the ground plan of Bentham’s indefatigable and lifelong labours.
So again, in the modified Benthamism which the persuasive exposition of J.S. Mill afterwards made popular in England, the influence of Auguste Comte (Philosophie positive, 1829-1842, andSystème de politique positive, 1851-1854) appears as the chiefComte.modifying element. This influence, so far as it has affected moral as distinct from political speculation, has been exercised primarily through the general conception of human progress; which, in Comte’s view, consists in the ever-growing preponderance of the distinctively human attributes over the purely animal, social feelings being ranked highest among human attributes, and highest of all the most universalized phase of human affection, the devotion to humanity as a whole. Accordingly, it is the development of benevolence in man, and of the habit of “living for others,” which Comte takes as the ultimate aim and standard of practice, rather than the mere increase of happiness. He holds, indeed, that the two are inseparable, and that the morealtruisticany man’s sentiments and habits of action can be made, the greater will be the happiness enjoyed by himself as well as by others. But he does not seriously trouble himself to argue with egoism, or to weigh carefully the amount of happiness that might be generally attained by the satisfaction of egoistic propensities duly regulated; a supreme unquestioning self-devotion, in which all personal calculations are suppressed, is an essential feature of his moral ideal. Such a view is almost diametrically opposed to Bentham’s conception of normal human existence; the newer utilitarianism of Mill represents an endeavour to find the right middle path between the two extremes.
It is to be observed that, in Comte’s view, devotion to humanity is the principle not merely of morality, but of religion;i.e.it should not merely be practically predominant, but should be manifested and sustained by regular and partly symbolical forms of expression, private and public. This side of Comte’s system, however, and the details of his ideal reconstruction of society, in which this religion plays an important part, have had but little influence either in England or elsewhere. It is more important to notice the general effect of his philosophy on the method of determining the particulars of morality as well as of law (as it ought to be). In the utilitarianism of Paley and Bentham the proper rules of conduct, moral and legal, are determined by comparing the imaginary consequences of different modes of regulation on men and women, conceived as specimens of a substantially uniform and unchanging type. It is true that Bentham expressly recognizes the varying influences of climate, race, religion, government, as considerations which it is important for the legislator to take into account; but his own work of social construction was almost entirely independent of such considerations, and his school generally appear to have been convinced of their competence to solve all important ethical and political questions for human beings of all ages and countries, without regard to their specific differences. But in the Comtian conception of social science, of which ethics and politics are the practical application, the knowledge of the laws of the evolution of society is of fundamental and continually increasing importance; humanity is regarded as having passed through a series of stages, in each of which a somewhat different set of laws and institutions, customs and habits, is normal and appropriate. Thus present man is a being that can only be understood through a knowledge of his past history; and any effort to construct for him a moral and political ideal, by a purely abstract and unhistorical method, must necessarily be futile; whatever modifications may at any time be desirable in positive law and morality can only be determined by the aid of “social dynamics.” This view extends far beyond the limits of Comte’s special school or sect, and has been widely accepted.
When we turn from French philosophy to German, we find the influence of the latter on English ethical thought almost insignificant until a very recent period. In the 17th century, indeed, the treatise of Pufendorf on theLaw of Nature, in which the general view of Grotius was restatedGerman influence on English ethics.with modifications, partly designed to effect a compromise with the doctrine of Hobbes, seems to have been a good deal read at Oxford and elsewhere. Locke includes it among the books necessary to the complete education of a gentleman. But the subsequent development of the theory of conduct in Germany dropped almost entirely out of the cognizance ofEnglishmen; even the long dominant system of Wolff (d. 1754) was hardly known. Nor had Kant any serious influence in England until the second quarter of the 19th century. We find, however, distinct traces of Kantian influence in Whewell and other writers of the intuitional school, and at a later date it became so strong that its importance on subsequent ethical thought can scarcely be over-estimated.
The English moralist with whom Kant has most affinity is Price; in fact, Kantism, in the ethical thought of modern Europe, holds a place somewhat analogous to that formerly occupied by the teaching of Price and ReidKant.among English moralists. Kant, like Price and Reid, holds that man as a rational being is unconditionally bound to conform to a certain rule of right, or “categorical imperative” of reason. Like Price he holds that an action is not good unless done from a good motive, and that this motive must be essentially different from natural inclination of any kind; duty, to be duty, must be done for duty’s sake; and he argues, with more subtlety than Price or Reid, that though a virtuous act is no doubt pleasant to the virtuous agent, and any violation of duty painful, this moral pleasure (or pain) cannot strictly be the motive to the act, because it follows instead of preceding the recognition of our obligation to do it.48With Price, again, he holds that rightness of intention and motive is not only an indispensable condition or element of the rightness of an action, but actually the sole determinant of its moral worth; but with more philosophical consistency he draws the inference—of which the English moralist does not seem to have dreamt—that there can be no separate rational principles for determining the “material” rightness of conduct, as distinct from its “formal” rightness; and therefore that all rules of duty, so far as universally binding, must admit of being exhibited as applications of the one general principle that duty ought to be done for duty’s sake. ThisCategorical Imperative.deduction is the most original part of Kant’s doctrine. The dictates of reason, he points out, must necessarily be addressed to all rational beings as such; hence, my intention cannot be right unless I am prepared to will the principle on which I act to be a universal law. He considers that this fundamental rule or imperative “act on a maxim which thou canst will to be law universal” supplies a sufficient criterion for determining particular duties in all cases. The rule excludes wrong conduct with two degrees of stringency. Some offences, such as making promises with the intention of breaking them, we cannot even conceive universalized; as soon as every one broke promises no one would care to have promises made to him. Other maxims, such as that of leaving persons in distress to shift for themselves, we can easily conceive to be universal laws, but we cannot without contradiction will them to be such; for when we are ourselves in distress we cannot help desiring that others should help us.
Another important peculiarity of Kant’s doctrine is his development of the connexion between duty and free-will. He holds that it is through our moral consciousness that we know that we are free; in the cognition that I ought to do what is right because it is right and not because I like it, it is implied that this purely rational volition is possible; that my action can be determined, not “mechanically,” through the necessary operation of the natural stimuli of pleasurable and painful feelings, but in accordance with the laws of my true, reasonable self. The realization of reason, or of human wills so far as rational, thus presents itself as the absolute end of duty; and we get, as a new form of the fundamental practical rule, “act so as to treat humanity, in thyself or any other, as an end always, and never as a means only.” We may observe, too, that the notion of freedom connects ethics with jurisprudence in a simple and striking manner. The fundamental aim of jurisprudence is to realize external freedom by removing the hindrances imposed on each one’s free action through the interferences of other wills. Ethics shows how to realize internal freedom by resolutely pursuing rational ends in opposition to those of natural inclination. If we ask what precisely are the ends of reason, Kant’s proposition that “all rational beings as such are ends in themselves for every rational being” hardly gives a clear answer. It might be interpreted to mean that the result to be practically sought is simply the development of the rationality of all rational beings—such as men—whom we find to be as yet imperfectly rational. But this is not Kant’s view. He holds, indeed, that each man should aim at making himself the most perfect possible instrument of reason; but he expressly denies that the perfection of others can be similarly prescribed as an end to each. It is, he says, “a contradiction to regard myself as in duty bound to promote the perfection of another, ... a contradiction to make it a duty for me to do something for another which no other but himself can do.” In what practical sense, then, am I to make other rational beings my ends? Kant’s answer is that what each is to aim at in the case of others is not Perfection, but Happiness,i.e.to help them to attain those purely subjective ends that are determined for each not by reason, but by natural inclination. He explains also that to seek one’s own happiness cannot be prescribed as a duty, because it is an end to which every man is inevitably impelled by natural inclination: but that just because each inevitably desires his own happiness, and therefore desires that others should assist him in time of need, he is bound to make the happiness of others his ethical end, since he cannotmorallydemand aid from others, without accepting the obligation of aiding them in like case. The exclusion of private happiness from the ends at which it is a duty to aim contrasts strikingly with the view of Butler and Reid, that man, as a rational being, is under a “manifest obligation” to seek his own interest. The difference, however, is not really so great as it seems; since in another part of his system Kant fully recognizes the reasonableness of the individual’s regard for his own happiness. Though duty, in his view, excludes regard for private happiness, thesummum bonumis not duty alone, but happiness combined with moral worth; the demand for happiness as the reward of duty is so essentially reasonable that we must postulate a universal connexion between the two as the order of the universe; indeed, the practical necessity of this postulate is the only adequate rational ground that we have for believing in the existence of God.
Before the ethics of Kant had begun to be seriously studied in England, the rapid and remarkable development of metaphysical view and method of which the three chief stages are represented by Fichte, Schelling and HegelHegel.respectively had already taken place; and the system of the latter was occupying the most prominent position in the philosophical thought of Germany.49Hegel’s ethical doctrine (expounded chiefly in hisPhilosophie des Rechts, 1821) shows a close affinity, and also a striking contrast, to Kant’s. He holds,with Kant, that duty or good conduct consists in the conscious realization of the free reasonable will, which is essentially the same in all rational beings. But in Kant’s view the universal content of this will is only given in the formal condition of “only acting as one can desire all to act,” to be subjectively applied by each rational agent to his own volition; whereas Hegel conceives the universal will as objectively presented to each man in the laws, institutions and customary morality of the community of which he is a member. Thus, in his view, not merely natural inclinations towards pleasures, or the desires for selfish happiness, require to be morally resisted; but even the prompting of the individual’s conscience, the impulse to do what seems to him right, if it comes into conflict with the common sense of his community. It is true that Hegel regards the conscious effort to realize one’s own conception of good as a higher stage of moral development than the mere conformity to the jural rules establishing property, maintaining contract and allotting punishment to crime, in which the universal will is first expressed; since in such conformity this will is only accomplished accidentally by the outward concurrence of individual wills, and is not essentially realized in any of them. He holds, however, that this conscientious effort is self-deceived and futile, is even the very root of moral evil, except it attains its realization in harmony with the objective social relations in which the individual finds himself placed. Of these relations the first grade is constituted by the family, the second by civil society, and the third by the state, the organization of which is the highest manifestation of universal reason in the sphere of practice.
Hegelianism appears as a distinct element in modern English ethical thought; but the direct influence of Hegel’s system is perhaps less important than that indirectly exercised through the powerful stimulus which it has given to the study of the historical development of human thought and human society. According to Hegel, the essence of the universe is a process of thought from the abstract to the concrete; and a right understanding of this process gives the key for interpreting the evolution in time of European philosophy. So again, in his view, the history of mankind is a history of the necessary development of the free spirit through the different forms of political organization: the first being that of the Oriental monarchy, in which freedom belongs to the monarch only; the second, that of the Graeco-Roman republics, in which a select body of free citizens is sustained on a basis of slavery; while finally in the modern societies, sprung from the Teutonic invasion of the decaying Roman empire, freedom is recognized as the natural right of all members of the community. The effect of the lectures (posthumously edited) in which Hegel’s “Philosophy of History” and “History of Philosophy” were expounded, has extended far beyond the limits of his special school; indeed, the predominance of the historical method in all departments of the theory of practice is not a little due to their influence.