CHAPTER VII
THE BASIS OF RIGHT AND WRONG
HISTORICAL knowledge without critical insight leads to moral nihilism, the conviction of the pre-Socratic Sophists that, since every time and people has its own standards, there is no real objective right and wrong. Morality is seen to be not a fixed code sent readymade from heaven, but a set of habits and intuitions that have had a natural origin and development. Our particular moral code is perceived to be but one out of many, our type of conscience psychologically on the same level with the strange, and to us perverted, sense of duty of alien races. How can we judge impartially between our standards and those of the Fiji Islanders? What warrant have we for saying that our code is a better one than theirs? Or how do we know that the whole thing is not superstition?
What is the nature of that intrinsic goodness upon which ultimately all valuations rest?
As a matter of fact, underneath the manifold disagreements as to good and bad, there is a deep stratum of absolute certainty. It is only in the more complex and delicate matters that doubt arises; all men share in those elementary perceptions of good and bad that make up the bulk of human valuation. To men everywhere it is an evil to be in severe physical pain or to be maimed in body, to be shut away from air, from food, from other people. It is a good to taste an appetizing dish, to exercise when well and rested, to hear harmonious music, to feel the sweet emotion of love. The fact that men agree upon judgments does not prove them true; but these are not judgments, they are perceptions. [Footnote: Or affections. Let no one quarrel about the psychological terms used; the only important matter is to note the fact, however it be phrased, that "good" and "bad" in their basic usage are DESCRIPTIVE terms. A toothache is bad just as indisputably as the sky is blue. The word "bad" has a definite meaning, just as the word "blue" has; and the toothache is, among other things, precisely what we mean by "bad," just as the look of the cloudless sky by daylight is what we mean by "blue.">[ To call love good is not to give an opinion, it is to describe a fact. It is a matter of direct first-hand feeling, whose reality consists in its being felt. To say that these experiences are good or bad is equivalent to saying that they FEEL good or bad; there can be no dispute about it. This is the bottom fact of ethics. Different experiences have different intrinsic worth as they pass. There is a chiaroscuro of consciousness, a light and shade of immediate goodness and badness over all our variegated moments. The good moments are their own excuse for being, a part of the brightness and worth of life. They need nothing ulterior to justify them. The bad moments feel bad, and that is the end of it; they are bad-feeling moments, and no sophistication can deny it. Conscious life looked at from this point of view, and abstracted from all its other aspects, is a flux of plus and minus values. Certain of its moments have a greater felt worth than others; some experiences are intrinsically undesirable, the shadows of life; others, intrinsically sweet, a part of its sunshine. In the last analysis, all differences in value, including all moral distinctions, rest upon this disparity in the immediate worth of conscious states. [Footnote: Cf. G. Santayana, The Sense of Beauty, p. 104: "All worth leads us back to actual feeling somewhere, or else evaporates into nothing-into a word and a superstition." I cannot but feel that contemporary definitions of value that omit reference to hedonic differences e.g. that of Professor Brown (Journal of Philosophy, Psychology, and Scientific Methods, vol. II, p. 32): "Value is degree of adequacy of a potentiality to the realization of the effect by virtue of which it is a potentiality"-miss the real meaning of "value." We do, indeed, speak occasionally of x as having value as a means to y, when y is not good or a means to a good. But that seems to me a misuse of the word.] We may say absolutely that if it were not for this fundamental difference in feeling there would be no such thing as morality. There might conceivably be a world in which consciousness should exist without any agreeable or disagreeable qualities; in such a world nothing would matter; all acts would be equally indifferent. Or there might be a world in which all experiences were equally pleasurable or painful; in such a case all acts would be equally good or equally sad; there would be no ground for choice. One might in any of these hypothetical worlds be driven by mechanical impulse or fitful whim to do this or that, but there would be no rational basis for preference. Such, however, is not the case. Comparative valuation is possible; all secondary goods and evils arise, all morality, all art and religion and science have their wellspring in this brute fact, this primordial parting of the ways between the more and the less desirable phases of possible conscious life. Morality of an elementary type would exist on this level even without the further complications of actual life. At least a very important art would arise; whether or not we should call it morality is a mere matter of definition. For a choice between alternatives immediately felt goods would arise, and the problem of how to get the better kinds of experience and avoid the worse would demand solution. Every bit of plus value added to experience would make the world so much the brighter, as would every bit of pain avoided. There are, to be sure, the mystical optimisms and pessimisms to be reckoned with, the sweeping assertions of certain schools and individuals that everything is equally good or equally bad. Such undiscriminating formulas are either the mere objectification of a mood, of some unusual period of ecstasy or sorrow, a blind outcry of thanksgiving or of bitterness, or they are the clumsy expression of some practical truth, as, the wisdom of acquiescence, and the futility of preoccupation with evil. But taken seriously and literally such statements are simply untrue to the facts and blur our fundamental perceptions. If actually accredited, either would lead to quiescence; if everything were equally good or evil all striving would be meaningless, one might as well jump from a housetop or walk into the fire. But as a matter of fact such mystical assertions are indulged in only in the inactive moments of life, and mean no more than a lyric poem or a burst of music. Every one in his practical moments acknowledges tacitly, at least, the difference between the intrinsic goodness and badness of experiences. A life of even delight or even wretchedness, or of colorless indifference, is not inconceivable, but it is not the lot of any actual human beings.
The larger quarrel between optimists and pessimists need not, for our purposes, be settled. Life may be a very good thing, on the whole, or a very bad thing. The only point we need to note is that it is at any rate a varying thing. Some experiences are more worth having than others. Moral theory needs no further admission to find its foothold. Nor do we need to discuss the problem of evil. It may be that all pain has its ultimate uses that nothing is "really" bad, if we take that to mean that all evil has a necessary existence as a means to a good otherwise unattainable and worth the cost. But however useful as a means evil may be, it is nonetheless evil and regrettable. It is not good qua pain. If the same amount of good could be obtained without the preliminary evil, it were better to skip it. In short, the existence of different values in immediate experience is indisputable; we may call them for convenience intrinsic goodness and badness.
What is extrinsic goodness?
But there is a radically different sense of the words "good" and "bad"; namely, that in which we say that a thing is good FOR this or that. This is the kind of goodness the THINGS about us have; they are good for the production of intrinsic goodness (as we are using that phrase), which is always (so far as we know) something produced in living organisms. [Footnote: We also occasionally speak of things as being "good for" something else when that something else is not a good or a means to a good (see preceding footnote); as, "sunshine is good for weeds." But as applied to evils, the phrase "good for" more often means "good to abolish"; as, "hellebore is good for weeds." These usages illustrate the ambiguity of all our common ethical terms. To consider them here would be, however, needlessly confusing. The two senses of the term "good" mentioned in the text are the only senses we need to bear in mind for the purposes of ethics.] To put the same truth in other terms, things are good or bad only with respect to their effect upon our conscious experience. [Footnote: I am fully aware of the widespread current distaste for the word "consciousness," with its idealistic associations. The term seems to me too useful to discard; but I wish to point out that, as I use it, it involves no metaphysical viewpoint, but is equally consonant with idealism or realism of any sort.] Primitive man, indeed, imagines inanimate things as having intrinsic goodness or badness, i.e., as feeling happy or unhappy, benevolent or malignant. We still speak of a serene sky, an angry storm cloud, a caressing breeze, and in a hundred ways read our affective life into material objects. But we now recognize all these ascriptions as cases of the pathetic fallacy, poetically significant but literally untrue. Animism, which looms so large in primitive religion, consists in thus objectifying into things the emotions they arouse in us. In reality all of these affective qualities exist in us, not in the outer objects; so far as our epithets have an objective truth they describe not the content of the objects, but their function in our lives. When we speak of delicious food, beautiful pictures, ugly colors, we mean strictly that these objects are such as to arouse in us certain peculiar pleasant or unpleasant feelings. So that apart from the existence of consciousness there would be no goodness or badness at all. [Footnote: The neo-realists would prefer to say, perhaps, "apart from the existence of organisms,">[ and this may be an exacter phrase; we from previous page [Footnote: pleasures and pains that remain out of connection with that interrelated stream of experience to which we usually limit the term "consciousness." On the other hand, MAY it not be that God, and angels, or other disembodied beings, have consciousness, and intrinsic goodness, without having organisms? Of course, for all we know, the world about us may be chock full of pleasures and pains. But for practical purposes, and so far as our morality is concerned, either the statement in the text or the suggested equivalent is true. The point is, that the foundation of morality is in US—whether you call US in the last analysis consciousnesses or organisms]
It is the existence of felt goodness, intrinsic goodness, and its opposite, that allows us to attribute to objects another kind of goodness or badness, according as they are calculated to produce in us the former kind. This kind of goodness and badness we may call extrinsic. It is only by thus attributing a sort of goodness and badness to senseless objects that we can aim for and avoid the good and bad phases of conscious life. In themselves these conscious moments are largely unnamable and inexpressible. There are, as it is, dumb objectless ecstasies that are of transcendent sweetness; but we do not usually know how to reproduce them, and for the most part we have to overlook these goods in our ideals and aim only for those that we can associate with recognized outer stimuli. For practical purposes we think rather in terms of outer objects than of our states of experience; nature has had need to make men but very slightly introspective. And so it is that this derived use of our eulogistic and disparaging terms plays a larger part than its primary application. But the essential point to note is that "goodness" and "badness" in the first instance refer to the fundamental cleavage between the affective qualities of experience, and only secondarily and by metonymy apply to objects in the physical world which affect our conscious states. The next point to note is that our conscious experiences and activities themselves have not only their intrinsic value, as they pass, but an extrinsic value, as means toward future intrinsic values. Each phase of experience has its own worth, while it lasts, and also has its results in determining future phases with their varying degrees of worth. Our reveries, our debauches, our sacrifices are good or bad in their effects as well as in themselves. Thus all experience has a double rating; acts are not only pleasant, agreeable, intrinsically desirable, but also wise, prudent, useful, virtuous, i.e., extrinsically desirable. These extrinsic values usually bulk much larger in the end than the first transitory intrinsic value; but our natural tendency is to forget them and guide our action by immediate values. Hence the need of a continual disparagement of the latter, and the many means men have adopted of emphasizing the importance of the former. Yet, after all, our concern for the extrinsic value of acts has to do only with means to ends; and unless acts tend to produce intrinsic goodness somewhere they are not extrinsically good. There is no sense in sacrificing an immediate good unless the alternative act will tend in its ultimate effects to produce a greater good, or unless the act sacrificed would have brought, after its present intrinsic good, some greater intrinsic evil. The sacrifice of a good for no greater good is asceticism or fanaticism. From this there is no ultimate salvation but by referring all acts to the final touchstone—asking which will produce in the end the greatest amount of intrinsic good and the least intrinsic evil. What sort of conduct, then, is good? And how shall we define virtue? We are brought thus to the conception of an art which shall not only teach us which of two immediate, intrinsic, goods is the better, but shall consider all the near and remote consequences of acts, and direct us to that conduct which will produce most good in the end. [Footnote: The impossibility of finding any other ultimate basis for our conception of moral "good" or "bad" is well expressed by Socrates in Plato's Protagoras (p. 354): "Then you think that pain is an evil and pleasure is a good, and even pleasure you deem an evil, when it robs you of greater pleasure than it gives, or causes pain greater than the pleasure. If, however, you call pleasure an evil in regard to some other end or standard, you will be able to show us that standard. BUT YOU HAVE NONE TO SHOW… And have you not a similar way of speaking about pain? You call pain a good when it takes away greater pains than those which it has, or gives pleasures greater than the pains." He then goes on to explain the need of morality,-to guide us, in the face of the foreshortening effects of our particular situation, to what will make for the greatest happiness in the long run (p. 356): "Do not the same magnitudes appear larger to your sight when near, and smaller when at a distance? Now suppose happiness to consist in doing or choosing the greater, and in not doing or avoiding the less, what would be the saving principle of human life? Would not the ACT OF MEASURING be the saving principle?">[ is best which will in the long run bring into being the greatest possible amount of intrinsic goodness and the least intrinsic evil. For goodness of conduct we commonly use the term "virtue"; and for intrinsic good the most widely accepted name-though one which is misleading to many is "happiness." So we may say, in sum, that virtue is that manner of life that tends to happiness. Objection is occasionally made that happiness is too vague a term, too elusive a concept, to be set forth as the ultimate aim of conduct. "Alas!" says Bradley, "the one question which no one can answer is, what is happiness?" But this is a palpable confusion of thought. If we mean by the question, "Wherein is happiness to be found, by doing what can we attain it?" then the answer is, indeed, uncertain in its completeness; it is precisely to answer it that we study ethics. Or if we mean, "What is the psychology of happiness?" the answer is as yet dubious; but it is irrelevant. Whatever its psychological conditions and the means to attain it, we know happiness when we have it. The puzzle is not to recognize it, but to get it. By happiness we mean the steady presence of what we have called intrinsic goodness and the absence of intrinsic badness; it is as indefinable as any ultimate element of experience, but as well known to us as blackness and whiteness or light and dark. Take, as a typical moral situation, a case in which a thirsty man drinks polluted water. In the diagram the arrow represents the direction of the flow of time, and each of the ribbons below represents the stream of consciousness of an individual concerned-the uppermost being that of the thirsty man himself, the others those of his wife, children, or friends. The plus sign early in the drinker's stream of experience stands for the plus value which drinking the water effects-the gratifying taste of the water and the allaying of the discomfort of thirst-real values, whose worth cannot be gainsaid. Following, in his own stream of experience, are a row of minus signs, indicating the undesirable penalties in his own life which follow-disease, pain, deprivation of other goods. No good accrues to others, unless the slight pleasure of seeing his thirst allayed. But evils follow in their experience: worry, sympathetic pain at his suffering, expense of doctor's bills, perhaps (which means deprivation of other possible goods), etc. It is clear at a glance that the positive good attained is not worth the lingering and widespread evils; and the act of drinking the polluted water, though to a very thirsty man a keen temptation, is immoral. Morality is thus an acting upon a right perspective of life. Personal morality considers the goods and evils in the one stream of consciousness, social morality the goods and evils in other conscious lives concerned. Between them they sum up the law and the prophets.
The best life for humanity is that which is, on the whole, felt best; not necessarily that which is judged best by this man or that, for our judgments are narrow and misrepresent actual values,-but that which has had from beginning to end the greatest total of happiness. No other ultimate criterion for conduct can ever justify itself, and most theoretical statements reduce to this. To be virtuous is to be a virtuoso in life. All sorts of objections have been raised to this simple, and apparently pagan, way of stating the case; they will be considered in due time. The reader is asked to refrain from parting company with the writer, if his prejudices are aroused, until the consonance of this sketchy account of the basis of morality with Christianity and all idealism can be demonstrated.
H. Spencer, Data of Ethics, chap. III. S. E. Mezes, Ethics, chap IX. Leslie Stephen, Science of Ethics, chaps. II, IX. F. Thilly, Introduction to Ethics, chaps. IV, V. F. Paulsen, book II, chap. I. J. S. Mill, Utilitarianism. B. P. Bowne, Principles of Ethics, chap. II. The classic accounts of a rational foundation of ethics are to be found by the discerning reader in Plato's Protagoras, Gorgias, and Republic (esp. books. I, II, IV), and Aristotle's Ethics (esp. books. I and II). For refinements in the definition of right and wrong, see G. E. Moore, Ethics, chaps. I-V; B. Russell, Philosophical Essays, I, secs. II, III. International Journal of Ethics, vol. 24, p. 293. Definitions of value without reference to pleasure or pain will be found in Journal of Philosophy, Psychology, and Scientific Methods, vol. II, pp. 29, 113, 141. An elaborate and careful discussion will be found in G. H. Palmer's Nature of Goodness.