Problems of Conduct: An Introductory Survey of Ethics

by Durant Drake

CHAPTER XIV

THE WORTH OF MORALITY

BEFORE proceeding to a more concrete unfolding of the difficulties and problems of morality, it will be well to formulate our theory in terms of modern biology, and then, finally, to answer those modern critics who reject not merely the rational explanation of morality but morality itself.

Morality as the organization of human interests.

The worth of morality is most commonly defended today, in biological terms, by describing it as a synthesis of human interests; it is valuable because it is what we really want and need. It does, indeed, forbid the carrying-out of any impulse which renders impossible greater goods; it flatly opposes that unrestrained satisfying of a part of our natures which we call self-indulgence, or of one nature at the expense of others which we call selfishness. But it stifles desire only for a greater ultimate good; it rejects that needless repression of a part of the self which we call asceticism, and an undue subordination of self to others. It is, then the organizing or harmonizing principle, subordinating the interests of each aspect of the self, and of the many conflicting selves, to the total welfare of the individual and of the community. As Plato pointed out, [Footnote: Republic, books. I-IV; e.g. (444): "Is not the creation of righteousness the creation of a natural order and government of one another in the parts of the soul, and the creation of unrighteousness the opposite?" and (352): "Is not unrighteousness equally suicidal when existing in an individual [as it is when it exists in the State], rendering him incapable of action because he is not at unity with himself, making him an enemy to himself?" and (443): "The righteous man does not permit the several elements within him to meddle with one another, or any of them to do the work of others; but he sets in order his own inner life, and is his own master, and at peace with himself; and when … he is no longer many, but has become one entirely temperate and perfectly adjusted nature, then he will think and call right and good action that which preserves and cooperates with this condition." (In quoting Plato I have used Jowett's translation, with an occasional substitution; as, above, in the use of "righteousness" and "right" instead of "justice" and "just.")] representative of all other interests, the consensus of interest. Such a definition, we must admit, happily describes morality, showing us that if we would find its leading we must know ourselves; we must examine our actual existing needs and consider how best to attain them. The direction of morality is that of a carefully pruned and weeded human nature. But there are certain dangers inherent in this form of definition which we must note:

(1) We must not be satisfied with the synthesis of consciously felt desires. Many of our deepest needs fail to come to the surface and embody themselves in impulses; we do not know or seek what is really best for ourselves. There are possibilities of harmony and peace upon low levels. We must be pricked into desire for new forms of life and not allowed to stagnate in a condition which, however well organized and contented, is lacking in the richness and joy we might attain. We must include in the "interests" to be organized all our dumb and unrealized needs, all potential and latent impulses, as well as our articulate desires.

(2) On the other hand, there are perverse and pathological impulses which are deserving of no regard and must be simply cast aside in the organizing process, because they lead only to unhappiness. There is a difference between the desirable and the desired; morality is not merely an organizing but a corrective force, bringing sometimes not peace but a sword. A truer figure would be to represent it as a flowers and ruthlessly pruning or weeding out others, that the garden may be the most beautiful place.

(3) Moreover, this definition, while an excellent DESCRIPTIONTION of what morality in general is, is not a JUSTIFICATION of morality, does not point to its ultimate raison d'etre. To all this organizing activity we might say, Cui bono, for what good? WHY should we organize our interests; why not deny them like the ascetics? The mere existence of pushes, in this direction and that, affords no material for moral judgment; a harmonizing of them would make a mathematical resultant, but it would be of no superior WORTH. If there were no pleasure and pain in life, it would not MATTER in the least whether the various life forces were organized or not. In such a colorless world a unison of human impulses would be as morally indifferent as the convergence of tributary rivers or the formation of an organized solar system. It is only, as we long ago pointed out, [Footnote: Cf. ante, p. 74 ] when consciousness differentiates into its plus and minus values, pleasure and pain, that a reason arises why any forces in the cosmos should be thwarted or allowed free play. With the emergence of those values, however, everything that affects them becomes significant. If the complete transformation of our interests would make human life brighter, fuller of plus values, such a radical alteration, rather than a harmonization, would be our ideal. As it is, desire points normally toward the really desirable; the direction of human welfare lies, in general, along the line of our organic needs, of the avoidance of clashes, of the mutual subordination and cooperation of natural impulses. The principle of reason, of intelligence, is necessary in morality to find this way of cooperation, this ultimate drift of need; but without the potentiality of happiness chaos would be as good as order, both within the individual soul and within the social group. [Footnote: Plato realized this, and in the Philebus points out that we cannot completely describe morality either in terms of pleasure-pain or in terms of reason (or wisdom), the organizing principle. Both aspects of morality are important. Cf, along this line, H. G. Lord, The Abuse of Abstraction in Ethics, in the James memorial volume.] Do moral acts always bring happiness somewhere? The ultimate justification of morality the value of synthesizing our interests, lies in the happiness men thereby attain. But there is one fundamental doubt that ever and anon recurs the doubt whether, after all, actions that we agree in calling virtuous always BRING happiness. If not, either our definition of morality, or our universal judgment as to what is moral, would seem to be in error. Perhaps morality is, after all, off the track, and to be discarded.

(1) We must first lay aside cases of perverted conscience, acts which are "subjectively moral," or conscientious, but not objectively best. These cases we have already glanced at; they need be no stumbling block.

(2) We must remember that the types of conduct which we have glorified by the concepts "virtue," "duty," etc, are those which TEND to produce happiness. We have to frame our judgments and pigeonhole acts according to their normal results. But it happens not infrequently that accidents upset these natural tendencies. For these unforeseeable eventualities the actor is not responsible; if his act was the best that could have been planned, in consideration of all known factors, it remains the ideal for future cases, it still retains the halo of "virtue" which must attract others to it. Good acts may lead, by unexpected chance, to evil consequences; bad acts may result, by some accident, in good. But to the interfering factor belongs the credit or blame; the act that would normally have led to good or to evil remains right or wrong. To rescue a drowning man is right, for such action normally tends to human welfare; if the rescued man turns out a great criminal, or escapes this death to suffer a worse, the act of rescuing the drowning remains a desirable and therefore moral act. On the other hand, if one man slanders another, with the result that the latter, refuting the slander, thereby attains prominence and position, the act of slander, normally harmful, remains an immoral act.

It is a failure to recognize this necessarily general character of our moral judgments that raises the problem of Job. The ancient Israelites saw clearly that righteousness was the road to happiness; [Footnote: Cf. for example, "Righteousness tendeth to life; he that pursueth evil pursueth it to his own death." "Blessed is every one that feareth the Lord, that walketh in his ways. Happy shalt thou be, and it shall be well with thee.">[ and when a righteous man like Job fell into misfortune, they accused him of secret sin. Job is conscious of his innocence, of having done his part aright, and cannot understand how he has come to such an evil pass. It would have brought him no material alleviation, but it might have saved him some mental chafing, to recognize that morality is simply doing our part. When we have done our best we are still at the mercy of fortune. Happiness, as Aristotle pointed out, is the result of two cooperating factors, morality and good fortune. [Footnote: Nichomachean Ethics, book I, several places: e.g, in chap. VII, "To constitute happiness there must be, as we have said, complete virtue and fit external conditions.">[ If either is lacking, evil will ensue. If all men were perfectly virtuous, we should still be at the mercy of flood and lightning, poisonous snakes, icebergs and fog at sea, a thousand forms of accident and disease, old age and death. The millennium will not bring pure happiness to man; he is too feeble a creature in the presence of forces with which he cannot cope. Morality is just-the best man can do; and it is not to be blamed for the twists of fate that make futile its efforts. (3) Are there not, however, cases where conduct which we agree is right is not even likely to bring the greatest happiness attainable; where not only immediate but lasting happiness is to be deliberately sacrificed in the name of morality? Suppose, for example, a politician who becomes convinced of the evils of the liquor trade ruins his career in a hopeless fight against the saloons. He loses his office, his income, his honor in the sight of his associates; he brings suffering upon his innocent wife and children; and all for no good, since his fight is futile and ineffective. Surely any one could foresee that such action would make only for unhappiness, or for no happiness commensurable with the sacrifice. Yet if we agree with his premise, that the liquor trade is a curse to humanity, we deem his conduct not only conscientious but objectively noble and right. How can we justify that judgment?

In the first place, we cannot be sure, beforehand, that such a fight will not be successful. Forlorn hopes sometimes win. We must encourage men to venture, to take chances; only so can the great evils that ride mankind be banished. If there is a fighting chance of accomplishing a great good it is contemptible not to try; society must maintain a code that leads at times to quixotic acts.

In the second place, the fight, even if in itself hopeless, is sure to have valuable indirect results. It arouses others to the need; it stimulates in others the willingness to sacrifice self-interest and work for the general good. Every such honorable defeat has its share in the final victory. The subtle benefits that result from such moral gallantry are not evident on the surface, but they are there. No push for the right is wholly wasted. It pays mankind to let its heroes lavish their lives in apparently ineffective struggles; through their example the apathetic masses are stirred and moved a little farther toward their goal.

In general, we may say that the belief that virtue is not the right road to happiness betrays inexperience and immaturity of judgment. A moderate degree of morality saves man from many pitfalls into which his unrestrained impulses would lead him. The highest levels of morality bring a degree of happiness unknown to the "natural man." Who are the happiest people in the world? The saints; those who are inwardly at peace, who play their part with absolute loyalty. Even the irremediable misfortunes of life do not affect them as they do the worldly man; they have "learned the luxury of doing good." Of morality a recent writer says, "Its distribution of felicity is ideally just. To him who is most unselfish, who sinks most thoroughly his own interests in those of the race of which he is a unit, it awards the most complete beatitude." [Footnote: J. H. Levy, of London, in a funeral oration.] To him who complains that he is moral but not happy, the answer is, Be more moral! A high enough morality, a complete enough consecration, will lead, in all but very abnormal cases, to happiness in the individual life, as well as make its due contribution to the happiness of others.

Is there anything better than morality?

It is this lack of vision, this immature skepticism as to the service of morality to human welfare, that has fired a flame of revolt in certain minds, a revolt not merely against incidental defects and outworn conceptions of morality, but against morality uberhaupt. The declamations of these Promethean rebels make it clear, however, that their protest is but the old fault of condemning a necessary institution altogether for its imperfections or its abuses. Morality has been blended with superstition and tyranny, has been often blind, perverted, narrow, checking noble impulses and choking the rich and happy development of life. But it is one thing to arraign these accidents and corruptions of morality; it is quite another to discard the whole system of guidance of which they are but the excrescences and mistakes. This usurping is, of course, also in large part a thirst for novelty, a love of paradox, of practicing ingenuity in making the better appear the worse; it is in part a volcanic eruption of suppressed longings and a protest against the inadequacy of our present code to provide opportunity and happiness for the masses. The motives vary with the individual rebels.

It must suffice, however, from among the many leaders of this revolt, to quote that clever but unbalanced German iconoclast, Nietzsche. Typical of his doctrine is the following: [Footnote: Genealogy of Morals (ed. Alex. Tille), Foreword, p. 9.] "Never until now was there the least doubt or hesitation to set down the 'good' man as of higher value than the 'evil' man-of higher value in the sense of furtherance, utility, prosperity, as regards MAN in general (the future of man included). What if the reverse were true? What if in, the 'good' one also a symptom of decline were contained, and a danger, a seduction, a poison, a narcotic by which the present might live AT THE EXPENSE OF THE FUTURE? Perhaps more comfortably, less dangerously, but also in humbler style- more meanly? So that just morality were to blame, if a HIGHEST MIGHTINESS AND SPLENDOR of type of man-possible in itself were never attained? And that, therefore, morality itself would be the danger of dangers?"

The point of this tirade is that morality puts a wet blanket over human powers; it is a bourgeois ideal, saving men, indeed, from pain, but also robbing life of its picturesqueness and glory. Many people frankly prefer "interesting" to "good" people; Nietzsche generalizes this feeling. Morality is to him uninteresting, dull, a code for slaves, for the clash of combat, the tang of cruelty and lust, the tingle of unrestrained power. Every man for himself then, and the Devil take the hindmost. Shocked as we are by this brutal platform, there is something in it that appeals to the red blood and adventurous spirit in us; after all, we are not far removed from the savage, and the thought of a psalm-singing, tea-drinking, tamely good world is abhorrent to the marrow of us. Stevenson, with his delightfully irresponsible audacity, sighs for an occasional "furlough from the moral law"; and there are times for most of us when it seems as if we should choke and smother under the everlasting "Thou shalt not!" But the daring rebel, the defiant Titan, comes creeping back to the shelter of morality with a headache or something worse, and discovers that his Promethean boldness was but childish petulance; that it is futile and foolish to try to escape the inexorable laws of human life. There are, in fact, two adequate answers that can be made to the despiser of morality:

(1) Dull or not, repressive or not, morality is absolutely necessary. It is better than the pain, the insecurity, the relapse into barbarism, that immorality implies. Our whole civilization, everything that makes human life better than that of the beasts of prey, would collapse without its foundation of moral obedience. The regime of slashing individualism would kill off many of the weaker who are precious to humanity-a Homer (if he was blind), a Keats, a Stevenson; nay, if carried to extreme, it would put an end to the race. For who are the weakest, the "hindmost," but the babies! Sympathy and love and self sacrifice, at least in parents, are necessary if the race is to endure a generation. But even for the individual, the penalties of immorality are too obvious to need recapitulation. If morality is repression, it is the minimal repression consistent with the maintenance of successful and happy life. Its real aim is to bring life, and life more abundantly.

(2) But if we are looking for something great, for adventure and excitement and battle against odds, we can find it much better than in brutally slashing at our fellows, or running amuck at the beck of our impulses, by putting our valor at the service of some really great human endeavor. If we want to get into the big game, the great adventure, we must pit ourselves, with the leaders of mankind, against the hostile universe. The men and women who set our blood tingling and our hearts beating fastest are-Darwin, discoverer by patient labor of a great cosmic law; Pasteur, conqueror at last over a terrible human disease; Peary, first to plant foot upon the axis of the world; Goethals, builder of a canal that links the oceans. The steady march of a moralized civilization, presenting united front to the cosmos, is infinitely more glorious than the futile, aimless, and petty struggles of an anarchic immorality. Our half-disciplined life is already far richer and more romantic than the life of Nietzsche's "supermen" could be; and we are only a little way along the road of moral progress. The real superman will be a BETTER man, a man of tenderness and chivalry, of loyalty and self-control, a man of disciplined heart and purified will; to attain to such a supermanliness is, indeed, a heroic and splendid achievement, worthy of our utmost endeavor, and calling into play all our noblest powers.

Some there are, accustomed to the vision of tables of stone engraved by the hand of God and set up for man's obedience amid Sinaitic thunders, for whom the discovery of the humble human and prehuman origin, and the stumbling hit-or-miss evolution, of morality dulls its sanctity. But any one who is tempted for this reason to deride morality may console himself with the reflection that everything else of supreme importance in human life is of plebeian ancestry. Reason, art, government, religion, had their crude and superstition-ridden beginnings. Man himself was once hardly different from a monkey. Yet there is a spark of the divine in him and in all these arts and institutions which he with the aid of the cosmic forces has evolved. Surely a juster judgment may find a sublimity in this age-long march from the clod toward the millennium that could never belong to the spectacular but very provincial myths of the Semites. The emotions ever lag behind the intellect; and our hearts may still yearn for the neighborly and passionate battle-god of the Pentateuch. Moreover, we shall continue to recognize a vast fund of truth and insight in those early folk tales and primitive codes. But there comes a deeper breath to the man who realizes that morality and religion long antedate the Jewish revelation, and comes to see God in the tens and hundreds of thousands of years of slow but splendid human progress. Historical codes of morals are, indeed, seamed with superstition and are progressively displaced; but morality persists. At no time has man wholly solved the problem of life, but he must ever live by the best solution he has found. The innumerable codes are so many experiments, their very differences bearing witness to the need of some set of guiding principles for conduct.

It is sometimes said that morality, being a merely human invention, may be discarded when we choose. To this we may reply that morality bears, indeed, the indisputable marks of human instinct, will, and reason; but it is not an invention; it is a lesson, slowly learned. In its humanness lies its value. It is not an alien code, irrelevant to human nature; it is a natural function; it is the greatest of human institutions unless that be religion, which is its flower and consummation. Morality is made for man, for his use and guidance; what could possibly have greater sanctity or authority for him? Rebel as he may, and chafe under its restraints, he always comes back to morality; perhaps to a revised code, but to essentially the same control; for he cannot do without it. Our morality has its defects, but it is on the right track. A clearer insight into its teleological necessity, the purpose it exists to serve, will direct us in our efforts to revise it, so to fashion it as to make it productive of still greater good in the time to come. But if we discard it altogether, we are "like the base Indian" who "threw a pearl away, Richer than all his tribe."

What we need is not to abandon but to steadily improve our code; and whereas any one can pick flaws, only the man of trained mind and controlled desire can discover feasible lines of advance. "When all is said, there is nothing as yet to be changed in our old Aryan ideal of justice, conscientiousness, courage, kindness, and honor. We have only to draw nearer to it, to clasp it more closely, to realize it more effectively; and, before going beyond it, we have still a long and noble road to travel beneath the stars." [Footnote: Maeterlinck, "Our Anxious Morality," in The Measure of the Hours.] The conception of morality as the organization of interests will be found in Plato's Republic and Aristotle's Ethics, and in many recent ethical books and papers. Among them are R. B. Perry's Moral Economy, G. Santayana's Reason in Science (chap. IX); William James, "The Moral Philosopher and the Moral Life" (in the Will to Believe and Other Essays).

A discussion of whether morality really makes for happiness will be found in Leslie Stephen, System of Ethics, chap. X; W. L. Sheldon, An Ethical Movement, chap. VIII. For Nietzsche's theory, see his Beyond Good and Evil. There are many excellent replies; a brief but adequate one will be found in Perry, op. cit, chap. I.