What is Morality?
What is morality? Paley, by many considered the chief of modern Christian authorities, basing his conception of morality on the Bible, defines it as “the doing good to mankind, in obedience to the will of God [as revealed in the Bible], and for the sake of everlasting happiness [and to escape everlasting misery].” Supernaturalism and selfishness are thus its sole principles; supernaturalism being its source and selfishness being the motive for its observance. Here virtue does not bring its own reward, the will of God is not omnipotent, and mankind, like a spoiled child, must be bribed or frightened to obey its precepts.
This is the Christian conception of morality. But it is a false conception. Morality is not supernatural and divine, but natural and human. It is purely utilitarian. Utility, regardless of the will of God, is its all-pervading principle. Whatever is beneficial to man is right, is moral; and whatever is injurious to him is wrong, is immoral. The end and aim of moral conduct, according to Hobbes, is self-preservation and happiness; not everlasting happiness in another world, as taught by Paley, but life-lasting happiness in this. Dr. Priestley’s phrase, “The greatest happiness of the greatest number,” is pronounced by Jeremy Bentham, one of the most eminent of ethical writers, “a true standard for whatever is right or wrong, useful, useless, or mischievous in human conduct.”
More and more, as men become civilized and enlightened, the egoistic principles of religionists give way to the altruistic principle of Rationalists. “Live for others” is the sublime teaching of the Positivist Comte. In obeying this noble precept we are not sacrificing, but augmenting our own happiness. “To do good is my religion,” said Thomas Paine. The rewards and punishments of this religion, which is here but another name for morality, are happily expressed by Abraham Lincoln: “When I do good I feel good, and when I do bad I feel bad.” The husband and wife who labor for each other’s happiness, regardless of their own; the father and mother who deprive themselves to make their children happy; men, like Sir Moses Montefiore and Baron Hirsch, and women, like Florence Nightingale and Clara Barton, who devote their time and wealth to aid in removing the poverty and alleviating the sufferings of humanity—these, by increasing the happiness of others, increase their own.
When the true principles of morality are universally understood and accepted, divine revelations will be cast aside and supernatural religions will die; the zealot’s visions of a celestial paradise will vanish, and the philanthropist’s dream of a heaven on earth will be realized.