ETHICAL APPLICATIONS OF THE LAW OF IDENTITY
It may be remembered that Mr. Podsnap remarked, with sadness tempered by satisfaction, that he regretted to say that “Foreign nations do as they do do.” Besides aiding the comforting expression of moral disapproval, the law of identity has yet another useful purpose in practical ethics: It serves the welcome purpose of providing an excuse for infractions of the moral law. There was once a man who treated his wife badly, was unfaithful to her, was dishonest in business, and was not particular in his use of language; and yet his life on earth was described in the lines:
This man maintained a wife’s a wife,
Men are as they are made,
Business is business, life is life;
And called a spade a spade.
One of the objects of Dr. G. E. Moore’s Principia Ethica[22] was to argue that the word “good” means simply good, and not pleasant or anything else. Appropriately enough, this book bore on its title-page the quotation from the preface to the Sermons, published in 1726, of Bishop Joseph Butler, the author of the Analogy: “Everything is what it is and not another thing.”
But another famous Butler—Samuel Butler, the author of Hudibras—went farther than this, and maintained that identities were the highest attainment of metaphysics itself. At the beginning of the first Canto of Hudibras, in the description of Hudibras himself, Butler wrote:
He knew what’s what, and that’s as high
As metaphysic wit can fly.
I once conducted what I imagined to be an æsthetic investigation for the purpose of discovery, by the continual use of the word “Why?”[23] the grounds upon which certain people choose to put milk into a tea-cup before the tea. I was surprised to discover that it was an ethical, and not an æsthetic problem; for I soon elicited the fact that it was done because it was “right.” A continuance of my patient questioning elicited further evidence of the fundamental character of the principle of identity in ethics; for it was right, I learned, because “right is right.”
It appears that some people unconsciously think that the principle of identity is the foundation, in certain religions, of the reasons which can be alleged for moral conduct, and are surprised when this fact is pointed out to them. The late Sir Leslie Stephen, when travelling by railway, fell into conversation with an officer of the Salvation Army, who tried hard to convert him. Failing in this laudable endeavour, the Salvationist at last remarked: “But if you aren’t saved, you can’t go to heaven!” “That, my friend,” replied Stephen, “is an identical proposition.”
[22] Cambridge, 1903.
[23] Cf. P. E., p. 2.