Utilitarianism is principally represented by English thought, to which belongs Hobbes, the greatest of all utilitarians, who proclaimed, in statu naturae (that is to say, in genuine reality) mensuram juris esse utilitatem.[1] Similar doctrines are to be found in Spinoza, who has also been looked upon and criticized as a pure utilitarian. But the matter is rather more complicated as regards Spinoza. Of him it should rather be said that he would have been the most resolute of ethical rigorists, had he ever been able to construct an Ethic. His determinism was an insuperable obstacle to this, for it does not admit distinctions of values, but considers the good. like being, in its abstractness, and therefore, the being of each one as suum essere conservare; hence the appearance of utilitarianism, assumed by the Ethic of Spinoza.
English Ethic.
From Hobbes descend Locke, Hartley, Hume, Adam Smith, Warburton, Paley, and others such; they are all less courageous and less coherent philosophers than he. Indeed, if Hobbes himself could not but be incoherent and could not avoid causing a desire for and therefore a state of peace to arise from a state of nature or of war, whence is discovered to the mind a source of the practical, altogether different from that of the useful alone, which was presupposed; with the mean and sophistical efforts of his successors, the incoherence becomes altogether irritating. The aid sought from associationism is among these efforts, and the excogitation of the example of the miser (found for the first time in 1731, in a discourse of the Rev. John Gay),[2] and also the admission of the principle of sympathy beside that of egoism, a principle which with a cast of the dice is made to disappear again, and to become absorbed in egoism itself. The inanity of utilitarianism, which has already in Hobbes a tendency to disavow itself, by recognizing as true laws not those of nature, but those revealed by God (in Scripturis sacris latae),[3] and in Locke retained the divine side by side with the civil laws and those of public opinion,[4] became evident in the theological utilitarianism of Warburton and of Paley. As for intuitionists and psychologists, such as Shaftesbury, Hutcheson, Butler, these either left an unsolved dualism (as was above all the case with the last), or, although possessing the most lively consciousness of moral force, they yet strove to deduce it in some way from the egoistical and utilitarian principle. The French materialists of the eighteenth century, such as Helvétius and D'Holbach, though less subtle, are more consequent.
Idealistic Philosophy.
Rigoristic Ethic displayed its strength against anti-ethical utilitarianism and anti-philosophical psychologism, not only in traditional scholastic, but also in the explicit polemic undertaken by Cudworth, Cumberland, Clarke and Price, against Hobbes, Locke, and the other utilitarians who followed them. The makers of great systems, too, attached themselves to ethical rigorism, Descartes (and in a certain sense Spinoza), Malebranche, Leibnitz, and the philosophy of the school of Leibnitz, as the moral consciousness declared itself in its true nature in Jean Jacques Rousseau against the French materialists. But rigorism also ended by contradicting itself in the same way as utilitarianism, owing to its one-sidedness, when it recognized a principle that was not merely utilitarian or that lost itself in mystery, either by reasoning with the utilitarian principle in the course of its development, or by receiving utilitarianism into itself, without any mediation, in the form of the morally indifferent. This is an old evil, which had already appeared in the ἀδιάφορα of Stoicism, and in all those exceptions to the rigorous moral law, which ascetic Christianity had been obliged to allow, in order to exist side by side with the worldly life.
Kant and his affirmation of the ethical principle.
III. The strength and the weakness of rigorism are to be clearly seen in the greatest ethical system to which it led: the moral doctrine of Emmanuel Kant. It was time that the principle of Christian Ethic should be reaffirmed, duty as clearly distinguished from pleasure, giving to it that relief which it had been without in the systems of Descartes and of Leibnitz, after the materialistic and utilitarian orgy that had lasted for more than a century, and after the equivocal attempts at an approach and fusion of the useful and the moral. Kant did not indeed in this respect oppose Wolffian Leibnitzianism; and although the ethical concept of perfectio seemed to him to be empty and indeterminate, yet he was never able to prove that it was a eudæmonistic and utilitarian concept.[5] But that concept certainly had not the energy of duty and of the Kantian categoric imperative, which are true declarations of war against every heteronomous morality. This is the merit of Kant, after whom no serious philosopher can be anything but a Kantian in Ethic, as, after Christianity, to no one, not a wind-bag or an extravagant, is it given to be anything but a Christian. Moral action has no other motive than morality itself: to promote one's own happiness (said Kant) can never be immediately duty, and even less the principle of all duties.
Self-contradictions of Kant concerning the concept of the useful, of prudence, of happiness, etc.
But the mistake of Kant lies in not having well analyzed the concepts of pleasure, of happiness and of the useful, and in having thought that he could free himself from them, by placing them among another set of principles, which he called hypothetical imperatives and opposed to the categoric. We know that the imperative of those concepts is not less categoric than that of morality: it is a true imperative, not to be confounded with the knowledge of experience, metaphorically called imperative, because it assumes the appearance of a technique dealing with the practical. Kant was to some extent aware of this, for he sub-distinguishes the hypothetical imperatives into problematical and assertorial. The first of these are technical and give rise to maxims of cleverness (Geschicklichkeit); the second are pragmatic and consist of maxims of prudence. Observe the difficulties in which he becomes involved, through not wishing to recognize the autonomous character of these imperatives compared with the moral imperatives, that is to say, the categoricity of both. The imperatives of prudence and of happiness are concerned (he says) "with an end which can be assumed as real among all rational beings (in so far as the imperatives can be applied to them in their quality of dependent beings); and, therefore, an intention, which not only they may possess, but which it is assumed with certainty that they do possess, according to a necessity of nature, which is the intention of happiness." We should therefore conclude that they are concerned with an end not less serious than that of morality. But Kant perceives the poison in the argument and strives to turn them again into imperatives concerning means: "ability" (he continues) "in the choice of the means of one's own well-being, may be called prudence; therefore the imperative relating to the choice of the means for one's own happiness, namely the precept of prudence, is always hypothetical; the action is ordered, not absolutely, but only as means for another purpose." It is clear that to be able to call that knowledge or ability "prudence" is not sufficient to change the imperative of happiness into mere ability and knowledge. Kant perceives this also: "If it were easy to give a definite concept of happiness, the imperatives of prudence would altogether coincide with those of ability and would also be analytic. For it would be said in the one case as in the other, that he who wishes the end also wishes (necessarily, in conformity with reason) the only means for the purpose within his power. The concept of happiness is unfortunately so indeterminate, that although every one wishes to attain to it, he is nevertheless unable ever to say definitely and in accordance with himself exactly what he desires and wishes. The reason is that the elements which belong to the concept of happiness are all empirical and must therefore all be taken from experience; quired an absolute whole, a maximum of well-being in my present state and in every future state." In what shall happiness be placed? In riches? In knowledge? In long life? In good health? None of these things is without dangers. In short, it is impossible to determine with full certainty, according to any principle whatever, what would make man truly happy; therefore it is not possible to act according to a definite principle, but only according to empirical concepts; and the imperatives of prudence, strictly speaking, command nothing.—As we see, the only effective argument of Kant against the admission of the categoric imperatives of well-being, of utility, of happiness, is that he does not know exactly what they are. This did not authorize him to exclude those imperatives and reduce them to pseudo—imperatives, to hypothetic imperatives, or to empirical rules. In other passages of his works, Kant tends to the other solution of excluding the maxims of prudence from the pure practical reason, because they are maxims of self-love (Selbstliebe,) or of the practical reason empirically or pathologically conditioned, since for him every pleasure that precedes the moral law and is independent of it, is pathological, that is to say, it belongs to the senses, to the inferior appetitive faculty, not to that which is superior and to reason. Kant often returns to this point and always experiences the same embarrassments and contradictions, as is proved by the variety of the arguments to which he has recourse.[6]
Errors derived from it in his Ethic.