The distinction of the two forms, well known to the inner consciousness, will appear more clearly when we examine the reasons for which the one or the other of them has been denied. We say the one or the other, because we have now freed ourselves from the obligation of refuting the theses that have their origin in presuppositions, both materialistic and intellectualiste, and therefore deny the moral and economic activities, either because they do not admit the concept of spiritual activity itself, or because they do not admit the more special conception of practical activity. The greater number of those who deny morality are nothing but mechanicists, empiricists, materialists, and positivists, to whose brains not only do economy and morality appear inconceivable, but also art and science and, in short, every spiritual value. They ask: Where is this moral principle of which you discourse? Point it out to us with your finger. But they also ask: Where are the categories or the pure concept? Where is the æsthetic synthesis and the pure intuition? Where is the a priori of perception and of history? Where are all these fine things you talk of as though they existed, and that we neither see nor touch?—And for our part, we can henceforth let them say what they will, only praying in our hearts that God may illuminate them and make them discover (at least when they are near to death and the dense veil of their bodies has become more thin) that if the universals were things that it was possible to perceive as we do individual things, they would not be universals.
The two possible negations.
When the double assumption of a spiritual activity and of a practical form of it has been admitted, it is not possible to do otherwise than either to deny the economic for the moral form, or the moral for the economic. What might seem to be a third possibility, that of denying the two forms, is reducible to the first, because, when the distinction of the terms has been suppressed, there remains nothing but the practical activity considered in general, which coincides with the individual and economic activity. We shall begin then with the examination of the negation of morality for economy, which is the thesis of utilitarianism. Those same materialists have recourse to utilitarianism when they wish to present some sort of a Philosophy of the practical, but with what little right they avail themselves of such aid, is clear from what has already been said: the useful is always value and teleology, and materialism, in all its sub-forms and varieties, is incapable of positing the smallest concept of value and finality.
The thesis of utilitarianism against the existence of moral acts.
Utilitarianism affirms that no other volition exists save that which answers to the merely individual determination, or, as it is also expressed, to the pleasure of the individual, understanding by pleasure, not the generic pleasure that also accompanies moral satisfaction in the individual, but that which is exclusively individual. Actions, therefore, as it says, are what concern it, not their motives, that is, the motive of the individuality of the act abstractly conceived, not that of the spirit become concrete in it; thus, not killing for fear of punishment and not killing because repugnant to one's own conscience, become the same thing. They are the consequences of different conditions, but in both cases of the same motive, which is personal convenience. And as there does not exist a pleasure that cannot be and is not substituted for a different pleasure, so there is not an action, however moral it be called, that cannot be interrupted and changed, when different conditions present themselves. Every action, every man has his price: it is all a matter of discovering what that price is. He who seems to place the glory of his country above all other aspirations, although he cannot, for example, be corrupted by money, by vanity, or by pleasure, will yet always have in him some weak point that a more expert corrupter will discover or be able to discover; and when the discovery has been made and the suitable transaction proposed, the glory of his country will be abandoned, because it has been well compensated for by something else. This way of looking upon human actions has appeared to be concrete, exact, rational; and the utilitarian theory, if it have often been called hedonistic, and sometimes even æsthetic (understanding by æsthetic, individual pleasure), is also wont to be decorated with the name of ethical or practical rationalism, rational morality.
Difficulties arising from the presence of these.
All would go very well, and the practical activity would in this way be entirely explained and unified, if we did not at every moment of life run against the distinction between mere pleasure and duty, between the useful and the honest action, and if there did not arise in our conscience an invincible distinction between the things that have a price and those that have none, and if an abyss did not differentiate among apparently similar actions that which has a merely utilitarian from that which has a moral motive. The utilitarians even (who, although bad philosophers, are men, and as such carry at the bottom of their souls a far better philosophy than they profess in books and in the schools) are not able to suppress that distinction in themselves and to deny all recognition to the power of morality, to which, as men, they submit at every moment. How then are they to behave? How are they to explain the genesis of that distinction which, by the premises that they have posited, cannot be other than illusion? What is there that gives effective existence to the fallacious category of morality, side by side with the veracious one of utility?
Attempt to explain them as quantitative distinctions.
There have been several attempts to solve that hard resisting term of morality. The first, which was logically bound to present itself, was that of considering facts called moral as nothing but empirical groups of utilitarian facts, and of explaining the false category as an hypostasis of those empirical groups, arbitrarily reduced to a rigorous and philosophical concept. Banking, usury, commerce, industry, agriculture, and labour are empirically distinguished, yet are all economic facts. Courage, prudence, temperance, chastity, justice, modesty are empirically distinguished, yet are all moral facts. Why not unite the two series, and recognize the unity and continuity of nature by the insertion among them of other types and terms? Morality is also utility, but the utility of the greater number; interest is interest, but well understood; pleasure is pleasure, but pleasure of greater duration and quantity, preferred to another less intense, or more fugitive; egoism, egoism of family, of race, of human race, egoism of species, altruism; eudemonism, but social eudemonism, enjoyment, but enjoyment of sympathy, utility, but utility of conforming, not to one's own individual judgment, but to that of public opinion. Thus are moral facts included in utilitarian, in the same way as the number a hundred thousand is not less a number than two or three and the others inferior to it, because it is composed of three and of two and of other numbers less than itself. Cæsar Borgia murders his brother and thus gets rid of a rival both in love and in politics, that is, he seeks his advantage; but Giordano Bruno also seeks his own advantage, and nothing else, when he allows himself to be burned in order to assert his philosophy, because, for one constituted as he, with that demoniacal fury of his for philosophical truth, the pyre must have seemed a very miserable and negligible thing, just as his brother's blood seemed to Cæsar Borgia. Call the one of these actions utility of a complexity of ten and the other utility of a complexity of a hundred, or give to the complexity a hundred the name of morality, of well-understood self-interest, of sympathy, of altruism, and so on, and to the complexity of ten that of utility, of individual interest, of egoism: the two actions will not thus have been declared of a different nature.
Critique.