But the fact is that they have already been declared of a different nature by the utilitarians themselves. No one, indeed, will have been deceived with the ingenious phraseology excogitated: well-understood interest is no longer mere self-interest; the egoism of species is not egoism, durable pleasure is not mere pleasure. The difference between the one term and the other is not quantitative, and even where a greater quantity is talked of, a greater duration, a greater number, arithmetical definitions are not posited, but symbols pointing to qualitative differences. There is a difference, not of complexity but of nature, between the action of Cæsar Borgia and that of Giordano Bruno; there is no common measure between baseness and moral elevation as there is between undulating plains and mountains. The two series, of empirical utilitarian concepts and of empirical moral concepts, are not only irreducible to a single series, but remain obstinately distinct and irreducible. All that can be done, and has been done, is to unify them verbally; and in this the utilitarians have shown themselves as bold as it was possible to be in so miserable an enterprise. But the identity or similarity of words does not suffice to cancel the profound distinctions of things.
Attempt to explain them as facts either extraneous to the practical or irrational and stupid.
There would have been an immediate passage from the consciousness of the puerility of such identifications to the recognition of a distinct ethical form, if purpose and prejudice had not made resistance, prompting, on the contrary, the search for new expedients for setting themselves free in theory from the tedious and recurring phantom of morality. On this occasion also these expedients must have been just two: that is, to declare morality or concept extraneous to the practical, or intrinsic to it indeed, but contrary. The first was attempted, but feebly, when morality was spoken of as the fantasticality of poets, as the dream or rosy illusion caressed in life. No attention was paid to the fact that what the poet imagines cannot be contradictory and absurd, but must indeed be founded in the reality of life and in the nature of things; and that morality is not the æsthetic form in which it is reproduced and represented, but practical form or action. But the unmaintainability of this attempt was too evident for its success. The other expedient, on the contrary, has always had and still has great success. This turns morality into a practical contradictory concept, that is, into something certainly practical, but without motive, incoherent, and in contradiction to the healthy development of the practical. It is true that it is usually enunciated in very different words from those used by us. They speak as follows: What is called a good and virtuous action is nothing but the product of the association between certain acts that are for us the means to a pleasure, and that pleasure itself; so that gradually, even where the primitive pleasure is absent, those acts are sought and repeated for themselves, as though in themselves pleasurable. The savage fought against the enemies who assailed his tribe, that he might not be made a slave or sacrificed to the idol of another tribe, that is to say, in order to defend his personal liberty or his life; but later on, man, forgetting that the tribe or the city or the State were simple means for protecting life and goods, defends them for themselves and allows himself to be despoiled and slain for his country. In the same way (to employ the classical example), money is first sought as a means to enjoyment, and to form a supply for procuring a life more comfortable and secure; but by degrees he who amasses money turns in his soul the means into the end, and becomes avaricious, that is, he finds delight in the mere possession of money, and sacrifices for that all his other joys, even an easy life, food, house and sleep, which he originally intended that money should obtain for him. Morality arises entirely from a similar process of association between means and end, and the case of the miser explains by analogy every act of virtue that cannot be directly reduced to simple pleasure and individual utility.
Associationism and evolutionism. Critique.
Now the association here discussed is neither that of logic nor of æsthetic, nor valid association, synthesis, but irrational and fallacious association. It is only possible to exchange means for end as the result of a bad association of ideas: therefore that association is folly and stupidity, as the miser adduced as an example is stupid and foolish, being called "miser" precisely for this reason, with the intention of blaming him (for this word does not mean "economic" or "provident"). And behold! morality should be defined as that which is practically irrational, foolish, stupid, the product of illusion and confusion, or the contrary of the practical activity, which is clear-sightedness, rationality, wisdom. Thus defined, it is at the same time annulled. Indeed, irrationality is that which is condemned to be perpetually subjected to the rational; and what is called the moral man, if he were nothing but a false associator of ideas, would be constantly confuted by the man of good sense, by the utilitarian, who would prevent him from committing the stupidity of sacrificing himself for his children, for his country, or for knowledge; or, were he to persist, would cover him with contempt and ridicule. The fear that to discover its origin would be tantamount to abolishing morality would therefore be perfectly justified in this new sense also; or better, it would not be a question of a fear, but of a fact: morality would be in a state of progressive annulment, as the effect of increasing instruction, both in the individual and in society. It has been replied that neither this fear nor this fact arises, because that false association is indissoluble, being a product of heredity, or, to speak of it in proper terms, it is hereditary stupidity (evolutionistic utilitarianism). But whether inherited or acquired, it is so dissoluble as to be dissolved in the theory proposed: lux facta est, and no one succeeds in obscuring it any longer. If, notwithstanding that pretended light, morality be not dissipated, if recourse be had to the miserable subterfuge of insuperable heredity (which is surpassed at the very moment in which its origin is made clear), this means to say that, for the moralist himself, morality is not the irrational, but something very rational. He does not succeed in identifying it with the merely individually useful, but neither can he reject it as the pure and simple negative of this. And since he does not wish to abandon the utilitaristic hypothesis, there is no other path open to him but that of recourse to mystery.
A desperate attempt: theological utilitarianism and mystery.
This is precisely what happens in the last form of utilitarianism, which has seemed to be capricious and extravagant, but is on the contrary profoundly auto-critical, since it reveals the ultimate essence and defect of the doctrine: what is known as theological utilitarianism. Human actions are always inspired by what is merely useful to the individual, and if a number of these seems to diverge from this criterion, this happens because account is not taken of an actual fact, by means of which even the actions which seem to be divergent are reduced to the common measure. This given fact is the life beyond this world, in which God rewards or punishes him who has obeyed or disobeyed his will, in the life of this world. He who in this life seems to resist the impulse of his personal advantage and performs sacrifices of every sort, even to that of his own life, follows equally with the others his personal advantage; and believing in God, in the immortality of the soul, and in the reward and the punishment that await him, he regulates his action according to these actual facts. Intuitionistic Ethic, which places a moral duty at the side of individual pleasure, but indeducible from it, is in reality deduced from individual pleasure, and is likewise turned into rational or utilitarian Ethic by means of the transcendental datum. In this way the solution makes shipwreck in mystery; since God, immortality, the other life, the divine command, punishments and rewards, cannot be defined and justified by means of thought and concept. When utilitarianism becomes theological, it abandons the philosophical field, confessing by so doing its philosophical defeat. And to philosophical consideration the distinction between the individually useful and that which is also superindividual shines out ever more clearly after the many vain attacks of utilitarianism, the affirmation of the moral form, as united and distinct from the utilitarian; the autonomy of Ethic against every form of utilitarianism and every heteronomous Ethic.