The useful as the egoistic or immoral.
Since then, owing to the unalterably practical character of the utilitarian fact, it was not possible to insist upon its reduction to the technical, and since, on the other hand, it was not desired to recognize it as a practical category side by side with the practical category of morality, they have tried to think of it as something certainly practical, but at the same time of little value, to beware of it, to combat it, to free ourselves from it. "Useful" has in this way become synonymous with wilfulness, with individual caprice, with will more or less perverted, and (looking upon immorality as the individual I, shut up in itself and rebelling against the universal) with egoism. This theory is supported by certain common modes of speech, in which the moral man is opposed to the man intent upon what is useful to him as an individual, the ethical to the economic life. But it is a question of phrases, true,' perhaps, in a certain sense, but inexact when understood or interpreted as affirmations of a contest between morality and utility.
Critique: the useful is amoral.
We discover at once that the contest is inexistent, by merely thinking of the case already mentioned, of the man in whom the moral conscience is not developed or has been suppressed, or of the case—limit called innocence. What is done in innocence responds, no doubt, to individual pleasure, and so to what is useful for the individual, as he feels it in the given circumstances: were this not so, what is done would not be done. But innocence is not immoral on this account. It will be amoral, because it is merely individual volition deprived of the light of the eternal; it will never be immoral. Thus (to make use of the comparison and analogy of the theoretic activity) the images that the poet creates will be without philosophy, but will not for this reason be anti-philosophical. Because, were that so, they would have to be partially philosophical, that is to say, to enter into strife with philosophy; but there is no such strife, and, therefore, those images, although philosophically not true, are none the less not philosophically false. Yet they are theoretical acts, in the same way that philosophy is a theoretical act. The philosophical innocence of the poet does not change his intuitive knowledge into bad philosophical knowledge, into a negative of philosophy.—Further, the useful not only is not the negative of morality, but, as we know, is also a fact that unites itself very well with morality, as the word is joined to the thought, making it concrete and palpable, so much so that thought without words is impossible. What honourable man would tolerate being judged disuseful? What moral action would be truly moral, were it not at the same time useful? The good action is good, because it is not bad, that is, it absolutely excludes the bad at the point in which it becomes effective; but certainly it is not so, because disuseful; indeed, in being good, it is also useful, because it absolutely comprehends the useful in itself at the point in which it becomes effective. The union of morality with utility suffices to eliminate the concept of the useful as a negative. Certainly negative and positive do unite to give rise to becoming and to development; but their union is that of strife, not of concord.
The useful as ethical minimum.
The third way of eliminating the concept of the useful from Philosophy, or from the Philosophy of the practical, is that which makes of it a concept of ethical description, or an empirical and psychological concept designating certain groups of very minute ethical facts, the rudimentary ethical consciousness. Hence the illusion of the existence of volitional acts indifferent in respect to morality. These acts are really indifferentiated for the mind that is examining them, which sometimes does not take the trouble to do so minutely, save when such an examination is seriously undertaken, and then they are always differentiated into good or bad. Thus it generally said that eating and sleeping, playing at cards or at billiards, are things that appertain, not to morality, but to individual utility, and that each one may conduct himself as he wills in respect to them, whereas individual choice is excluded when it is necessary to fulfil one's own obligations of social work or of respecting the life of one's neighbour. But if we observe attentively, we see that also in eating or in sleeping, in playing cards or billiards, one acts morally or immorally, since, for example, it is immoral to ruin one's health with eating too much, or with sleeping too little, or to corrupt soul and intellect with card-playing and dawdling in billiard-rooms, when one can do something better.
Critique: the useful is premoral.
But the useful is none of all these things; it is not the complex of ethical micro-organisms, in which we discover with the microscope the same facts of life and of death that we observe with the naked eye in macro-organisms. No microscope will ever discern in it the oppositions of moral good and evil, because these oppositions are not really there; there are only those of utilitarian or economic good and evil. For the useful is not the moral minimum, but the premoral. In this case it is a question, not of approximative, but of rigorous difference; not psychological, but philosophical.
A desperate attempt: the useful as inferior practical conscience. Confirmation of the autonomy of the useful.
Finally, it is necessary to consider the attempt to present the utilitarian conscience as a moral conscience, different and inferior to another moral conscience placed over it, not as a new mode of eliminating the concept of the useful, by absorbing it in that of morality, but as a confession of the autonomy of that moment of the spirit. It would be moral, because there is no contradiction to be found in it that can cause it to be judged immoral, and if it be so judged, this happens because it is looked at from the point of view of the superior conscience, or because the superior conscience is erroneously transported into the inferior. But this has importance precisely because it is not moral, and because the value that it is admitted to possess, far from being morality, is spirituality; that is to say, it constitutes a peculiar spiritual value, different from morality. "Better a will of some sort than no will at all" is a common saying which means that prior to morality, there is another and more elementary spiritual demand. The distinction of the two consciences, then, is philosophical, not one of more or less, a distinction of degrees, but not of empirical degrees, which coincides with our conclusion. Thus, to return to the usual comparison, the poetical figuration is true, and can only be judged false by him who looks upon it from a philosophical point of view, or himself falsifies it by turning it into a bad philosopheme. But the truth of that figuration is not philosophical, and remains purely and simply poetical truth. It will be said that morality is implied in utilitarian volition, because, when the individually useful is posited, the universal, which will dominate and correct it, is promoted, in the same way as it has been said that philosophy is implied in the æsthetic intuition, since by positing the individual imagination is posited the claim of the universal, which surpasses and renders it untrue. But since the æsthetic conscience is distinguished from the philosophical, precisely because that which in the latter is explicit is only implicit in the former, so, in like manner, the utilitarian conscience is distinguished from the moral conscience, because that morality which becomes explicit and effective in the second, is only implicit or actually inexistent in the first. The difference between implicit and explicit is another way of enunciating the distinction between the two consciousnesses or practical forms, the autonomy of both being thus recognized.