Vain polemic conducted with such an assumption against utilitarianism.
The polemic of autonomous Ethic against the heteronomous Ethic of utilitarianism has had a false and fruitless beginning, owing to this fiction of disinterested actions. In the belief of conquering and more than conquering, it has been attempted to show that man accomplishes some actions without any personal interest, whereas on the contrary an easy victory has in this way been prepared for the adversary. Utilitarianism, in fact, has always been able triumphantly to make the counter-demonstration that there is no action, be it as lofty as you will, that does not answer to a personal end. It is evident that the hero has his personal interest in the pro patria mori, just as the saint, who wishes to direct his soul toward humility, finds his own account in allowing himself to be abused, beaten and splashed with mud ("in this is perfect joy," said Francesco of Assisi to Frate Leone). Correct polemic should not enter upon the useless task of denying this evidence; it should on the contrary admit, as was admitted above, that there is no action which does not answer to an individual desire, since it is the individual that performs it, and the universal is always obliged to avail itself of individuals. But when this point has been conceded and admitted, it will prove, as was proved above, that the useful action can either remain merely personal or progress to the action that is universal-personal, ethical-useful. And the ethical-useful action itself is precisely the new spiritual category that the utilitarian does not see.
Actions morally indifferent, obligatory, supererogatory, etc. Critique.
A second erroneous but unavoidable consequence of the conception of useful and moral as coordinated concepts is that while, according to that theory, there can be ethical actions economically disinterested or indifferent, so there can be actions that are useful and morally indifferent. The indifferent would not be those that are merely economic, and, therefore, neither moral nor immoral, which we have recognized as the necessary precedent of moral actions, reappearing always when a return is made to the state of innocence, or as soon as the moral conscience is abolished or suspended. They would on the contrary be economic actions that should persist as such, that is, as ingenuous and amoral, when the moral consciousness is already kindled, and consequently in the very circle of such a conscientiousness. They are altogether inadmissible when thus conceived, and to have admitted them is equivalent to annulling morality, as the recognition of the right of subjects to rebel at their pleasure would be to annul sovereignty, or a burlesque contract containing the clause that each party should be free not to observe the other clauses agreed upon, at his pleasure. Indifferent actions do not exist, either for economy or for morality, and those to which such a character is generally attributed are, as we know, indifferentiated, not indifferent, and always differentiable when more closely examined. Only he who places the useful and the moral, side by side with one another, separate and impenetrable, is of necessity led to conceive of useful actions morally indifferent, and as such licit or permissible. Hence it also happens that moral actions also seem to be obligatory compared with the first; and that, in order to obtain equilibrium at the other extremity, ultramoral or more than moral actions, called meritorious or supererogatory, are placed side by side with obligatory actions that hold the mean. But morality does not grant leave not to do, nor prizes for doing more than was required; it simply imposes doing, doing always what is morally good, always realizing the universal, in ordinary as in extraordinary life, on the occasions that occur every day, every hour, every minute, as in those that occur every year, every ten years, every century. Nothing is indifferent to economy in its sphere and nothing to morality in its sphere: in it, economic actions with their premoral character do not persist, but only moral actions subsist. Economicity is certainly the concrete form of morality; but it is never an element that possesses a value of its own in the moral life.
Comparison with the relation of art and philosophy.
A comparison with the theoretic activity will serve to make clearer this criticism of the licit or morally indifferent. Artistic intuitions or expressions are neither true nor false philosophically, so much so that Philosophy, if it wish to exist, must also become concrete itself, as living speech, æsthetic form, intuition-expression, and place itself as an intuition among intuitions, though it be an intuition portans mysteria, that is, enclosing in itself the universal. But the appearance of philosophy reacts upon the pure intuitions, or upon the poetic representation of the world, in which existent and inexistent were indistinct; and the world of intuition transforms itself into the world of perceptions, in which those that once were poetic intuitions, are now all of them critical or reflective images penetrated by the concepts, divided into images of existence and images of possibility. In the world of perception or of history, no poetical element can subsist as such; what was a bewitching truth in the field of art, were it introduced into history, would give rise to disharmony and become changed into a repugnant lie, as we see is actually the case in history mingled with inventions and fables. History too assumes artistic form; but it cannot tolerate in its bosom art as an element standing alone. Utilitarian or economic volitions and the moral-economic volitions (universal and historical perceptions or representations of the practical) proceed in a manner perfectly analogous (intuitions of the practical). Moral indifference belongs to the first, when they are on this side of the moral conscience, but within this conscience they lose the right to innocence, as in history the pure intuitions, when they have become perceptions, lose the privilege that they possessed as pure intuitions. The ethical discrimination of the economic volitions, which takes place through the moral conscience, is then in full correspondence with the historical discrimination of the æsthetic intuitions, which takes place through the logical conscience.
Other erroneous conceptions of modes of action.
We owe to the false conception by coordination, not only the two monstrous little concepts of disinterested actions and of those that are morally indifferent, licit, or permissive, but others also, which have been deduced by means of a somewhat different casuistic from the same general hypothesis. Indeed, in the preceding case, useful and moral, posited as apart and parallel, were maintained one extraneous to the other and at peace between themselves. But nothing forbade that warlike plans should be attributed to those two entities, just as when two coordinate animal species are posited, we may suppose, either that the individuals of each one mind their own affairs and allow the individuals of the other species to live and to prosper in peace, or that the one takes to persecuting the other, sometimes injuring or destroying it and sometimes being by it injured or destroyed. Thus were and are obtained concepts of moral anti-economic actions and of anti-economic moral actions, of immoral economic actions, and of economic immoral actions, four concepts which are all four to be rejected. Moral action can never be accomplished at a loss: morality is for the moral man the supreme advantage in the situation in which he finds himself, and it would be erroneous to measure it by comparison with what an individual without morality would do in the same situation, for, as we know, individual and situation are all one, in such a way that a like comparison is impossible. In a similar manner, an anti-economic action can never be moral; at the most it will not even be amoral, or will not even posit the primary and generic condition of morality, that is, it will not be action, but inert contemplation. An immoral action can never be economic, because immorality implies internal disagreement and strife between one volition directed to the universal and another directed to the merely individual, hence the result will be practical inconclusion and infecundity, dissatisfaction and remorse; that is to say, just the opposite of utility and economicity. In like manner, an economic action can never be immoral: at the most (when it is merely an economic action), it will be amoral.
Pleasure and the economic activity, happiness and virtue.
The bond of unity and distinction that exists between the concepts of the useful and the moral and the consequent negation of the formula of coordination, help to solve in a definite way the intricate questions relating to pleasure and morality, happiness and virtue.