A Review of the Systems of Ethics Founded on the Theory of Evolution

by Cora May Williams

Mr. Stephen's analysis of the development of altruism from egoism, while in the main true and one of the most minute analyses on this subject that we possess, opens, through its ambiguity of terms, the way to inaccuracy of thought and to errors of theory into which I am not at all sure that the author does not himself fall at some points. Starting with an implied definition of sympathy as actual "feeling with" other sentient beings through the intellectual comprehension of their emotions, and acknowledging that sympathy in this sense may not lead directly to altruism, he uses the same word also, later in the analysis, in the higher sense, and at some points appears to confound the two meanings; so that, as there is a similar ambiguity in the use of the word "idiot," or "moral idiot," in the same connection, his theory seems to fall into the mistake of asserting the normal association of intellectual comprehension with altruism. He writes:—

"It is not more true that to think of a fire is to revive the sensations of warmth than it is true that to think of a man is to revive the emotions and thoughts which we attribute to him. To think of him in any other sense is to think of the mere doll or statue, the outside framework, not of the organized mass of consciousness which determines all the relations in which he is most deeply interesting to us." "The primary sympathy is, of course, modified in a thousand ways—by the ease or difficulty with which we can adopt his feelings; by the attractiveness or repulsiveness of the feelings revealed; by the degree in which circumstances force us into coöperation or antagonism; and by innumerable incidental associations which make it pleasant or painful to share his feelings. If by sympathy we mean this power of vicarious emotion, it may give rise to antipathy, to hatred, rivalry, and jealousy, and even to the diabolical perversion of pleasure in another's pain."[167] "The pain given by your pain may simply induce me to shut my eyes. The Pharisee who passed by on the other side may have disliked the sight of the wounded traveller as much as the good Samaritan. Indeed, the sight of suffering often directs irritation against the sufferer. Dives is often angry with Lazarus for exposing his sores before a respectable mansion, and sometimes goes so far as to think, illogically perhaps, that the beggar must have cultivated his misery in order to irritate the nerves of his neighbors. To give the order: 'Take away that damned Lazarus,' may be as natural an impulse as to say: 'Give him the means of curing his ailments.'"[168] "To believe in the existence of a sentient being is to believe that it has feelings which may persist when I am not aware of them. A real belief, again, implies that, at the moment of belief, I have representative sensations or emotions corresponding to those which imply the actual presence of the object. Again, a material object has an interest only so far as it is a condition of some kind of feeling, and, when the sympathies are not concerned, of some feeling of my own, whether implying or not implying any foretaste of the future. To take any interest in any material object, except in this relation, is unreasonable, as it is unreasonable to desire food which cannot nourish or fire which cannot warm. I want something which has by hypothesis no relation to my wants. The same is true of the sentient object so long, and only so long, as I do not take its sentience into account. But to take the sentience into account is to sympathize, or at least the sympathy is implied in the normal or only possible case. The only condition necessary for the sympathy to exist and to be capable therefore of becoming a motive, is that I should really believe in the object, and have, therefore, representative feelings. To believe in it is to feel for it, to have sympathies which correspond to my representations, less vivid as the object is more distant and further from the sphere of my possible influence, but still real and therefore effective motives. Systematically to ignore these relations, then, is to act as if I were an egoist in the extremest sense, and held that there was no consciousness in the world except my own. But really to carry out this principle is to be an idiot, for an essential part of the world as interesting to me is constituted by the feelings of other conscious agents, and I can only ignore their existence at the cost of losing all the intelligence which distinguishes me from the lower animal."[169] A similar use of the word "idiot" occurs in the following passage with regard to the relations of moral action to conviction: "It is a simple 'objective' fact that a man acts rightly or wrongly in a given case, and a fact which may be proved to him; and, further, though the proof will be thrown away if he is a moral idiot, that is, entirely without the capacities upon which morality is founded, the proof is one which must always affect his character if we suppose the truth to be assimilated, and not the verbal formula to be merely learned by rote."[170] "To learn really to appreciate the general bearings of moral conduct is to learn to be moral in the normally constituted man." Here the author adds, however, "though we must always make the condition that a certain aptitude of character exists."[171] Again he writes: "But it remains to be admitted that there is apparently such a thing as pleasure in the pain of others—pure malignity—which we call 'devilish' to mark that it is abnormal and significant of a perverted nature."[172] And in the same connection—where he is, at first, seemingly intent on proving only the normal connection of pain with the sight of suffering, admitting that this sympathetic pain may lead to brutality instead of altruistic action towards the sufferer—he says: "Sympathy is the natural and fundamental fact. Even the most brutal of mankind are generally sympathetic so far as to feel rather pain than pleasure at the sight of suffering. The scum of a civilized population gathered to pick pockets on a race-course would be pained at the sight of a child in danger of being run over or brutally assaulted by a ruffian, and would be disposed to rescue it, or at least to cheer a rescuer, unless their spontaneous emotion were overpowered by some extrinsic sentiment."[173] And finally: "The direct and normal case is that in which sympathy leads to genuine altruism, or feeling in accordance with that which it reflects."[174]

The terms in these passages are thus evidently very loosely used, and the charge above made is, I think, substantiated,—that the author himself finally falls into the error following upon a confusion of the various meanings, and comes to assert what he elsewhere distinctly denies, namely, the normal connection of intellect and morality, of the comprehension of suffering with that form of sympathy which issues in altruistic action. The problem is an interesting one, and it may be well for us to look into it a little further.

During the last few years a number of books have been written in which the attempt has been made to prove the general physical, and especially the cerebral, and so the intellectual inferiority of a large number of criminals. There may be a difference of opinion as to the value of exact weights and measures except in so far as they demonstrate an actual nervous deformity of some sort; and it may be said that the cases examined for distinctly cerebral defect are too few to admit of the formation of any universal, definite, theory or law. But some degree of importance must assuredly be attached, by the unprejudiced reader, to the more purely psychological evidence obtained in many cases, as well as to the evidence of the tendency to brain-disease often found in the direct line of descent. Indeed, in the case of some of the photographs issued with Lombroso's "L'Homme Criminel," not more than a glance is needed to convince one that the possessors of such heads and faces cannot be normal men and women. To this testimony from the criminologists may be added that of many eminent specialists in mental diseases, whose evidence goes to show the degeneration of the moral sense in cases of brain-disease. Maudesley says, for instance, of moral feeling: "Whoever is destitute of it is, to that extent, a defective being; he marks the beginning of race-degeneracy; and if propitious influence do not chance to check or to neutralize the morbid tendency, his children will exhibit a further degree of degeneracy, and be actual morbid varieties. Whether the particular outcome of the morbid strain shall be vice, or madness, or crime, will depend much on the circumstances of life." "When we make a scientific study of the fundamental meaning of those deviations from the sound type which issue in insanity and crime, by searching inquiry into the laws of their genesis, it appears that these forms of human degeneracy do not lie so far asunder as they are commonly supposed to do. Moreover, theory is here confirmed by observation; for it has been pointed out by those who have made criminals their study, that they oftentimes spring from families in which insanity, epilepsy, or some allied neurosis exists, that many of them are weak-minded, epileptic, or actually insane, and that they are apt to die from diseases of the nervous system and from tubercular diseases."[175] To the history proper of the Jukes, Dugdale has appended a series of tables giving further information as to the stock, environment, and present condition of some two hundred and thirty-three criminals committed for various crimes, each of which crimes heads a separate list. These lists are decidedly interesting, particularly as affording us some considerable information with regard to psychological characteristics and environment, under the headings: "Neglected Children," "Orphans," "Habitual Criminals," "First Offenders," "Reformable," "Hopeless," etc. From the table of percentages we remark that, in the "Neurotic Stock," the highest percentage (40·47) is reached in arson and the crimes against persons, or crimes of impulse, as Dugdale terms them, while 23·03 is the percentage of neurotic stock in the whole number of criminals examined. "This close relationship between nervous disorders and crime," says Dugdale, "runs parallel with the experience of England, where 'the ratio of insane to sane criminals is thirty-four times as great as the ratio of lunatics to the whole population of England, or, if we take half the population to represent the adults which supply the convict prisons, we shall have the criminal lunatics in excess in the high proportion of seventeen to one.'" Dugdale further quotes from Dr. Bruce Thomson, surgeon to the General Prison of Scotland, the following words: "On a close acquaintance with criminals, of eighteen years' standing, I consider that nine in ten are of inferior intellect, but that all are excessively cunning." Dr. Thomson says also: "In all my experience, I have never seen such an accumulation of morbid appearances as I witness in the post-mortem examinations of the prisoners who die here. Scarcely one of them can be said to die of one disease, for almost every organ of the body is more or less diseased; and the wonder to me is that life could have been supported in such a diseased frame."

But with regard to this last quotation, it may be remarked that, although many modern students of crime tend to look upon the general diseased condition of body among criminals as the cause of their criminality, it is generally, as a matter of fact, a cumulative growth, vicious acts appearing now as condition, now as result, in its increase. Vice is directly connected with disease, and crime against others, even where it does not itself directly involve vice, is still likely to be connected with it, since the man who is immoral in one direction is not likely to be restrained from immorality in what is ordinarily considered a direction of lesser wrong; and the self-gratification of vice always presents a temptation to the man of coarser fibre. Dugdale notices that pauperism often appears in the younger members of a family where crime appears in the elder branches, his explanation being that crime is a sign of comparative vigor, pauperism of greater physical weakness.

We have found some connection between intellectual incapacity and moral lack in the shape of crime, but the cases are extreme ones. The question is not: Are the extremes of criminality connected with mental incapacity? but, Is the power of intellectual comprehension, is intelligence, always associated with sympathy and altruism? Is the connection of these two general? Or, conversely: Is lack of sympathy and altruism in general a sign of mental incapacity, of the power of comprehension for another's suffering?

The individual may be supposed to be naturally endowed with a certain basis of tendency, which, as coördinate with a nervous organization that, as organization, is of definite nature, is also definite. I do not intend, here or elsewhere, to lay especial stress on the physical, as distinguished from the psychical; merely, it is convenient for reference. The individual character and life must be the continual progressive issue of this basis of tendency or capacity and the developing and modifying factors of environment. Individuals will, therefore, but in very different degrees and manners, reflect the moral standard of the society as organization, the class, and the family, to which they belong, the importance assumed by the class or family relations being according to the closeness and duration of association, and the natural aptitude of the individual for one or another sort of influence. Aside from altruistic considerations, the individual will find it to his advantage to conform to the standards of these environments, at least in a considerable degree. The standards may, however, conflict, so that there is also a conflict of advantages. Moreover, circumstances may arise such that conformity to all or any of these standards presents much greater disadvantage than advantage, involving great sacrifice, which may reach even to personal destruction. But while a single anti-social act to avert personal destruction may involve greater advantage to the individual, as life represents an advantage over death, and while such an act is more an advantage and less a disadvantage as it involves less conflict with social standards (if it is the theft of food, for instance, rather than murder), any continued course of crime in so-called civilized society must be attended with many risks to the evil-doer, and present gain may mean future loss of a much higher degree. Deeds conflicting with general social standards are punished by penalties which are larger as the conflict is greater in the eye of the state. The individual who lays himself liable to legal punishment or social ostracism is foolish as well as, in very many cases, bad; of course, it is possible that his conduct may rise above the moral standards as well as that it may fall below them. But we are now considering cases where it is, by the assumption, supposed to fall below them. It is easy to perceive, from this standpoint, that great and persistent criminals are likely to be of inferior intellect, as well as wanting in moral aptitude, although, whatever reasoning capacity they possess being developed in the line of their own interest in their accustomed occupation, they may appear to the more moral, who are not practised in this direction, to possess a high degree of cunning.

The honest man has generally a better chance than the habitual criminal, however small his chance may be. Further, education of any sort, which is also intellectual elevation, gives the individual better chances of earning his own living honestly, and so renders the advantages on this side greater, and also endows with the power of perceiving these advantages. But these are only general truths, applying, again, to extreme cases. There may be cases in which there seems, at least, to be no choice left between crime and a life continually on the verge of starvation; and though the crime means also continual risk, and higher risk as the crime is greater and so, in general, more lucrative, the advantage may still be reckoned by the individual as on its side. In this case, the individual may discover, in the end, that his calculation was mistaken; but the mistake may not be so great, the balance of disadvantage on the side of conformity with social standards so excessive, as to prove him below the average of intellect in his mistaking. The wisest men make many mistakes in calculating the results of their action. Again, the cleverer a man is, the greater is his power to cope with the risk of detection and to avoid it. It may be objected that the single individual cannot hope to compete continually with the organized action of all society, and that the criminal must, at times, submit to some degree of punishment, even if escaping its worst phases. But if he feels no shame at the disgrace of the punishment, it may not mean to him the greater disadvantage.

But here we come round to the altruistic and moral emotions, for shame is present only where the individual has a desire to please, and is pained at the disapproval of others; that is, shame implies and requires, in the degree in which it exists, social and altruistic capacity. Furthermore, when we come to examine the concept of "advantage," we find that it is as relative as that of "end," and will be judged according to the individual predilections; to the non-sympathetic, shameless man it is an advantage to "get on" at whatever cost to others; to the moral man no gain appears an advantage at the expense of principle. And, as there are all degrees of altruism in the bases of character of different individuals, so the advantage, in any particular case, will lie at very different points according to the individual mind reflecting on it. Only the general truths may be asserted, that, even to the man of less than the average moral aptitude, great punishment must appear a disadvantage, while even to the man of considerable moral principle death for the sake of his convictions is a thing to be hesitated at.

We may return to view the question in the light of the general facts of social evolution. We found that only the general assertion could be made, that the advantages of coöperation, the disadvantages of strife and discord, increase with the closer relations of men, and that the adoption of coöperation follows this line of advantage by individual choice, and by the disadvantage under which the less social as the less fit, labor, the latter tending gradually to disappear leaving the field to the more social. Thus the whole progress is the result of the will of the human being, as well as of the other forces of nature; it is only as the individual chooses, that progress is possible. But lower types survive long beside the more progressive, higher ones. The individual is not so reasonable that he always perceives his own more enduring advantage, or always chooses it even when he perceives it; he may choose momentary gratification at the acknowledged risk, and even with the certainty, of great future loss. Nor can it be averred that the individual always suffers seriously from action at variance with even the average standard; simply, the line of survival gradually changes in favor of altruism, so that escape is less frequent and less probable; and the lines of greatest deviation from the altruism demanded at any period by the line of advance tend to disappear; but the altruism demanded by any line of advance is not, up to the present time, an absolute altruism, nor do all deviations from it result in destruction to the individual even in extreme cases. The fact of the growing disadvantage of selfishness, and its destructive tendency, remains, nevertheless. It may be expressed in another form in the statement that power of all sorts is increased by civilization, and where a coördinate increase of self-restraint does not accompany the increased power, it must lead to destruction, either in the case of the individual, or if not so abruptly, then in the case of his descendants. The closer contact of human beings and increased knowledge and coöperation mean growing opportunity of good or evil, to self and others. The destructive forces lie as well in the workings of social organization, in the will of man, as in nature outside man. Legal justice, public opinion, and the opinion of the smaller circle of personal friends and acquaintances, all have their part. Any degree of social instinct developed in the course of social evolution only assists in rendering social punishments of all sorts the more felt; and thus each increment of advance assists in further advance. Men who persist in action antagonistic to social demands, action which they themselves acknowledge to be immoral, may yet feel the condemnation of society so much, that, even while yet persisting, they destroy their vitality by alcoholism or other excesses to drown regret and remorse; habit chains them, in many cases, where the condemnation of others reaches them only late. But the whole process of social evolution is one of very gradual assimilation, and neither in the world as a whole, in the nation or race, or in the tribe, clan, family, locality, or class, is it one of equal advance on all sides. The coöperation adopted may be, at different points, that of individuals against individuals, of tribes against tribes, of nations against nations, or of classes against classes.