We saw that conduct is distinguished from the totality of actions by the exclusion of purposeless actions; but during evolution this distinction arises by degrees. We trace up conduct to the vertebrates and through the vertebrates to man, and find that here the adjustments of acts to ends are both more numerous and better than among lower mammals; and we find the same thing on comparing the doings of higher races of men with those of lower. These better adjustments favor, not only prolongation, but also increased amount of life.
And among these adjustments of acts to ends, there are not only such as further individual life but also, evolving with these, such as favor the life of the species. Race-maintaining conduct, like self-maintaining conduct, arises gradually out of that which cannot be called conduct. The multitudinous creatures of all kinds which fill the earth are engaged in a continuous struggle for existence, in which the adjustments of acts to ends, being imperfectly evolved, miss completeness because they cannot be made by one creature without other creatures being prevented from making them. This imperfectly evolved conduct introduces us, by antithesis, to conduct which is perfectly evolved,—such adjustments that each creature may make them without preventing other creatures making them also. The conditions of such conduct cannot exist in predatory savage life; nor can it exist where there remains antagonism between individuals forming a group, or between groups of individuals,—two traits of life necessarily associated, since the nature which prompts international aggression prompts aggression of individuals on one another also. Hence the limit of evolution can be reached by conduct only in permanently peaceful societies; can be approached only as war decreases and dies out.
The principle of beneficence is not derived by Spencer from the principle of freedom, in "Social Statics"; and here, as in the latter book, Spencer has difficulty with it. He says: "A gap in this outline must now be filled up. There remains a further advance not yet even hinted. For beyond so behaving that each achieves his ends without preventing others from achieving their ends, the members of a society may give mutual help in the achievement of ends. And if either indirectly by industrial coöperation, or directly by volunteered aid, fellow-citizens can make easier for one another the adjustments of acts to ends, then their conduct assumes a still higher phase of evolution; since whatever facilitates the making of adjustments by each increases the totality of the adjustments made, and serves to render the lives of all more complete."
Thus, then, says Spencer, "we have been led to see that Ethics has for its subject-matter that form which universal conduct assumes during the last stages of its evolution."
By comparing the meanings of a word in different connections, and observing what they have in common, we learn its essential significance. Material objects we are accustomed to designate as good or bad according as they are well or ill adapted to achieve prescribed ends. The good knife is one which will cut; the good gun is one which will carry far and true; and so on. So of inanimate actions, and so, also, of living things and actions. A good jump is a jump which, remoter ends ignored, well achieves the immediate purpose of a jump; and a stroke at billiards is called good when the movements are skilfully adjusted to the requirements. So too our use of the words good and bad with respect to conduct under its ethical aspects has regard to the efficiency or non-efficiency of the adjustments of acts to ends. This last truth is, through the entanglements of social relations, by which men's actions often simultaneously affect the welfares of self, of offspring, and of fellow-citizens, somewhat disguised. Nevertheless, when we disentangle the three orders of ends, and consider each separately, it becomes clear that the conduct which achieves each kind of end is regarded as relatively good; and conduct which fails to achieve it is regarded as relatively bad. The goodness ascribed to a man of business, as such, is measured by the activity and ability with which he buys and sells to advantage, and may coexist with a hard treatment of dependents which is reprobated. The ethical judgments we pass on such self-regarding acts are ordinarily little emphasized; partly because the promptings of the self-regarding desires, generally strong enough, do not need moral enforcement, and partly because the promptings of the other-regarding desires, less strong, do need moral enforcement. With regard to the second class of adjustments of acts to ends, which subserve the rearing of offspring, we no longer find any obscurity in the application of the words good and bad to them, according as they are efficient or inefficient. And most emphatic are the application of the words, in this sense, throughout the third division of conduct comprising the deeds by which men affect one another. Always, then, acts are good or bad, according as they are well or ill-adapted to ends. That is, good is the name we apply to the relatively more evolved conduct; and bad is the name we apply to that which is relatively less evolved; for we have seen that "evolution, tending ever towards self-preservation, reaches its limits when individual life is the greatest, both in length and breadth; and we now see that, leaving other ends aside, we regard as good the conduct furthering self-preservation, and as bad the conduct tending to self-destruction." With increasing power of maintaining individual life goes increasing power of perpetuating the species by fostering progeny; and the establishment of an associated state both makes possible and requires a form of conduct such that life may be completed in each and in his offspring, not only without preventing completion of it in others, but with furtherance of it in others; and this is the form of conduct most emphatically termed good. "Moreover, just as we saw that evolution becomes the highest possible when the conduct simultaneously achieves the greatest totality of life in self, in offspring, and in fellow-men; so here we see that the conduct called good rises to the conduct conceived as best, when it fulfils all three classes of ends at the same time."
Has this evolution been a mistake? The pessimist claims so, the optimist claims not. But there is one postulate in which both pessimists and optimists agree—namely, that it is evident that life is good or bad, according as it does, or does not, have a surplus of agreeable feeling; if a future life is included in the theory of either, the assumption is still the same, that life is a blessing or a curse according as existence, now considered in both worlds, contains more of pleasure or of pain; and the implication is therefore that conduct which conduces to the preservation of self, the family, and society, is good or bad in the same measure. "Thus there is no escape from the admission that conduct is good or bad according as its total effects are pleasurable or painful." So that if self-mutilation furthered life, and picking a man's pocket brightened his prospects, we should regard these acts as good. Approach to such a constitution as effects complete adjustment of acts to ends of every kind is, however, an approach to perfection, and therefore means approach to that which secures greater happiness. "Pleasure somewhere, at some time, to some being or beings, is an inexpugnable element of the conception" of moral aim.
Here follow criticisms of the religious school of morals, which bases its system on the will of God, and of the school of "pure intuitionists," who hold "that men have been divinely endowed with moral faculties." "It must be either admitted or denied that the acts called good and the acts called bad naturally conduce, the one to human well-being and the other to human ill-being. Is it admitted? Then the admission amounts to an assertion that the conduciveness is shown by experience; and this involves abandonment of the doctrine that there is no origin for morals apart from divine injunctions. Is it denied that acts classed as good and bad differ in their effects? Then it is tacitly affirmed that human affairs would go on just as well in ignorance of the distinction; and the alleged need for commandments from God disappears." To affirm that we know some things to be right and other things to be wrong, by virtue of a supernaturally given conscience; and thus tacitly to affirm that we do not otherwise know right from wrong, is tacitly to deny any natural relations between acts and results. For if there exist any such relations, then we may ascertain by induction, or deduction, or both, what these are. And if it be admitted that because of such natural relations happiness is produced by this kind of conduct, which is therefore to be approved; while misery is produced by that kind of conduct, which is therefore to be condemned; then it is admitted that the rightness or wrongness of actions is determinable, and must finally be determined, by the goodness or badness of the effects that flow from them, which is contrary to the hypothesis. Spencer also repeats and enlarges upon his formerly stated objections to utilitarianism as superficial: "The utilitarianism which recognizes only the principles of conduct reached by induction, is but preparatory to the utilitarianism which deduces these principles from the processes of life as carried on under established conditions of existence."
Every science begins by accumulating observations, and presently generalizes these empirically, but only when it reaches the stage at which its empirical generalizations are included in a rational generalization, does it become developed science. So with Ethics; a preparation in the simpler sciences is presupposed. It has a biological aspect; since it concerns certain effects, inner and outer, individual and social, of the vital changes going on in the highest type of animals. It has a psychological aspect; for its subject-matter is an aggregate of actions that are prompted by feelings and guided by intelligence. And it has a sociological aspect; for these actions, some of them directly, and all of them indirectly, affect associated beings. Belonging under one aspect of each of these sciences,—physical, biological, psychological, sociological,—it can find its ultimate interpretations only in those fundamental truths which are common to all of them, as different aspects of evolving life.