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

by Cora May Williams

The science of Ethics has often claimed to be a science of pure reason. This claim is opposed to its character as a practical science, since action can be judged only according to the ends it had in view, and ends presuppose feelings of pain and pleasure. On the other hand, there is, in the mere capacity for pain and pleasure, no limitation of the extent of the circle of conceptions with which the feelings of pain and pleasure are connected.

Individualism can be carried out in practice only approximately; the individual has his origin in the species, and lives his whole life as a part of the life of his kind, with an organization in which the results of the action and passion of earlier generations are inherited, and in a mental atmosphere which has induced the development of his species. And just as the instinct of self-preservation did away with the isolation of the single moments of the individual life, becoming, thus, the basis of feelings determined by the interests of the life as totality, so the sympathetic instincts do away with the isolation of the single individuals and determine the conditions of the life of the species in the minds of its individuals. The most primitive form of the sympathetic instincts is exhibited in the family. Here, however loose and variable the relation of man and wife may be, that of mother and child cannot, by its nature, be done away with or essentially changed. In this case, the sympathetic feeling springs immediately from the natural instinct, and the relation is the nucleus which makes possible the higher forms of family life. In the family circle, the sympathetic feelings are cultivated, and arrive at such strength that they come to include ever wider and wider circles of human beings. Indeed, the mother-love remains forever the image and criterion of all sympathy, as well in respect to strength as to purity.

When sympathy has reached full purity, it is a feeling of pain or pleasure determined by the fact that other beings feel pain or pleasure. The most important point of its development was when it so broadened as to include all mankind. The Peripatetic and the Stoic schools of Greek philosophy led to this idea of love to all humanity and the natural union of all men in one great society. But this idea acquired greater historic importance when it became a chief commandment of a great religion,—of Christianity. To this sympathetic feeling the criterion of good and evil is no longer to be found in the individual life, but is dependent on the life of the whole society of which the individual is a member.

Yet sympathy is not, from this standpoint, identical with the ethical feeling, conscience. Conscience is here, too, a feeling of relations determined by the relation between the ruling or central feeling of the individual and the results of action. When the individual feels his own interests subordinate to the good of the whole of which, through sympathy, he regards himself as a part, the ethical feeling appears as the feeling of duty. A feeling of duty may be spoken of, likewise, from the standpoint of pure Individualism, for the concept of duty expresses only the relation of a lower, narrower consideration to a higher; and this is represented, in Individualism, by the relation of the single moments to the life as a whole.

From another point of view, the ethical feeling appears, in its higher development, as the feeling of justice, which, while regarding the good of the whole as the chief end, considers also the peculiarities of individuals. Sympathy in its active form is impulse to share. This sharing must be carried out according to fixed principles; where sympathy is universal, differences of division can be justified only by the fact that the Goods divided, if otherwise divided, would not be in so high a degree Goods to those to whom they reverted, or would not conduce to so great progress of the society as a whole. The ethical law upon this standpoint, the standpoint of Humane Ethics, can be no other as to content, than that action shall conduce to the greatest possible welfare and the greatest possible progress of the greatest possible number of conscious beings; and this law includes two chief mandates, a negative and a positive mandate: (1) The individual may not receive more than befits the position which, in consequence of his peculiar qualities, he occupies among his kind; (2) but, on the other hand, the capacities and impulses of every individual shall be as fully and richly developed and satisfied as is consistent with the demands of the life of the species as a whole. These two mandates follow with logical necessity from the concept of society as a multiplicity of conscious beings united into one whole. It is contrary to the unity of society, that an individual, or that individuals, should be wilfully preferred to others; every exceptional position must be justified by the demands of the general conditions of life; on the other hand, a society is the more perfect the more freely and more independently the single members move, and the larger the number of different possibilities it realizes, if, at the same time, unity is preserved and attains an ever higher character and ever increasing validity.

When the ethical feeling develops, upon the basis of sympathy, to the feeling of duty and justice, the principle included in the above law becomes the standard according to which the individual judges his own actions as well as those of others, and pronounces them good or bad. The good is that which preserves and develops the welfare of conscious beings.

The ethical principle now arrived at applies to the deeds of conscious beings, presupposing an end in view. Unconscious nature affects man's life, but its workings have no ethical character. The ethical judgment is itself determined by the principle on which it is pronounced, and hence it serves to produce greater welfare. This is especially to be seen where the judging and the acting individual are one and the same person; in other cases, it becomes a special problem to bring the acting individual to the recognition of the principle; this is a problem of psychologic-pedagogical nature.

The word "welfare" is used in preference to utility or happiness in order to prevent misunderstanding, and may be defined as including all that serves to satisfy the needs of man's nature. Ethics must take into consideration all the gradations of life, and cannot, therefore, distinguish in the beginning between outer and inner, higher and lower, welfare. Such a distinction is already an ethical judgment, and can be made only after determination of the ethical criterion. Another mistake is the stress often laid upon momentary feelings of pain and pleasure. Pain signifies, it is true, the beginning of the disintegration of life, and pleasure its normal and harmonious development; yet each must be considered in its relation to the whole consciousness, the whole character, and the whole social state. So-called utilitarianism has injured its own cause by resolving consciousness into a sum of feelings, and society into a collection of individuals. The significance of single feelings of pain and pleasure for the welfare of society cannot be determined as if the problem were a simple arithmetical one.

The reasoning of Philosophical Ethics must not be confused with practical reflection. In the last we are led by instincts and impulses, by motives of which we are, for the most part, wholly unconscious, by thoughts and feelings the first origin of which we cannot designate. We follow the "positive morality" to which we have accustomed ourselves and which is, in part, an inheritance of our species. Ethics as an art precedes Ethics as a science; the aim of the latter is partly to show by what principles the former is guided, and partly to correct these principles.

The ethical principle broadens out, thus, from the single moment of the individual life until it embraces the whole of mankind; but there are many points in the course of the development at which we can make a stand, and there may, therefore, be as many philosophical systems as there are larger or smaller totalities. The position of the man who holds fast consistently to a principle that determines the criterion by the family, the caste, the nation, a sect, as highest totality, is as unassailable as we have seen that of the individualist to be. The psychologic-historical evolution alone can bring us, through the changes which it produces in the feelings, beyond these criterions. In other words, every criterion has a psychologic-historical basis. He who is to recognize and carry out practically the principle of the greatest possible welfare, must be no egoist or individualist, no fanatical patriot or sectarian; this is the subjective condition necessary to the objective principle. The conscience which is to be regulated by the objective principle is always itself the condition of the recognition of this principle. A system which leaves this fact out of consideration takes on a dogmatic character. The basis of all ethical judgments is feeling. By this is not meant, however, that the standpoint of an individual cannot be influenced by argument; the feelings are always connected with concepts, and discussion of these concepts is both possible and must react upon them even if only very gradually.