23. The truth is that the notions which Shaftesbury attached to the terms ‘affection for self-good’ and ‘affection for public good’ were not such as allowed of a consistent opposition between them. They can only be so opposed if, on the one hand, self-good is identified with pleasure; and on the other, affection for public good is carefully distinguished from desire for that sort of pleasure of which the gratification of others is a condition. But with Shaftesbury, affections for self-good do not represent merely those desires for pleasure determined by self-consciousness—for pleasure presented as one’s personal good—which can alone be properly reckoned sources of moral evil. They include equally mere natural appetites—hunger, the sexual impulse, &c.—which are morally neutral, and they do not clearly exclude any desire for an object which a man has so ‘made his own’ as to find his happiness—‘self-enjoyment’ or ‘self-good,’ according to Shaftesbury’s language—in attaining it, though it be as remote from imagined pleasure as possible. [1] On the other hand, ‘affections for public good,’ as he describes them, are not restricted to such desires for the good of others as are irrespective of pleasure to self. They include not only such natural instincts as ‘parental kindness and concern for the nurture and propagation of the young,’ which, morally, at any rate, are not to be distinguished from the appetites reckoned as affections for self-good, but also desires for sympathetic pleasure—the pleasure to oneself which arises on consciousness that another is pleased. Shaftesbury’s special antipathy, indeed, is the doctrine that benevolent affections are interested in the sense of having for their object a pleasure to oneself, apart from and beyond the pleasure of the person whom they move us to please; but unless he regards them as desires for the pleasure which the subject of them experiences in the pleasure of another, there is no purpose in enlarging, as he does with much unction, on the special pleasantness of the pleasures which they produce. With such vagueness in his notions of what he meant by affections for ‘self-good’ and for ‘public good,’ it is not strange that he should have failed to give any tenable account of the selfishness in which he conceived moral evil to consist. He could not apply such a term of reproach to the ‘self-affections’ in general, without condemning as selfish the man who ‘finds his own happiness in doing good,’ and who is in truth indistinguishable from one to whom ‘affection for public good’ has become, as we say, the law of his being. Nor could he identify selfishness, as he should have done, with all living for pleasure without a more complete rupture than he was capable of with the received doctrine of his time and without bringing affection for public good, in the form in which it was most generally conceived, and which was, at any rate, one of the forms under which he presented it to himself—as desire, namely, for sympathetic pleasure—into the same condemnation. His way out of the difficulty is, as we have seen, in violation of his own principle to find the characteristic of selfishness not in the motive of any affection but in its result; not in the fact that a man’s desire has his own good for its object, which is true of one to whom his neighbour’s good is as his own, nor in the fact that it has pleasure for its object, which Shaftesbury, as the child of his age, could scarcely help thinking was the case with every desire, but in the fact that it is stronger than is ‘consistent with the interest of the species or public.’
[1] Book II., part 2, sec. 2.
What have Butler and Hutcheson to say about it? Chiefly that affections terminate upon their objects. But this does not exclude the view that all desire is for pleasure.
24. Neither Butler nor Hutcheson [1] can claim to have carried the ethical controversy much beyond the point at which Shaftesbury left it. Each took for granted that the object of the ‘self-affection’ was necessarily one’s own happiness, and neither made any distinction between living for happiness and living for pleasure. They could not then identify selfishness with the living for pleasure without condemning the self-affection, and with, it the best man’s pursuit of his own highest good in the service of others, altogether as evil. Nor in the absence of any better theory of the object of the self-affection could the social affections, which, according to Butler, are subject in the developed man to the direction of self-love, escape the suggestion that they are one mode of the general desire for pleasure. Butler and Hutcheson, indeed, are quite clear that they are ‘disinterested’ in the sense of ‘terminating upon their objects.’ [2] This means, what is sufficiently obvious when once pointed out, (a) that a benevolent desire is not a desire for that particular pleasure, or rather ‘removal of uneasiness,’ which shall ensue when it is satisfied, and (b) that it cannot originally arise from the general desire for happiness, since this creates no pleasures but merely directs us to the pursuit of objects found pleasant independently of it, and thus, if it directs us to benevolent acts, presupposes a pleasure previously found in them. This, however, as Butler points out, is equally true of all particular desires whatever—of those styled self-regarding, no less than of the social—and if it is not incompatible with the former being desires for pleasure, no more is it with the latter being so. Much confusion on the matter, it may be truly said, arises from the loose way in which the words ‘affection’ and ‘passion’ are used by Butler and his contemporaries, not excluding Hume himself, alike for appetite, desire, and emotion. In every case a pleasure other than satisfaction of desire must have been experienced before desire can be excited by the imagination of it. A pleasure incidental to the satisfaction of appetite must have been experienced before imagination of it could excite the desire of the glutton. In like manner, social affection, as desire, cannot be first excited by the pleasure which shall arise when it is satisfied; it must previously exist as the condition of that pleasure being experienced; but it does not follow that it is other than a desire for an imagined pleasure, for that sympathetic pleasure in the pleasure of another in which the social affection as emotion consists. Now though Butler and Hutcheson sufficiently showed that it is no other pleasure than this which is the original object of benevolent desires, they did not attempt to show that it is not this; and failing such an attempt, the received doctrine that the object of all desire, social and self-regarding alike, is pleasure of one sort or another, would naturally be taken to stand. This admitted, there can be nothing in the fact that a certain pleasure depends on the pleasure of another, and that a certain other does not, to entitle an action moved by desire for the former sort of pleasure to be called unselfish in the way of praise, and one moved by desire for the latter sort selfish in the way of reproach. The motive—desire for his own pleasure—is the same to the doer in both cases. The distinction between the acts can only lie in that which Shaftesbury had said could not constitute moral good or ill—in the consequences by which society judges of them, but which do not form the motive of the agent. In other words, it will be a distinction fixed by that law of opinion or reputation, in which Locke had found the common measure of virtue and vice, though he had not entered on the question of the considerations by which that law is formed.
[1] The works of Hutcheson, published before Hume’s treatise was written, and which strongly affected it, were the ‘Enquiry into the Original of our Ideas of Beauty and Virtue’ (1725), and the ‘Essay on the Nature and Conduct of the Passions and Affections’ (1728). In what follows I wrote with direct reference to his posthumous work, not published till after Hume’s treatise, but which only reproduces more systematically his earlier views.
[2] See in Preface to Butler’s Sermons, the part relating to Sermon XI., ‘Besides, the only idea of an interested pursuit’ &c.; also the early part of Sermon XI., ‘Every man hath a general desire,’ &c.
Of moral goodness Butler’s account circular: Hutcheson’s inconsistent with his doctrine that reason gives no end.
25. Such a conclusion would lie ready to hand for such a reader of Butler and Hutcheson as we may suppose Hume to have been, but it is needless to say that it is not that at which they themselves arrive. Butler, indeed, distinctly refuses to identify moral good and evil respectively with disinterested and interested action, [1] but neither does he admit that desire for pleasure or aversion from pain is the uniform motive of action in such a way as to compel the conclusion that moral good and ill represent a distinction, not of motives, but of consequences of action contemplated by the onlooker. An act is morally good, according to him, when it is approved by the ‘reflex faculty of approbation,’ bad when it is disapproved, but what it is that this ‘faculty’ approves he never distinctly tells us. The good is what ‘conscience’ approves, and conscience is what approves the good—that is the circle out of which he never escapes. If we insist on extracting from him any more satisfactory conclusion as to the object of moral approbation, it must be that it is the object which ‘self-love’ pursues, i.e., the greatest happiness of the individual, a conclusion which in some places he certainly adopts. [2] Hutcheson, on the other hand, gives a plain definition of the object which this faculty approves. It consists in ‘affections tending to the happiness of others and the moral perfection of the mind possessing them.’ If in this definition by ‘tending to’ may be understood ‘of which the motive is’—an interpretation which the general tenor of Hutcheson’s view would justify—it implies in effect that the morally good lies in desires of which the object is not pleasure. That desire for moral perfection, if there is such a thing, is not desire for pleasure is obvious enough; nor could desire for the happiness of others be taken to be so except through confusion between determination by the conception of another’s good, to which his apparent pleasure is rightly or wrongly taken as a guide, and by the imagination of a pleasure to be experienced by oneself in sympathy with the pleasure of another. Nor is it doubtful that Hutcheson himself, though he might have hesitated to identify moral evil, as selfishness, with the living for pleasure, yet understood by the morally good the living for objects wholly different from pleasure. The question is whether the recognition of such motives is logically compatible with his doctrine that reason gives no ends, but is only a ‘subservient power’ of calculating means. If feeling, undetermined by thought or reason, can alone supply motives, and of feeling, thus undetermined, nothing can be said but that it is pleasant or painful, what motive can there be but imagination of one’s own pleasure or pain—one’s own, for if imagination is merely the return of feeling in fainter form, no one can imagine any feeling, any more than he can originally feel it, except as his own?
[1] See preface to Sermons (about four pages from the end in most editions):-‘The goodness or badness of actions does not arise hence,’ &c. The conclusion he there arrives at is that a good action is one which ‘becomes such creatures as we are’; and this, read in the light of the second sermon, must be understood to mean an action ‘suitable to our whole nature,’ as containing a principle of ‘reflex approbation.’ In other words, the good action is so because approved by conscience.
[2] See a passage towards the end of Sermon III., ‘Reasonable self-love and conscience are the chief,’ &c. &c.; also a passage towards the end of Sermon XI., ‘Let it be allowed though virtue,’ &c. &c.