(2) If it is practically impossible to calculate the relative worth of consequences in many cases, it is yet easy enough to do so in the great majority of moral situations. In most cases the preponderance of value is clear. That selfishness and self-indulgence are not worth while; that abstinence from pleasure-giving drugs and intoxicating liquors is worth the sacrifice; that truth and honesty, the law-abiding spirit, the spirit of service, friendliness and courtesy, sanitary measures, incorruptible courts, and a thousand other things are worth the effort and cost of acquiring them, is indisputable. It is only in some peculiarly balanced situations that we find practical difficulty in deciding. If morality were limited to the cases where we can be sure on which side the greater good or lesser evil lies, we should not be shorn of much of our present code.
(3) It would, of course, be impracticable to stop and calculate at the moment when action is needed. But such continual recalculation is unnecessary. Our ancestors, after many experiments, have found solutions for all the familiar types of situation; the results of their thought are crystallized for us in the ideals that press upon us from without and the voice of conscience that calls to us within. Forces beyond the individual human mind have taken care of these things and slowly steered man, with all his passions and caprices, toward his own better welfare. It is only in moments when we long to understand and justify our ideals, or when some unusually baffling problem arises, that we need to calculate and weigh relative advantage and disadvantage. And that is what, in such situations, most people do.
Are some pleasures worthier than others?
Undiscriminating critics have often condemned the eudsemonistic criterion on the ground that any sort of pleasure is rated equally high on its scale so long as it is pleasure. "Pushpin as good as poetry!" seems to some the height of sarcasm. Socrates says in the Philebus, "Do we not say that the intemperate has pleasure, and that the temperate has pleasure in his very temperance, and that the fool is pleased when he is full of foolish fancies and hopes, and that the wise man has pleasure in his wisdom? And may not he be justly deemed a fool who says that these pairs of pleasures are respectively alike?"
Why, however, do we rate the pleasures of temperance and wisdom above those of intemperance and folly? Simply because of their respective EFFECTS. INTRINSICALLY they may be equally desirable, or the latter may even be keener pleasures? that depends upon the individual circumstances; but there is no question about their relative EXTRINSIC value. There is always "the devil to pay" for intemperance and folly; while temperance and wisdom lead to health, love, honor, achievement, and many another good. As to push- pin-or let us say baseball-VERSUS poetry, it is only prejudice that makes us say we rate the latter higher. Outdoor games are not only productive of a keener delight to most people, they are extrinsically good as well, conducing to health, quickness of wit, self-control, and other goods. They ARE, in their time and place, as good as poetry. The reason for the greater reverence we feel, or feel we ought to feel, for poetry lies in the fact that it takes much more mental cultivation to acquire the taste for it; the love of poetry is a sort of patrician distinction. It is also true that poetry opens up to its lover a much wider range of enjoyments; it opens his eyes to the beauty and significance and pathos in the world; it is immensely educative, and inspiring to the spiritual life. The love of broadening and inspiring things requires cultivation in most of us; so that we praise and honor such things and urge people toward them. Pushpin, or baseball, NEEDS no apotheosis. But if we ever develop into a race of anaemic bookworms, we shall have to glorify sport and learn to shrug our shoulders at the soft and easy enjoyments of poetry. Nothing is more obvious than the utilitarian nature of such habitual judgments and attitudes.
One of the Platonic illustrations, often brought up, is that of the happy oyster. [Footnote: Philebus, 22. "Is such a life eligible?" asks Socrates. Later (40), he agrees that "a man must be admitted to have real pleasure who is pleased with anything or anyhow," but asks if it is not true that some pleasures are "false." Protarchus hits the nail on the head by replying, "No one would call pleasures bad because they are 'false,' but BY RASON OF SOME OTHER GREAT EVIL TO WHICH THEY ARE LIABLE," i.e, because of their after-effects.] Who would wish, however miserable, to exchange places with it! Are there not other things to be considered besides happiness? "It is better to be a Socrates dissatisfied than a fool satisfied." And why? In the first place, we suspect that the oyster's, or even the fool's, range of happiness is very limited. We should hesitate to forego such joys as we do have, even if sorrow attends them, at so great a sacrifice. In the second place, each of us has a deep-rooted love of his own personal memories and expectations; and except in cases of unusual depression of spirits few of us would wish to lose our identity and become some other person or thing even if we knew that other being to be happier. In the third place, a man knows HE could NOT be happier as an oyster; an oyster's joys (whatever they may be) would not satisfy him; he has other needs and desires. He must find happiness, if at all, in the satisfaction of his human cravings. The oyster's life, however satisfactory to the oyster, would leave him restless and bored. If you are a Socrates, you realize similarly that you could not FIND satisfaction in the fool's life. You know that although you have sorrows the fool wots not of, you also have a whole range of joys beyond his ken; and those joys are particularly precious to you. In the fourth place, the very words "oyster" and "fool" beg the question. "Fool" means by very definition a sort of person one would NOT choose to be; and the very visualization of an oyster is repellent. Were one to offer as the alternative a happy lion or eagle; or a happy, free- hearted savage such as Chateaubriand and Rousseau painted, one suspects that not a few suffering men and women would jump at the chance.
It is not really important to decide, however, what any one would choose. Our choices are biased and often foolish. The actual question is, Is the happiness of a fool, or of an oyster (if happiness it has) as worthy, as objectively desirable, as that of a wise man? And here again we have to say, not EXTRINSICALLY so desirable. The wise man is he who finds his happiness in activities that conduce to his ultimate welfare and that of others. The happiness of fool or oyster is transitory, blind, and fraught with unseen dangers; it is of no value to the community in which they live. But INTRINSICALLY, just qua happiness, it is-if it is-as good. What makes one form of happiness more worthy than another is simply, in the first place, its greater keenness or extent or freedom from pain, and in the second place its potentialities of future happiness or pain for self and others. When Mill wrote, therefore, in his classic treatise, that "some KINDS of pleasure are more desirable and valuable than others," he showed a-for him unusual-failure to analyze. Some kinds of PLEASURES are more desirable, for the reasons summarized above. But PLEASURE, in the abstract, pleasantness, agreeableness, intrinsic worth, whatever you choose to call it, is itself a quality; there can be more or less of it in a concrete experience, that is all. To speak of KINDS of pleasure is to mean KINDS OF EXPERIENCE which have the common attribute of pleasantness. In themselves all kinds of experience that are equally pleasant are equally worthy; there is no meaning to that adjective as applied to intrinsic immediate good. "Worthy" and "unworthy" apply to experience only when we begin to consider their consequences.
Is morality merely subjective and relative?
Different people find happiness in different ways; if morality is simply the means to happiness, is it not relative to their varying desires; is it not a purely subjective matter and without a fixed objective nature?
We must discriminate. Morality is not relative to our inclinations and desires, because those often do not rightly represent our own true welfare, still less the general welfare. Happiness is desirable whether our impulses are adjusted so as to aim for it or not. Nor is morality relative to our opinions; an act may be wrong though the whole world proclaim it right. It is a matter not of opinion but of fact whether an act is going to bring the greatest attainable welfare or not. However biased and shortsighted we may. be, the consequences of acts will be what they will be. In a very real sense, then, morality is objective; it is valid whether we recognize its validity and want it or not. It represents our needs more truly than our own wills, and thus has a greater authority, just as the rules of dietetics are not a matter of appetite or whim, but have a rational authority over our caprices. Morality is not, like imagination, something we can shape at will; it is imposed upon us from without, like sensation. Its development is predetermined by the structure of human nature and its environment; we do not invent it, we accept it. [Footnote: Cf. Cudworth (ca. 1688), Treatise, chap, n, sec. 3: "It is so far from being true that all moral good and evil, just and unjust, are mere arbitrary and factitious things, that are created wholly by will, that (if we would speak properly) we must needs say that nothing is morally good or evil, just or unjust, by mere will without nature, because everything is what it is by nature, and not by will." A good recent discussion bearing upon the question of the relativity of morality will be found in Santayana's Winds of Doctrine, pp. 138-154.] But although imposed upon our restive impulses, it is not imposed by any alien and arbitrary will. It is imposed by the same cosmos that set our consciousness into relation with a given kind of body in a given world. Submission to it is simply submission to the laws of our own natures. Lasting happiness can be found only in certain ways; we must make the best of it, but it is for our own good that we obey. Morality is relative to our organic needs and particular environment. It is a function of human nature, varying with its variations. A different race of beings on another planet might have to have a very radically different code. Ours is a distinctively human code, bearing the earmarks of our humanity and stamped with the particular nature of our earth-life.