Conscience & Fanaticism: An Essay on Moral Values

by George Henry Lane Fox Pitt-Rivers

Though this additional category of Good may not altogether abolish the distinction which Mill makes between general morality and justice or duty which may be obligatory by law, it appears to amplify and extend the scope of the principle of Utility.

"Duty," in the words of J. S. Mill, "is a thing which may be exacted from a person as one exacts a debt. Unless we think that it might be exacted from him we do not call it his duty."

From this it might be assumed that there could never be any doubt about what is a person's duty, since when any one owes another or the community a debt, he is clearly conscious of it, even to the amount. In the case of right conduct which implies Duty, this, however, is not always so clearly recognized, especially when Duty implies Allegiance or Responsibility.

In this connexion we may say that the good we do for our own country is a nearer good than the good we do for an alien country, therefore if doing the good involves a choice we should choose our own country; for the debt we owe to our own country is greater than the debt we owe to humanity at large. Equally the good we owe to our own family is nearer than, and therefore comes before, the good we owe to society. To this most people will accede, and, in fact, the realization of this is at the base of all sense of Responsibility; thus every man, in whatsoever capacity he is acting, whether as statesman, county councillor, soldier or head of a family, should put the considerations of the body he represents or belongs to before all others; and finally he owes it to himself—or God[32]—to be true to himself, even before he can be true to another, in the sense that keeping faith with a friend will not excuse a man acting dishonestly or untruthfully towards himself. And this for the reason that Truth is independent of Utilitarian valuation, since Truth alone is an a priori and self-evident "good"; by its very meaning it is a statement of "what is," temporally as well as ultimately; as such it must be a statement of indisputable fact, not opinion or faith which rests on assertion. Since more things are capable of being proved untrue than ultimately true, it follows that as a criterion of conduct its value is chiefly negative. It can thus be shown that lying, deception, breach of contract are wrong per se, for truth is the basic principle upon which all others depend, and the necessary postulate of the idea of God, whilst the value of our positive acts must for the most part depend upon some such standard as the Greatest Happiness or Utility principle.

As an illustration of the "nearer is the greater good" principle may be cited the line taken up by Disraeli when the controversy over the opium trade between India and China first came to the fore. Disraeli firmly refused to ruin our export trade in opium for any quixotic considerations involving the moral effect upon the Chinaman, whilst it in no way implied a breach of faith with him.

Less clear is the question of precedence when two primary obligations are conflicting; primary obligations are here intended to mean those obligatory duties which may rightly be exacted from a person by reason of his indebtedness to the corporate body to which he belongs, or which he represents, and which is entitled to a preference in the good he does.

For instance, it may sometimes be said that a man's duty to his country as a soldier conflicts with his duty to his family as its sole support; both are primary obligations; as long, then, as allegiance to one does not involve a betrayal of the other, which could only be if their interests were fundamentally opposed and directed against each other, both obligations must be equally acknowledged, and a via media discovered to satisfy the claims of both to an equal extent.

Should, however, this confliction of interests be so direct and antagonistic as necessarily to involve an overt repudiation of the claims of one or the other, as in the hypothetical case of a soldier being ordered to execute the members of his own family, his conduct, supposing him to be actuated by a desire to act solely in conformance with ethical considerations, would be determined by his judgment as to which course would promote the greater good or Utility, having regard to the categories: quantity, quality and proximity; the "nearer" in this case undoubtedly being his family, though this fact alone would not necessarily outweigh the other values of quantity and quality. In certain Eastern countries it would possibly appeal to a man's sense of appropriateness to be the agent by which the crime or dishonour of his relative would be expiated.

A man is often heard to claim that his moral duty towards himself, in other words "his conscience," absolves him from the fulfilment of another primary duty or obligation. As I have attempted to show, the only real or a priori duty which a man can prove he owes to himself, and therefore has a right to place before any other clear duty derived from the fact of his membership of any community or corporate body, is his obligation not to violate Truth, which is a statement of reality, not of opinion. Thus no other duty can rightly oblige a man to perjure himself.

If this maxim is accepted, it will be seen that a deadlock of this sort between a man's duty to his country as a citizen and his duty to himself or his "conscience," could rarely occur in a civilized or rational community. Against this a man might argue that he had solemnly vowed not to shed human blood, either as a soldier or otherwise, and that he is right to resist any attempt to conscript him for the army, since he would thereby be required to perjure himself. The answer is simple, for the man clearly violated his duty to his country in the first place by vowing he would deprive his country of his services should they be required, a right which no country has ever forsworn and which is considered the natural return due for free citizenship and state protection; these conditions are presumed to be accepted with the benefits of citizenship and protection of person and property; his first violation of duty towards his country will therefore not absolve him of a second.