A Handbook of Ethical Theory

by George Stuart Fullerton

To this we may answer that it is not the same thing to possess intelligence and to use it. One may be supplied with information and quite capable of taking long views and embracing inclusive ends—and the attention may be so preoccupied with the desire of the moment, that the voices of others are stifled. In so far as this is the case, the man can not, at the time, be said to be reasonable or intelligent. He has information, and acts as if he were ignorant; his choices do not issue as a resultant of his desires as a whole; there is no resultant; the single desires make their influence felt separately.

To be sure, an insistent and oft-recurring desire may introduce a good deal of unity and harmony into life, even where long views are not taken and there is little intelligence. The stupid egoist may become rather a consistent egoist, and increasingly so as he grows older. His desires and volitions may converge upon an end of which he is very imperfectly conscious; incompatible desires may come to be repressed. But this does not refute the position that, when reason or intelligence is supreme, the attention is directed upon a wide range of desires, they are weighed in the light of each other, and the ultimate decision is no longer blind, but fairly expresses the permanent push of the man's nature. Even where a desire or group of desires, unilluminated by intelligence, seems so insistent as to take on something of this character, complete unity and harmony of action may be lacking, due to the short-sightedness of the methods employed to attain to the chosen goal. Blind desires may easily defeat their own ends; wealth does not necessarily accumulate in proportion to a man's miserliness; the ardent but unenlightened philanthropist may do his fellow-man more harm than good. Long views are of no little service in weeding out inconsistent actions and introducing order and unity into life.

59. THIS VIEW OF REASON MISCONCEIVED.—In the above view of the function of reason or intelligence it has not been represented as issuing commands to perform certain actions rather than others, nor as furnishing motives not in some way related to the impulses and desires of man. It has been treated, literally, as the presiding officer of a public assembly, who insists that every voice shall be heard; that all proposals shall be weighed and compared with one another; that the consequences of all shall be clearly foreseen. Its function is enlightenment; the driving force which impels to action of any sort has been found in the impulses and the desires.

It is possible to set this view forth in terms which make it highly unpalatable.

Thus Hume, who has a weakness for shocking the susceptibilities of the conservative and the sober-minded, startles us with the remark that "Reason is, and ought only to be, the slave of the passions." [Footnote: A Treatise of Human Nature, iv, Sec 3.] This doctrine, taken as the average reader is almost inevitably impelled to take it, seems worthy of instant reprobation. It appears to degrade the rational in man and to exalt the blind and irrational.

But it is not fair to the doctrine to set it forth in such terms. There is no small difference between random and fugitive desires and those more fundamental desires that express truly the nature of a man. Desires organized and harmonized gain great strength, and are enabled to overcome and expel from the mind erratic impulses, the obedience to which may easily be followed by regret. Action taken without a clear foresight of consequences, with an imperfect conception of the relation of means to ends, is blind and irrational action. Reason, as bringing enlightenment, as making possible deliberation, as turning the incoherent clamors of a mob of inconsistent desires into the authoritative voice of an orderly deliberative assembly, is not a faculty to be lightly regarded.

Nor should it be forgotten that, neither to the plain man, nor to the moralist, do desires all stand upon the same level. He who bends his intellectual energies to the satisfaction of his greed, his avarice, his longing for revenge, may fairly be said to be prostituting his mind to the service of passion. But is it a proper use of language to describe as the slave of his passions the man whose thought is set upon the enlightenment of mankind, the alleviation of suffering, the service of a state, the attainment of a noble character? Were Socrates, St. Francis, Abraham Lincoln, Wilberforce, Thomas Hill Green, the slaves of their passions? Yet these men were moved by certain dominant desires, and their unswerving pursuit of their goal was made possible only by the reason that harmonized their lives and substituted deliberate purpose for random impulse.

The doctrine, then, that the reason is to be likened rather to the presiding officer of a deliberative assembly, concerned only to give every voice a fair hearing, than to a legislator issuing commands independently, may be so stated as not to shock the sober-minded.

And the doctrine recommends itself in showing that reason and inclination or desire are not enemies. The possession of reason must lead to the suppression of some desires—those incompatible with a comprehensive purpose deliberately embraced; but the desires and the reason or intelligence work together to a common end. On this view, it is not the rational man who is divided against himself; it is the short-sighted, the impulsive, the inconsistent, the irrational man. He is the prey of warring desires whose strife leads to no permanent peace under the guidance of reason.

60. ANOTHER VIEW OF REASON.—To certain minds this view of reason as the arbiter and reconciler of man's impulses and desires does not appeal.