A Handbook of Ethical Theory

by George Stuart Fullerton

Thomas Hill Green writes: "Anything conceived as good in such a way that the agent acts for the sake of it, must be conceived as his own good." [Footnote: Prolegomena to Ethics, Sec 92.] The motive to action is, he maintains, always "some idea of the man's personal good." [Footnote: Sec Sec 95, 97.] He does not hesitate to say that a man necessarily lives for himself; [Footnote: Sec 138.] and he calls "the human self or the man" [Footnote: Sec 99.] a self-seeking ego, a self-seeking subject, and a self- seeking person. [Footnote: Sec Sec 98, 100, 145.]

Were Green's book a lost work, only preserved to the memories of men by such citations as the above, the author would certainly be relegated to a class of moralists with which he had, in fact, little sympathy.

But the book is not lost, and by turning to it we find Green continuing the first of the above citations with the words: "Though he may conceive it as his own good only on account of his interest in others, and in spite of any amount of suffering on his own part incidental to its attainment." He is willing to grant the self-seeking ego an eye single to its own interests, but he is careful to explain that: "These are not merely interests dependent on other persons for the means to their gratification, but interests in the good of those other persons, interests which cannot be satisfied without the consciousness that those other persons are satisfied." [Footnote: Sec 199.]

When Hobbes gave an account of "the passions that incline men to peace," [Footnote: Leviathan, I, xiii.] he made no mention of the social nature of man. That nature Green conceives to be so essentially social that the individual cannot disentangle his own good from the good of his fellows. To live "for himself," since that self is a social self, means to live for others. May this fairly be called egoistic doctrine?

98. WHAT IS MEANT BY THE SELF?—It is sufficiently clear that the happiness, or good, or advantage, or interests of the individual or self may mean many things. It is equally clear that in our interpretation of all such terms our notions of the nature of the self will play no inconsiderable role. What is the self?

In his famous chapter on the Consciousness of Self, [Footnote: Psychology, New York, 1890, I, chapter x.] William James enumerates four senses of the word. With three of these we may profitably occupy ourselves here. He calls them the Material Self, the Social Self and the Spiritual Self.

The innermost part of the material self he makes our body, and next to it, in their order, he places our clothes, our family, our home, and our property. They contribute to our being what we are in our own eyes, we identify ourselves with them, and we experience "a sense of the shrinkage of our personality" when even the more outlying elements, such as our possessions, are lost. "Our immediate family," he writes, "is a part of ourselves. Our father and mother, our wife and babes, are bone of our bone and flesh of our flesh. When they die, a part of our very selves is gone. If they do anything wrong, it is our shame. If they are insulted, our anger flashes forth as readily as if we stood in their place."

It is obvious that the limits of the material self, as above understood, may be indefinitely extended. There are men who feel about their country as the average normal man feels about his home; and doubtless the suffering of a stray beggar tugged at the heart of St. Francis as the misfortune of wife or child does in the case of other men. How far abroad our "interests" are to be found, and just what "interests" we shall regard as intimately and peculiarly our own, depends upon what we are.

The Social Self James describes as the recognition a man gets from his mates: "We are not only gregarious animals, liking to be in the sight of our fellows, but we have an innate propensity to get ourselves noticed, and noticed favorably, by our kind." Men certainly regard their fame or honor as to be included among their interests, and they may value and seek to obtain the good opinion of a very little clique or of a much wider circle.

By the Spiritual Self is meant our qualities of mind and character—"the most enduring and intimate part of the Self, that which we most verily seem to be." Our interest in these it is impossible to overlook, and their cultivation and development may become a ruling passion.