If the good Samaritan cared about the present feelings or the future welfare of the man fallen among thieves, it would no doubt give him some pleasure to satisfy that desire for his welfare; if he had desired his good as little as the priest and the Levite, there would have been nothing to suggest the strange idea that to relieve him, to bind up his nasty wounds, and to spend money upon him, would be a source of more pleasure to himself than to pass by on the other side and spend the money upon himself. In the case of the great majority of our pleasures, it will probably be found that the desire is the condition of the pleasure, not the pleasure of the desire.[1]
[Footnote 1: Rashdall: Ethics, p. 18.]
As has been previously pointed out in this and other chapters, action does not start with reflection upon pleasures, or, for that matter, upon anything else. Action is fundamentally initiated by instinctive promptings, or the promptings of habit. Satisfaction or pleasure attends the fulfillment of any inborn or acquired impulse, and dissatisfaction or pain its obstruction or frustration. Apart from the satisfactions experienced in the fulfillment in action of such impulses, pleasure does not exist. Actions, situations, persons, or ideas can be pleasant to us, but "pleasure" as a separate objective entity cannot be said to exist at all. The Utilitarians, again, made the intellectualist error of supposing that men dispassionately and mathematically weighed the consequences of their actions, whereas their relative impulsions to action are determined by the instincts they inherit and the habits they have already acquired.
Despite its false psychology, Utilitarianism does stand out as one of the great classic attempts to build an ethical theory squarely designed to promote human happiness. An execution of the same worthy intention, more acceptable to those trained in the modern psychology of instinct, is that moral conception variously known as Behaviorism, or Energism, a point of view maintained by thinkers from Aristotle to Professor Dewey in our own day. All behavioristic theories take the position that in order to find out what is good for man, we must begin by finding out what man is. In order to discover what will give man satisfaction, we must discover what his natural impulses and capacities are. In the utilization and fulfillment of these will man find his most complete realization and happiness. The standard of goodness, therefore, is measured in terms of the extent to which action promotes a complete and harmonious utilization of natural impulses and natural capacities. Ethics, from such a viewpoint, cannot set up arbitrary standards, but must form its standards by inquiries into the fundamental and natural needs and desires of men. Instead of laying down eternal principles to which human beings must be made to conform, it must derive its principles from observations of human experience, and test them there. The good is what does good; the bad what does harm. And what is good for men, and bad for men, depends not on rigid a priori intellectual standards, but on the original nature which is each man's inheritance.
To base ethics upon an analysis of the conditions of human nature, as scientific inquiry reveals it, carries with it two implications. It means that nothing that is shown to be a part of man's inevitable original equipment can with justice to man's welfare be ruled out. Every instinct taken by itself is as good as any other. It is only when one instinct competes with another, so that excessive indulgence of one, as, for example, that of sex or pugnacity, interferes with all a man's other instincts or interests (or with those of other men), that an instinct becomes evil. It means, secondly, that since individuals differ, and since situations are infinitely various and individual, no arbitrary and fixed laws can be laid down as fundamental eternal principles.
Moral knowledge. The contrast between the two types of morality that have been historically current may be approached from the standpoint of moral knowledge. That is, moral theories may be classified on the basis of their answer to the question: How do moral judgments arise? The chief contrast to be drawn is that between Intuitionalism on the one hand, and Empiricism on the other. Intuitionalism holds briefly that the moral quality of an act is intuitively perceived, and is recognized apart from experience of its consequences. The empirical theory holds that moral judgments come to be attached to acts as a result of experience, and particularly experiences of the approval and disapproval of other people. The contrast will again become clearer by a discussion of each theory separately.
Intuitionalism. Intuitionalism takes two chief forms. The first, Perceptual Intuitionalism, as Sidgwick calls it, holds that the rightness of each particular act is immediately known. The second, called by the same author Dogmatic Intuitionalism, holds that the general laws of common-sense morality are immediately perceived. The popular view of "conscience," well illustrates the first-mentioned position of the Intuitionalist.
We commonly think of the dictates of conscience as relating to particular actions, and when a man is bidden in a particular case to "trust to his conscience," it commonly seems to be meant that he should exercise a faculty of judging morally this particular case without reference to general rules, and even in opposition to conclusions obtained by systematic deduction from such rules.[1]
[Footnote 1: Sidgwick: Methods of Ethics (4th edition), p. 99.]
Conscience, this organ of immediate moral perception, is frequently taken to be divinely given at birth. There is no one so certain or immovable as the man whose actions are dictated by his "conscience." He does not have to think about his actions; he knows immediately what is right and what is wrong. The intuitionalist does not go into the natural history of scruples for or against the performance of certain actions. He takes these immediate aversions or promptings to act as the revelations of immediate and unquestionable knowledge, frequently presumed to be divinely implanted. Most Intuitionalists hold not that we experience an immediate intuition of the rightness or wrongness of action in every single situation, but that the common rules of morality, such common rules as good faith and veracity, are immediately recognized and assented to as moral. They insist that these are not determined by experience or by reflection, since stealing, lying, and murder are known to be wrong by everyone, though most men could not tell way.