Ethics

by John Dewey; James Hayden Tufts

§ 3. THE UTILITARIAN THEORY OF DUTY

Problem of Duty on Hedonistic Basis.—The utilitarians' explanation of the constraint of desire by the authority of right is framed to meet the peculiar difficulty in which their hedonistic theory places them. If pleasure is the good, and if all desire is naturally for the good, why should desire have to be constrained? How can such a thing as "duty" exist at all? For to say that a man is obliged or bound to seek that which he just can't help seeking is absurd. There is, according to the utilitarian, a difference, however, between the pleasure which is the object of desire and that which is the standard of judgment. The former is the person's own pleasure; it is private. The happiness which measures the rightness of the act is that of all persons who are affected by it. In view of this divergence, there must, if right action is to occur, be agencies which operate upon the individual so as to make him find his personal pleasure in that which conduces to the general welfare. These influences are the expectations and demands of others so far as they attach consequences in the way of punishment, of suffering, and of reward and pleasure, to the deeds of an individual.

In this way the natural inclination of an individual towards a certain pleasure, or his natural revulsion from a certain pain, may be checked and transformed by recognition that if he seeks the pleasure, others will inflict more than an equivalent pain, or if he bears the pain, others will reward him with more than compensating pleasures. In such cases, we have the fact of duty or obligation. There is constraint of first inclination through recognition of superior power, this power being asserted in its expressly declared intention of rewarding and penalizing according as its prescriptions are or are not followed. These are the factors: (1) demands, expectations, rules externally imposed; (2) consequences in the way of proffered reward of pleasure, and penalty of pain; (3) resulting constraint of the natural manifestation of desires. In the main, the theory is based on the analogy of legal obligations.[167]

(a) Bentham's Account.—Bentham dislikes the very word duty; and speaks preferably of the "sanctions" of an act. The following quotations will serve to confirm the foregoing statements.

"The happiness of the individuals of whom a community is composed is ... the sole standard, in conformity to which each individual ought to be made to fashion his behavior. But whether it be this, or anything else that is to be done, there is nothing by which a man can ultimately be made to do it, but either pain or pleasure."

A kind of pain or pleasure which tends to make an individual find his own good in the good of the community is a sanction. Of these Bentham mentions four kinds, of which the first alone is not due to the will of others, but is physical. Thus the individual may check his inclination to drink by a thought of the ills that flow from drunkenness. Metaphorically, then, he may be said to have a duty not to drink; strictly speaking, however, this is his own obvious interest. The sanctions proper are (a) political, consequences in the way of pleasure and pain (especially pain) attached to injunctions and prohibitions by a legal superior; (b) popular, the consequences following from the more indefinite influence of public opinion—such as being "sent to Coventry," being shunned, rendered unpopular, losing reputation, or honor, etc.; and (3) religious, penalties of hell and rewards of heaven attached to action by a divine being, or similar penances and rewards by the representatives on earth (church, priests, etc.) of this divine being.[168]

Value and Deficiencies of This View.—The strong point of this explanation of duty is obviously that it recognizes the large, the very large, rôle played by social institutions, regulations, and demands in bringing home to a person the fact that certain acts, whether he is naturally so inclined or not, should be performed. But its weak point is that it tends to identify duty with coercion; to change the "ought" if not into a physical "must," at least into the psychological "must" of fear of pain and hope of pleasure. Hope of reward and fear of penalty are real enough motives in human life; but acts performed mainly or solely on their account do not, in the unprejudiced judgment of mankind, rank very high morally. Habitually to appeal to such motives is rather to weaken than to strengthen the tendencies in the individual which make for right action. The difficulty lies clearly in the purely external character of the "sanctions," and this in turn is due to the fact that the obligations imposed by the demands and expectancies of others do not have any intrinsic connection with the character of the individual of whom they are exacted. They are wholly external burdens and impositions.

The individual, with his desires and his pleasures, being made up out of particular states of feeling, is complete in himself. Social relationships must then be alien and external; if they modify in any way the existing body of feelings they are artificial constraints. One individual merely happens to live side by side with other individuals, who are in themselves isolated, and are complete in their isolation. If their external acts conflict, it may be necessary to invade and change the body of feelings which make up the self from which the act flows. Hence duty.

The later development of utilitarianism tended to get away from this psychical and atomic individualism; and to conceive the good of an individual as including within himself relations to others. So far as this was done, the demands of others, public opinion, laws, etc., became factors in the development of the individual, and in arousing him to an adequate sense of what his good is, and of interest in effecting it. Later utilitarianism dwells less than Bentham upon external sanctions, and more upon an unconscious shaping of the individual's character and motives through imitation, education, and all the agencies which mould the individual's desires into natural agreement with the social type. While it is John Stuart Mill who insists most upon the internal and qualitative change of disposition that thus takes place,[169] it is Bain and Spencer who give the most detailed account of the methods by which it is brought about.

(b) Bain's Account.—His basis agrees with Bentham's: "The proper meaning, or import, of the terms (duty, obligation) refers to that class of action which is enforced by the sanction of punishment" (Bain, Emotions and Will, p. 286). But he sets less store by political legislation and the force of vague public opinion, and more by the gradual and subtle processes of family education. The lesson of obedience, that there are things to be done whether one wishes or no, is impressed upon the child almost unremittingly from the very first moment of life. There are three stages in the complete evolution of the sense of duty. The first, the lowest and that beyond which some persons never go, is that in which "susceptibility to pleasure and pain is made use of to bring about obedience, and a mental association is rapidly formed between the obedience and apprehended pain, more or less magnified by fear." The fact that punishment may be kept up until the child desists from the act "leaves on his mind a certain dread and awful impression as connected with forbidden actions." Here we have in its germ conscience, acknowledgment of duty, in its most external form.