Future pleasures and pains, even of one's own, are among the things most elusive of calculation. Of all things they lend themselves least readily to anything approaching a mathematical calculus. And the further into the future we extend our view, and the more the pleasures of others enter into the account, the more hopeless does the problem of estimating future consequences become. All of the elements become more and more indeterminate. Even if one could form a fairly accurate picture of the things that give pleasure to most people at the present moment—an exceedingly difficult task—he cannot foresee the detailed circumstances which will give a decisive turn to enjoyment at future times and remote places. Do pleasures due to defective education or unrefined disposition, to say nothing of the pleasures of sensuality and brutality, rank the same as those of cultivated persons having acute social sensitiveness? The only reason the impossibility of the hedonistic calculus is not self-evident is that theorists in considering it unconsciously substitute for calculation of future pleasures an appreciation of present ones, a present realization in imagination of future objective situations.
For, in truth, a man's judgment of future joys and sorrows is but a projection of what now satisfies and annoys him. A man of considerate disposition now feels hurt at the thought of an act bringing harm to others, and so he is on the lookout for consequences of that sort, ranking them as of high importance. He may even be so abnormally sensitive to such consequences that he is held back from needed vigorous action. He fears to do the things which are for the real welfare of others because he shrinks from the thought of the pain to be inflicted upon them by needed measures. A man of an executive type, engrossed in carrying through a scheme, will react in present emotion to everything concerned with its external success; the pain its execution brings to others will not occur to him, or if it does, his mind will easily glide over it. This sort of consequence will seem to him of slight importance in comparison with the commercial or political changes which bulk in his plans. What a man foresees and fails to foresee, what he appraises highly and at a low rate, what he deems important and trivial, what he dwells upon and what he slurs over, what he easily recalls and what he naturally forgets—all of these things depend upon his character. His estimate of future consequences of the agreeable and annoying is consequently of much greater value as an index of what he now is than as a prediction of future results.
One has only to read between the lines to see the enormous difference that marks off modern utilitarianism from epicureanism, in spite of similarities in professed psychologies. Epicureanism is too worldly-wise to indulge in attempts to base present action upon precarious estimates of future and universal pleasures and pains. On the contrary it says let the future go, for life is uncertain. Who knows when it will end, or what fortune the morrow will bring? Foster, then, with jealous care every gift of pleasure now allotted to you, dwell upon it with lingering love, prolong it as best you may. Utilitarianism on the contrary was a part of a philanthropic and reform movement of the nineteenth century. Its commendation of an elaborate and impossible calculus was in reality part of a movement to develop a type of character which should have a wide social outlook, sympathy with the experiences of all sentient creatures, one zealous about the social effects of all proposed acts, especially those of collective legislation and administration. It was concerned not with extracting the honey of the passing moment but with breeding improved bees and constructing hives.
After all, the object of foresight of consequences is not to predict the future. It is to ascertain the meaning of present activities and to secure, so far as possible, a present activity with a unified meaning. We are not the creators of heaven and earth; we have no responsibility for their operations save as their motions are altered by our movements. Our concern is with the significance of that slight fraction of total activity which starts from ourselves. The best laid plans of men as well of mice gang aglee; and for the same reason: inability to dominate the future. The power of man and mouse is infinitely constricted in comparison with the power of events. Men always build better or worse than they know, for their acts are taken up into the broad sweep of events.
Hence the problem of deliberation is not to calculate future happenings but to appraise present proposed actions. We judge present desires and habits by their tendency to produce certain consequences. It is our business to watch the course of our action so as to see what is the significance, the import of our habits and dispositions. The future outcome is not certain. But neither is it certain what the present fire will do in the future. It may be unexpectedly fed or extinguished. But its tendency is a knowable matter, what it will do under certain circumstances. And so we know what is the tendency of malice, charity, conceit, patience. We know by observing their consequences, by recollecting what we have observed, by using that recollection in constructive imaginative forecasts of the future, by using the thought of future consequence to tell the quality of the act now proposed.
Deliberation is not calculation of indeterminate future results. The present, not the future, is ours. No shrewdness, no store of information will make it ours. But by constant watchfulness concerning the tendency of acts, by noting disparities between former judgments and actual outcomes, and tracing that part of the disparity that was due to deficiency and excess in disposition, we come to know the meaning of present acts, and to guide them in the light of that meaning. The moral is to develop conscientiousness, ability to judge the significance of what we are doing and to use that judgment in directing what we do, not by means of direct cultivation of something called conscience, or reason, or a faculty of moral knowledge, but by fostering those impulses and habits which experience has shown to make us sensitive, generous, imaginative, impartial in perceiving the tendency of our inchoate dawning activities. Every attempt to forecast the future is subject in the end to the auditing of present concrete impulse and habit. Therefore the important thing is the fostering of those habits and impulses which lead to a broad, just, sympathetic survey of situations.
The occasion of deliberation, that is of the attempt to find a stimulus to complete overt action in thought of some future object, is confusion and uncertainty in present activities. A similar devision in activities and need of a like deliberative activity for the sake of recovery of unity is sure to recur, to recur again and again, no matter how wise the decision. Even the most comprehensive deliberation leading to the most momentous choice only fixes a disposition which has to be continuously applied in new and unforeseen conditions, re-adapted by future deliberations. Always our old habits and dispositions carry us into new fields. We have to be always learning and relearning the meaning of our active tendencies. Does not this reduce moral life to the futile toil of a Sisyphus who is forever rolling a stone uphill only to have it roll back so that he has to repeat his old task? Yes, judged from progress made in a control of conditions which shall stay put and which excludes the necessity of future deliberations and reconsiderations. No, because continual search and experimentation to discover the meaning of changing activity, keeps activity alive, growing in significance. The future situation involved in deliberation is of necessity marked by contingency. What it will be in fact remains dependent upon conditions that escape our foresight and power of regulation. But foresight which draws liberally upon the lessons of past experience reveals the tendency, the meaning, of present action; and, once more, it is this present meaning rather than the future outcome which counts. Imaginative forethought of the probable consequences of a proposed act keeps that act from sinking below consciousness into routine habit or whimsical brutality. It preserves the meaning of that act alive, and keeps it growing in depth and refinement of meaning. There is no limit to the amount of meaning which reflective and meditative habit is capable of importing into even simple acts, just as the most splendid successes of the skilful executive who manipulates events may be accompanied by an incredibly meager and superficial consciousness.
V
The reason for dividing conduct into two distinct regions, one of expediency and the other of morality, disappears when the psychology that identifies ordinary deliberation with calculation is disposed of. There is seen to be but one issue involved in all reflection upon conduct: The rectifying of present troubles, the harmonizing of present incompatibilities by projecting a course of action which gathers into itself the meaning of them all. The recognition of the true psychology also reveals to us the nature of good or satisfaction. Good consists in the meaning that is experienced to belong to an activity when conflict and entanglement of various incompatible impulses and habits terminate in a unified orderly release in action. This human good, being a fulfilment conditioned upon thought, differs from the pleasures which an animal nature—of course we also remain animals so far as we do not think—hits upon accidentally. Moreover there is a genuine difference between a false good, a spurious satisfaction, and a "true" good, and there is an empirical test for discovering the difference. The unification which ends thought in act may be only a superficial compromise, not a real decision but a postponement of the issue. Many of our so-called decisions are of this nature. Or it may present, as we have seen, a victory of a temporarily intense impulse over its rivals, a unity by oppression and suppression, not by coordination. These seeming unifications which are not unifications of fact are revealed by the event, by subsequent occurrences. It is one of the penalties of evil choice, perhaps the chief penalty, that the wrong-doer becomes more and more incapable of detecting these objective revelations of himself.