And, finally, I come back to the other theory which I have noticed. To supply the defects of the simply deterrent theory, it has been found necessary, as I said, to invoke the vindictive theory. We should go, it was suggested, upon the theory that a criminal is hateful, and, therefore, that it should be a pleasure to punish him. The feelings of resentment and moral indignation are parts of our nature, to which the punishment of the offender affords them a legitimate gratification. Now, to this, I should reply that, in the first place, I do not admit that the desire for revenge, as usually understood, can ever be legitimate. Revenge, as I understand the word, implies a personal feeling. It is taking pleasure in giving pain to a man because he has given pain to me. According to my view of morals, any pleasure in causing pain is, so far, wrong; and the public punishment should be free from all personal motive. I quite agree with Bentham that we ought not to take a positive pleasure in the sufferings, even of the worst criminal; and to admit the legitimacy of such pleasure is to admit an element of pure sentiment to which it is difficult to assign any precise limits. If you allow yourself to hate a man so as to take pleasure in his sufferings, you might justify the infliction of superfluous torture and the old methods of hanging, drawing, and quartering. To do so is precisely to approve the ferocious old treatment, to which, as I conceive, the theory of simple deterrence was an excellent corrective, in so far as it at least implied a definite limit to the indulgence of fiercer passions. There is, however, I think, an element of truth in the doctrine. I admit, that is, that the punishment of a criminal should carry a moral approval, and not be regarded purely as a measure of convenience. Successful crime should be regarded with abhorrence. If a man convicted of a grave offence should be allowed to go without punishment, we should be rightly aggrieved. It is not, however, that we should take pleasure in his suffering, but that we should be pained by an example of the practical impunity of anti-social conduct. The escape of a murderer would, as we should feel, be a blow to the security of all innocent people. In that sense, we may take pleasure in his punishment, not in the sense of positive enjoyment, but, certainly, in the sense of relief from positive sense of evil. It is, and should be, painful to see the rogues flourish and honest men droop, and to observe "captive good attending captain ill". But the pleasure of seeing the necessary equilibrium restored is different from the pleasure of dwelling upon the sufferings of the disturber. The practical difference is that, while we regard the infliction of suffering as necessary, we admit it to be a necessary evil, and are keenly alive to the inability of keeping it within the limits fixed by the general necessities of the law.
LUXURY.
Professor Sidgwick has been discussing the ethics of luxury, and, according to his wont, has been giving fresh interest to a well-worn topic. I do not wish to dispute anything that he has said, nor do I hope to clear up problems which he professedly left unsolved. In one sense, they obviously cannot be solved precisely. Luxury is a relative term, which cannot be defined in absolute terms. A luxury, in the first place, is distinguished from a necessary. But, then, one man's necessary may be another man's luxury. My very existence depends upon conditions with which another man can dispense. If, again, we admit that there are many things which, though not absolutely necessary, may rightly be used, if they can be used without injuring others, we see that we must also take into account the varying social conditions. If we use luxury, in what Bentham called the dyslogistic sense, we must distinguish between necessaries and superfluities, and then divide superfluities into comforts which may be rightfully enjoyed, and luxuries which cannot be enjoyed without incurring some degree of moral censure. But the dividing lines are always shifting. Scott tells somewhere of a Highlander sleeping on the open moor in a winter night. When he tried to roll the snow into a pillow his companion kicked it away, as a proof of disgraceful effeminacy. Most of us would come to a speedy end if we lived in a social state where such a standard of hardiness was rigidly enforced. We admit that some kind of pillow may be permitted, if not as absolutely necessary, as, at least, a pardonable comfort. We shall probably agree, also, that nobody is to be blamed for using clean sheets and securing a certain amount of warmth and softness—as much, at least, as is desirable for sanitary reasons. But if we endeavour to prescribe precisely how much may be allowed in excess of the necessary, how often we are to send our sheets to the wash, whether it is right to have lace upon our pillows, and so forth, we get into problems where any attempt at precision is obviously illusory. We are the more perplexed by the question, whether the provision of a bed for ourselves causes other people to go without a bed, and, perhaps, without supper, or how far we are bound to take such consequences into account. Without aiming, therefore, at an impossible precision, I shall try to consider—not what objects should be called luxuries, or comforts, or necessaries, but what are the really relevant considerations by which we should endeavour to guide our judgments.
Luxury is, as I have said, a well-worn topic. Saints and philosophers in all ages, have denounced the excessive love of material enjoyments, and set examples of a more or less thorough-going asceticism. It was—to go no further back—one of the favourite topics of our ancestors, in such papers as the Spectator and the Rambler. Addison, in his Cato, described the simple Numidian, whose standard appears to have resembled that of Scott's Highlander. The Numidian, he says, rests his head upon a rock at night, and, if next day he chances to find a new repast or an untasted spring, "blesses his stars and calls it luxury". General Oglethorpe quoted this passage, in an argument about luxury, to Johnson, and added, "let us have that kind of luxury, sir, if you will". Johnson himself put down all this declamation as part of the cant from which we ought to clear our minds. No nation, he said to Goldsmith, was ever hurt by luxury. "Let us take a walk from Charing Cross to Whitechapel, through the greatest series of shops in the world: what is there in any of these shops (if you except gin-shops) that can do any human being any harm?" "I accept your challenge," said Goldsmith. "The next shop to Northumberland House is a pickle-shop." To which the excellent Johnson replied, first, that five pickle-shops could serve the whole kingdom; secondly, that no harm was done to anybody either by making pickles or by eating pickles. I will not go into the ethics of pickles. I only quote this to remind you that this was one of the stock questions of the period; and not without reason. The denunciation of luxury was, in fact, the mark of a very significant tendency. Goldsmith had expressed the prevalent sentiment in the Deserted Village, as in the familiar passage beginning:—
Ill fares the land, to hastening ills a prey,
Where wealth accumulates and men decay.
And Goldsmith, like many contemporaries, was only versifying the sentiments uttered most powerfully by Rousseau in his famous exaltation of the ideal man of nature above the man of a corrupt civilisation. The theory has some affinity to the ancient doctrine already expounded by classical writers, according to which each form of government includes a principle of decay as well as of life. One stage in the process of corruption of Plato's ideal republic is marked by the appearance of the drones, people who take a surfeit of unnecessary pleasures, and, to obtain satisfaction, associate themselves with the fierce and rapacious. In Rousseau's time, this view became connected with the growing belief in progress and "perfectibility". It was a symptom of warning to the drones of his day. It showed that the thoughtful classes were becoming dimly sensible that something was wrong in the social organisation; and that a selfish and indolent aristocracy should be called upon to put its house in order. The denunciation of luxury meant, in short, that the rich and powerful were accused of indulgence in pleasures which they had not earned by services, but by the rigid enforcement of class privileges. Considered from this point of view, as the muttering of a coming storm, as the expression of a vague foreboding that the world was somehow out of joint, we may see more meaning than appears at first sight, in the old-fashioned commonplaces of our great-grandfathers. The language has changed its form; but the discontent at the misuse of wealth in various forms has certainly not diminished since that time.
Obviously, then, the question of luxury is connected with very wide and deep problems as to what is the proper use of wealth, and might lead us into ultimate questions as to the justification of the right to private property at all. I shall try, however, to keep as closely as may be to the particular aspect of such problems, which is immediately relevant to this particular question. And for this purpose, I think it will be convenient to take two points separately. The objections to luxury may be stated either with reference to the individual or with reference to the society. That is to say, that if we consider a man by himself, we may ask with Johnson, whether expenditure upon pickles is injurious to the constitution, or at what point it becomes injurious. And, in the next place, we may ask whether, if we see our way to decide that pickles are wholesome as well as agreeable, some of us may not be getting more than our fair share of pickles, and so diminishing the total sum of pleasure, by inordinate consumption. First, then, I discard, for the moment, all social considerations. I take for granted, for the sake of argument, that my indulgence does no harm to any one else; that I am not depriving others of a means of enjoyment, but simply adding to my own; or, at any rate, that I am not, for the moment, to take into account that set of consequences. How far, on this hypothesis, or, say, setting aside all question of duty to my neighbour, should I be prudent in accumulating wealth? I sometimes amuse myself with the problem, How rich should I like to be, supposing that I were perfectly wise in that sense in which wisdom is compatible with thorough-going egoism, or with what is called enlightened self-interest? The obvious answer is that, in that case, there would be no limits to my desires. An imaginative American, we are told, defined competence as "a million a minute and all your expenses paid". The suggestion is fascinating, but not, to my mind, quite satisfactory. It recalls a doctrine which used to be put forward by the old political economists. They had to meet the theory—a preposterous theory enough—of the danger of a universal glut; the danger, that is, that a nation might produce so much that nothing would have any value, and, therefore, that we should all be ruined by all becoming enormously rich. To meet this, it was often urged—along with more satisfactory arguments—that human desires were illimitable; and, therefore, that however rich a man might become he would always wish to become a little richer.