Morals and the Evolution of Man

by Max Simon Nordau

The theologians find no difficulty in this explanation. Just as the essence of Morality according to their ideas is the nearest possible approximation to divine perfection, so the moral law is one enacted by God Himself, and it is a sin punishable with hell fire to fail to observe it or to rebel against it. Others look upon Man as his own law-giver, and trace his moral conduct, his willingness to combat his own instincts, to an inner voice which teaches him what is right. They call this inner voice by different names. They call it Nature, Reason or Conscience, and look upon it as something innate, as a normal constituent of man's psychic nature. That is the meaning of Fichte's apodictic statement: "That which does not meet with the approval of one's own conscience is necessarily sin. Therefore he who acts on anyone else's authority acts in a conscienceless manner."

With this emphatic utterance Fichte dismisses both the devout believers, for whom Morality is the revealed Will of God, and the Rationalists who look upon it as the dictate of society. He considers that if man claims to act morally, he can do so only on his own authority, i.e. on that of his conscience. He is not aware that in so doing he frivolously abandons all rights to pronounce an objective moral judgment on any human action. He thereby relinquishes the power to ask any further question except: "Did he act in accordance with his own conscience? If so, then he has acted in a subjectively conscientious way, even if it appears to me to be immoral or even criminal and monstrous. If he has acted contrary to the promptings of his own conscience, then he is assuredly a sinner, even if his action be in my eyes splendid and exemplary." Thus Fichte, with his subjective basis of Morality, is led to a conclusion which is a ludicrous reversal of generally accepted ideas. According to him, a man would be acting conscientiously if, despising what all others hold good, right and sacred, he wallows in the satisfaction of his selfish instincts, as long as his conscience approves or even bids him do so; on the other hand, he is a sinner if, in opposition to his inner voice, but according to moral law, that is in obedience to extraneous authority, he practices all the virtues.

All these subjective moral philosophers tacitly assume with Rousseau that man is by nature good. They take no account of the empirically established fact that there are men whose Fichtean conscience, or whose Kantian categorical imperative, urges them to a course of action which according to the general opinion is bad, wicked and revolting. This criticism applies to Beneke, according to whom Morality is "a development of human nature which exists as such within us, and which we need only continue or promote"; it applies equally to Reid and Dugald Stewart, who describe it as an inclination, which has become a habit or a principle, to act according to the dictates of conscience. But conscience must be explained. It is by no means self-evident that each individual conscience will have the same standard of good and evil. The moral philosopher must not shirk the duty of showing how the conscience acquires its concepts of moral values, with what weapons it provides Reason to combat Instinct, which demands satisfaction without paying any attention to the warnings of conscience.

The great majority of moral philosophers do not endorse the view of Kant and Fichte, that conscience is a piece of human nature, a sense inborn in man, an inner voice that is independent of, and unmoved by, external influences; on the contrary, they are convinced that conscience originates outside the individual, that, in his consciousness, it is the advocate retained by society, commissioned to plead the cause of the community before the reason of the individual even, nay, especially, when the interests of the community run counter to those of the individual.

Bacon calls the presence in our consciousness of a defender of the interests of society our innate social affection, and treats it unreservedly as the source of Morality. Long before his time the Stoics had noted the existence of this social affection and called it οἱκείωσις; Hugo Grotius, with the intellectual perspicuity peculiar to himself, says that "Right and Morality flow from the same source, and this source is a strong social instinct natural to man, it is solicitude for the community, a solicitude guided by Reason." The English philosophers are practically unanimous in ascribing both conscience and Morality in general to a social source. The welfare of the community, says Richard Cumberland, is the highest moral law; Hutcheson remarks that, in the struggle between egoism and universal benevolence, the decisive factor in favour of the latter is the accompanying feeling, the reflective emotion of approval.

In modern parlance we call "universal benevolence," altruism, and the "reflective emotion of approval" is a paraphrase of conscience which contains an indication of its mode of action. For the idea that our action will meet with the approval of the community and the pleasurable emotion of satisfaction are in fact the reasons why we mostly submit to the dictates of conscience voicing the commands of the community. Only Hutcheson is too venturesome and goes too far, when he maintains unreservedly that the reflective emotion of approval in the struggle between egoism and universal benevolence is the decisive factor which turns the scales in favour of the latter. This is by no means always the case. When it does occur we call the action moral, but we characterize it as immoral when, in spite of the "reflective emotion of approval" "universal benevolence" is worsted by egoism.

It is unnecessary to quote the opinions of other moral philosophers. It is enough to observe that most of them describe the moral law as a social agreement and make conscience its accredited representative. L. Lévy-Brühl repeats a doctrine current since the days of Pythagoras when he says: "The sense of duty and that of responsibility, horror of crime, love of what is good and reverence for justice—all these, which a conscience sensitive to Morality thinks it derives from itself and from itself alone, have nevertheless a social origin"; and Feuerbach expresses the same view in an entertainingly melodramatic fashion when he calls the voice of conscience "An echo of the cry of revenge uttered by the injured party." This cry of revenge would never wake an echo in us if we did not possess a sounding board which cries of distress and lamentation cause to vibrate. Schopenhauer, digging deeper than his predecessor, clearly recognizes this sounding board, and describes its characteristics when he says that the foundation of ethics is pity, which in its passive form warns us: "Neminem laede! Do harm to no one!" And in its active form gives the order: "Imo omnes quantum potes juva! Assist everyone with all your might!"

The assumption, that sympathy with his neighbour must be present in man's consciousness before he is capable of moral action, is one that need not be made by subjective moral philosophers, who hold with Kant and his school that the moral law is an inborn categorical imperative, which proclaims its commands without reference to any extraneous object, or to the world, or mankind.

In the same way the theologians have no need of it, for they consider that what is morally good is the Will of God.

But he who holds with the moral philosophers of sociological tendencies that Morality is regard for one's fellow men, and the recognition that the claims of the real or supposed interest of the community are superior to those of the comfort of the individual, must admit that sympathy is a necessary preliminary to moral action; i.e. that the individual must have the ability to picture the sufferings of others so vividly that he feels their sorrows as his own, and with all his might and all his will strives to prevent, alleviate and heal them. The lack of this ability, psychic anæsthesia, is a symptom of disease. It renders the person affected incapable of moral action. It is a characteristic of the born criminal, and is the essential symptom of that state of mind which alienists term moral insanity. Even in this condition, if reason and the power of judgment are not affected, great offences against current moral law can be avoided. But this results from the fear of the painful and ruinous results which a collision with public opinion entails, even if the offender is not actually haled into court. It is not due to any inner necessity, nor to the prompting of one's own feelings.