It is, however, in the writings of Kant and Reid that the conscience-theory attains its modern, sentimental form. In his “Metaphysic of Morality” Kant (1724-1804) makes the following straddling assertion: “Nothing in the whole world, or even outside of the world [sic!] can possibly be regarded as good without limitation except a good will.” But this is not the full extent to which this philosopher presses his claims. For he continues, “A man’s will is good, not because the consequences which flow from it are good, nor because it is capable of attaining the ends which it seeks, but it is good in itself, or because it wills the good. Its intrinsic value is in no way increased by success or lessened by failure.” From all of which Kant concludes that “As the will must not be moved to act from any desire for the results expected to follow from obedience to a certain law, the only principle of the will which remains is that of the conformity of actions to universal law. In all cases I must act in such a way that I can at the same time will that my maxim should become a universal law.” This last statement is the famous categorical imperative.
At first glance this appears to have profundity, but it turns out even upon the slightest analysis to be quite the opposite. For example, the first passage quoted (“Nothing ... can be regarded as good without limitation except a good will”) contains assertions that nobody can know enough to make. It is ritualistic philosophy. Moreover, the expression “good will” actually does (Kant to the contrary, notwithstanding) put a logical limitation upon the concept good, just as “good” cat, or “good” razor does. Besides, the term “will” or volition always refers to a phenomenon which is strictly dependent upon circumstances, for a man wills only when there is something to be possessed. These are not all the errors which Kant here commits. His attempt to explain why the good will is good (itself a statement exhibiting the fallacy of ambiguity) reveals that Kant was a very poorly equipped psychologist. I ask you, how many persons is it possible to find,—indeed, is it possible to find one single man except among the psychopathic cases,—who would ever be stimulated to live,—much less to subscribe to Kant’s theory,—if his successes or failures had no effect whatever upon his future volitions? We do not imply by this rhetorical question that every man is, or can be, or should be immoderately egoistical, but only that Kant had no insight whatever into the psychological problems involved in ethics.
Consequently, the categorical imperative as a deduction from Kant’s first principles is to be regarded as completely erroneous. How, indeed, can a man act in such a way as to make the maxim of his action a universal law? Suppose we offer a simple example. When I am hungry, and food is before me, I eat it. Does this imply that my will to eat becomes a universal law, namely, that all the hungry should eat? But when I learn of the many hungry who are unable to eat, my will to eat illustrates not a universal law, but an extremely particular law, that is to say, the law that if I am hungry, and if food is supplied, and, furthermore, if I am willing to risk that food, then, but only then, do I eat it. There seems to be no way to establish the validity of Kant’s imperative, regardless of the direction one’s thought takes. To cite a different example entirely, let us imagine a hungry man who, having cornered all the food of his tribe, eats it on the assumption that every other man would do the same thing if he were similarly fortunate. Here the categorical imperative appears in such a light as to shock its author profoundly. And yet in strict logic, this interpretation is a valid one for an intuitionist ethics. Do we wonder that Levy-Brühl speaks of “the ambiguous and bastard concept of the moral law,” when they who attempt to state such a law have neither comprehension nor patience enough to discover the simplest principles of human conduct?
It is, however, in the “Essays on the Active Powers of Man,” by Thomas Reid (1710-1796) that the commonplace notion of conscience receives its principal philosophical support. Concerning this “moral sense,” as Reid calls it in reminiscence of Shaftesbury, the following formidable assertions are made. In the first place, “It is without doubt far superior to every other power of the mind.” In the second place, “The testimony of this moral sense,” like that of the rest of the senses, “is the testimony of nature, and we have the same reason to rely upon it.” In addition, just as the sense of vision is fundamental for space perception, so “The truths immediately testified by our moral faculty are the first principles of all moral reasoning.” Reid would also have us note that this reasoning is not inductive, but deductive, for he says, “The first principles of morals are the immediate dictates of the moral faculty.”
The outstanding fault of such a theory is that it assumes that every name we choose to manufacture has a reality corresponding to it. This is the fallacy of hypostatization, to which all idealistic philosophers are addicted. Granted that it is true, as Butler says, that we approve and disapprove of some of our actions, yet this does not imply that there is a transcendent faculty within us which we are at liberty to substantialize as Conscience or a Moral Sense. Such language is merely noun-worship. It is granted that the words “moral” and “sense” have each separately a meaning, but it does not follow that the compound term “moral-sense” must therefore have one. Moreover, all of these intuitionists are wilful and unperspicuous rationalists, demanding a fundamental principle in ethics before they have employed any induction or experimentation that might help them to frame such a principle correctly. They are willing to do no hard work, and to perform no crucial tests in order to see whether their guesses are facts or fictions. To complete our criticism, we must not omit to state that Reid’s elevation of conscience to a place among the senses merely reveals the extent to which he was willing to go in his defence of the testimony of the senses in general against the idealists of his age. His use of the “moral sense” was a debater’s trick. The high esteem in which conscience was held by his antagonists tempted him to turn one of their own weapons against them.
We can now better understand the statement previously made that the personification of conscience was the peculiar artifice, the “useful dodge,” of a certain school of ethical thinkers in the XVIII century. Consequently it is erroneous to suppose that the commonplace view of this phenomenon has always held undisputed sway over theoretical ethics. It had no place whatever in the minds of Greek ethical writers. Plato, Socrates, Aristotle, and their contemporaries founded the science of ethics without even dreaming that there was a conscience. Epictetus, Epicurus, and Marcus Aurelius showed no poverty of constructive thought for the lack of it. Even Helvetius, a contemporary of the intuitionists, rejected it as spurious when he wrote: “He who will warrant his virtue in every situation is either an impostor or a fool; characters equally to be mistrusted.”
Most people who have heard the name of John Locke will recall his arguments against the assumptions of the moral intuitionists in those passages where he combats the theory of innate moral ideas. According to Locke, all such ideas would have to be (1) independent of geographical location and climate, (2) independent of the age of the person and of his training, and (3) recognized by all persons as fundamental. But none of these conditions are found to be satisfied by anyone who makes the shortest pilgrimage through the world in the search for these statistics. And consequently the intellectually honest Locke rejects the philosophical theory of conscience, independently of his recognition of the facts of self-approval and self-disapproval.
It remained, however, for John Stuart Mill to foreshadow the beginning of the end of this fantastic theory of the moral faculty in Chapter III of his “Utilitarianism.” He writes:—
“The internal sanction of duty, whatever our standard of duty may be, is one and the same—a feeling in our own mind; a pain, more or less intense, attendant on violation of duty, which in properly cultivated moral natures rises, in more serious cases, into shrinking from it as an impossibility. This feeling ... is the essence of Conscience; though in that complex phenomenon as it actually exists, the simple fact is in general all encrusted over with collateral associations, derived from sympathy, from love, and still more from fear; from all the forms of religious feeling; from the recollections of childhood and of all our past life; from self-esteem, desire of the esteem of others, and occasionally even self-abasement.”
This analysis of Mill’s reveals that what the intuitionists loosely termed conscience is a far more complex phenomenon than they had suspected, and with this revelation the whole logical structure of intuitionism breaks down. For if conscience is not the simple, innate, infallible principle or faculty which the intuitionists postulated it to be, the deductions they made from this hypothesis become more and more untenable the longer they are scrutinized. Mill’s analysis of the psychological factors in conscience, together with Locke’s discovery of the cultural and geographical limitations of any moral sense make it necessary to define this ethical phenomenon in purely empirical terms.