A similar incompleteness in the statement of moral principles is found if we turn to Reid’s disciple, Dugald Stewart, whose Philosophy of the Active and Moral Powers of Man (1828) contains the general view of Butler and Reid, Dugald Stewart. and to some extent that of Price,—expounded with more fulness and precision, but without important original additions or modifications. Stewart lays stress on the obligation of justice as distinct from benevolence; but his definition of justice represents it as essentially impartiality,—a virtue which (as was just now said of Reid’s fourth principle) must equally find a place in the utilitarian or any other system that lays down universally applicable rules of morality. Afterwards, however, Stewart distinguishes “integrity or honesty” as a branch of justice concerned with the rights of other men, which form the subject of “natural jurisprudence.” In this department he lays down the moral axiom “that the labourer is entitled to the fruit of his own labour” as the principle on which complete rights of property are founded; maintaining that occupancy alone would only confer a transient right of possession during use. The only other principles which he discusses are veracity and fidelity to promises, gratitude being treated as a natural instinct prompting to a particular kind of just actions.
It will be seen that neither Reid nor Stewart offers more than a very meagre and tentative contribution to that ethical science by which, as they maintain, the received rules of morality may be rationally deduced from self-evident Whewell. first principles. A more ambitious attempt in the same direction was made by Whewell in his Elements of Morality (1846). Whewell’s general moral view differs from that of his Scottish predecessors chiefly in a point where we may trace the influence of Kant—viz. in his rejection of self-love as an independent rational and governing principle, and his consequent refusal to admit happiness, apart from duty, as a reasonable end for the individual. The moral reason, thus left in sole supremacy, is represented as enunciating five ultimate principles,—those of benevolence, justice, truth, purity and order. With a little straining these are made to correspond to five chief divisions of Jus,—personal security (benevolence being opposed to the ill-will that commonly causes personal injuries), property, contract, marriage and government; while the first, second and fourth, again, regulate respectively the three chief classes of human motives,—affections, mental desires and appetites. Thus the list, with the addition of two general principles, “earnestness” and “moral purpose,” has a certain air of systematic completeness. When, however, we look closer, we find that the principle of order, or obedience to government, is not seriously intended to imply the political absolutism which it seems to express, and which English common sense emphatically repudiates; while the formula of justice is given in the tautological or perfectly indefinite proposition “that every man ought to have his own.” Whewell, indeed, explains that this latter formula must be practically interpreted by positive law, though he inconsistently speaks as if it supplied a standard for judging laws to be right or wrong. The principle of purity, again, “that the lower parts of our nature ought to be subject to the higher,” merely particularizes that supremacy of reason over non-rational impulses which is involved in the very notion of reasoned morality. Thus, in short, if we ask for a clear and definite fundamental intuition, distinct from regard for happiness, we find really nothing in Whewell’s doctrine except the single rule of veracity (including fidelity to promises); and even of this the axiomatic character becomes evanescent on closer inspection, since it is not maintained that the rule is practically unqualified, but only that it is practically undesirable to formulate its qualifications.
On the whole, it must be admitted that the doctrine of the intuitional school of the 18th and 19th centuries has been developed with less care and consistency than might have been expected, in its statement of the fundamental axioms Intuitional and utilitarian schools. or intuitively known premises of moral reasoning. And if the controversy which this school has conducted with utilitarianism had turned principally on the determination of the matter of duty, there can be little doubt that it would have been forced into more serious and systematic effort to define precisely and completely the principles and method on which we are to reason deductively to particular rules of conduct.[39] But in fact the difference between intuitionists and utilitarians as to the method of determining the particulars of the moral code was complicated with a more fundamental disagreement as to the very meaning of “moral obligation.” This Paley and Bentham (after Locke) interpreted as merely the effect on the will of the pleasures or pains attached to the observance or violation of moral rules, combining with this the doctrine of Hutcheson that “general good” or “happiness” is the final end and standard of these rules; while they eliminated all vagueness from the notion of general happiness by defining it to consist in “excess of pleasure over pain”—pleasures and pains being regarded as “differing in nothing but continuance or intensity.” The utilitarian system gained an attractive air of simplicity by thus using a single perfectly clear notion—pleasure and its negative quantity pain—to answer both the fundamental questions of mortals, “What is right?” and “Why should I do it?” But since there is no logical connexion between the answers that have thus come to be considered as one doctrine, this apparent unity and simplicity has really hidden fundamental disagreements, and caused no little confusion in ethical debate.
In Paley’s Principles of Moral and Political Philosophy[40] (1785), the link between general pleasure (the standard) and private pleasure or pain (the motive) is supplied by the conception of divine legislation. To be “obliged” Paley. is to be “urged by a violent motive resulting from the command of another”; in the case of moral obligation, the command proceeds from God, and the motive lies in the expectation of being rewarded and punished after this life. The commands of God are to be ascertained “from scripture and the light of nature combined.” Paley, however, holds that scripture is given less to teach morality than to illustrate it by example and enforce it by new sanctions and greater certainty, and that the light of nature makes it clear that God wills the happiness of his creatures. Hence, his method in deciding moral questions is chiefly that of estimating the tendency of actions to promote or diminish the general happiness. To meet the obvious objections to this method, based on the immediate happiness caused by admitted crimes (such as “knocking a rich villain on the head”), he lays stress on the necessity of general rules in any kind of legislation;[41] while, by urging the importance of forming and maintaining good habits, he partly evades the difficulty of calculating the consequences of particular actions. In this way the utilitarian method is freed from the subversive tendencies which Butler and others had discerned in it; as used by Paley, it merely explains the current moral and jural distinctions, exhibits the obvious basis of expediency which supports most of the received rules of law and morality and furnishes a simple solution, in harmony with common sense, of some perplexing casuistical questions. Thus (e.g.) “natural rights” become rights of which the general observance would be useful apart from the institution of civil government; as distinguished from the no less binding “adventitious rights,” the utility of which depends upon this institution. Private property is in this sense “natural” from its obvious advantages in encouraging labour, skill, preservative care; though actual rights of property depend on the general utility of conforming to the law of the land by which they are determined. We observe, however, that Paley’s method is often mixed with reasonings that belong to an alien and older manner of thought; as when he supports the claim of the poor to charity by referring to the intention of mankind “when they agreed to a separation of the common fund,” or when he infers that monogamy is a part of the divine design from the equal numbers of males and females born. In other cases his statement of utilitarian considerations is fragmentary and unmethodical, and tends to degenerate into loose exhortation on rather trite topics.
In unity, consistency and thoroughness of method, Bentham’s utilitarianism has a decided superiority over Paley’s. He considers actions solely in respect of their pleasurable and painful consequences, expected or actual; and he Bentham and his school. recognizes the need of making a systematic register of these consequences, free from the influences of common moral opinion, as expressed in the “eulogistic” and “dyslogistic” terms in ordinary use. Further, the effects that he estimates are all of a definite, palpable, empirically ascertainable quality; they are such pleasures and pains as most men feel and all can observe, so that all his political or moral inferences lie open at every point to the test of practical experience. Every one, it would seem, can tell what value he sets on the pleasures of alimentation, sex, the senses generally, wealth, power, curiosity, sympathy, antipathy (malevolence), the goodwill of individuals or of society at large, and on the corresponding pains, as well as the pains of labour and organic disorders;[42] and can guess the rate at which they are valued by others; therefore if it be once granted that all actions are determined by pleasures and pains, and are to be tried by the same standard, the art of legislation and private conduct is apparently placed on an empirical, basis. Bentham, no doubt, seems to go beyond the limits of experience proper in recognizing “religious” pains and pleasures in his fourfold division of sanctions, side by side with the “physical,” “political,” and “moral” or “social”; but the truth is that he does not seriously take account of them, except in so far as religious hopes and fears are motives actually operating, which therefore admit of being observed and measured as much as any other motives. He does not himself use the will of an omnipotent and benevolent being as a means of logically connecting individual and general happiness. He thus undoubtedly simplifies his system, and avoids the doubtful inferences from nature and Scripture in which Paley’s position is involved; but this gain is dearly purchased. For in answer to the question that immediately arises, How then are the sanctions of the moral rules which it will most conduce to the general happiness for men to observe, shown to be always adequate in the case of all the individuals whose observance is required? he is obliged to admit that “the only interests which a man is at all times sure to find adequate motives for consulting are his own.” Indeed, in many parts of his work, in the department of legislative and constitutional theory, it is rather assumed that the interests of some men will continually conflict with those of their fellows, unless we alter the balance of prudential calculation by a readjustment of penalties. But on this assumption a system of private conduct on utilitarian principles cannot be constructed until legislative and constitutional reform has been perfected. And, in fact, “private ethics,” as conceived by Bentham, does not exactly expound such a system; but rather exhibits the coincidence, so far as it extends, between private and general happiness, in that part of each man’s conduct that lies beyond the range of useful legislation. It was not his place, as a practical philanthropist, to dwell on the defects in this coincidence;[43] and since what men generally expect from a moralist is a completely reasoned account of what they ought to do, it is not surprising that some of Bentham’s disciples should have either ignored or endeavoured to supply the gap in his system. One section of the school even maintained it to be a cardinal doctrine of utilitarianism that a man always gains his own greatest happiness by promoting that of others; another section, represented by John Austin, apparently returned to Paley’s position, and treated utilitarian morality[44] as a code of divine legislation; others, with Grote, are content to abate the severity of the claims made by “general happiness” on the individual, and to consider utilitarian duty as practically limited by reciprocity; while on the opposite side an unqualified subordination of private to general happiness was advocated by J.S. Mill, who did more than any other member of the school to spread and popularize utilitarianism in ethics and politics.
The fact is that there are several different ways in which a utilitarian system of morality may be used, without deciding whether the sanctions attached to it are always adequate. (1) It may be presented as practical Varieties of utilitarian doctrine. guidance to all who choose “general good” as their ultimate end, whether they do so on religious grounds, or through the predominance in their minds of impartial sympathy, or because their conscience acts in harmony with utilitarian principles, or for any combination of these or any other reasons; or (2) it may be offered as a code to be obeyed not absolutely, but only so far as the coincidence of private and general interest may in any case be judged to extend; or again (3) it may be proposed as a standard by which men may reasonably agree to praise and blame the conduct of others, even though they may not always think fit to act on it. We may regard morality as a kind of supplementary legislation, supported by public opinion, which we may expect the public, when duly enlightened, to frame in accordance with the public interest. Still, even from this point of view, which is that of the legislator or social reformer rather than the moral philosopher, our code of duty must be greatly influenced by our estimate of the degrees in which men are normally influenced by self-regard (in its ordinary sense of regard for interests not sympathetic) and by sympathy or benevolence, and of the range within which sympathy may be expected to be generally effective. Thus, for example, the moral standard for which a utilitarian will reasonably endeavour to gain the support of public opinion must be essentially different in quality, according as he holds with Bentham that nothing but self-regard will “serve for diet,” though “for a dessert benevolence is a very J.S. Mill. valuable addition”; or with J.S. Mill that disinterested public spirit should be the prominent motive in the performance of all socially useful work, and that even hygienic precepts should be inculcated, not chiefly on grounds of prudence, but because “by squandering our health we disable ourselves from rendering services to our fellow-creatures.”
Not less important is the interval that separates Bentham’s polemical attitude towards the moral sense from Mill’s conciliatory position, that “the mind is not in a state conformable to utility unless it loves virtue as a thing desirable in itself.” Such love of virtue Mill holds to be in a sense natural, though not an ultimate and inexplicable fact of human nature; it is to be explained by the “Law of Association” of feelings and ideas, through which objects originally desired as a means to some further end come to be directly pleasant or desirable. Thus, the miser first sought money as a means to comfort, but ends by sacrificing comfort to money; and similarly though the first promptings to justice (or any other virtue) spring from the non-moral pleasures gained or pains avoided by it, through the link formed by repeated virtuous acts the performance of them ultimately comes to have that immediate satisfaction attached to it which we distinguished as moral. Indeed, the acquired tendency to virtuous conduct may become so strong that the habit of willing it may continue, “even when the reward which the virtuous man receives from the consciousness of well-doing is anything but an equivalent for the sufferings he undergoes or the wishes he may have to renounce.” It is thus that the before-mentioned self-sacrifice of the moral hero is conceived by Mill to be possible and actual. The moral sentiments, on this view, are not phases of self-love as Hobbes held; nor can they be directly identified with sympathy, either in Hume’s way or in Adam Smith’s; in fact, though apparently simple they are really derived in a complex manner from self-love and sympathy combined with more primitive impulses. Justice (e.g.) is regarded by Mill as essentially resentment moralized by enlarged sympathy and intelligent self-interest; what we mean by injustice is harm done to an assignable individual by a breach of some rule for which we desire the violator to be punished, for the sake both of the person injured and of society at large, including ourselves. As regards moral sentiments generally, the view suggested by Mill is more definitely given by the chief living representative of the associationist school, Alexander Bain; by whom the distinctive characteristics of conscience are traced to “education under government or authority,” though prudence, disinterested sympathy and other emotions combine to swell the mass of feeling vaguely denoted by the term moral. The combination of antecedents is somewhat differently given by different writers; but all agree in representing the conscience of any individual as naturally correlated to the interests of the community of which he is a member, and thus a natural ally in enforcing utilitarian rules, or even a valuable guide when utilitarian calculations are difficult and uncertain.
This substitution of hypothetical history for direct analysis of the moral sense is really older than the utilitarianism of Paley and Bentham, which it has so profoundly modified. The effects of association in modifying mental phenomena Association and evolution. were noticed by Locke, and made a cardinal point in the metaphysic of Hume; who also referred to the principle slightly in his account of justice and other “artificial” virtues. Some years earlier, Gay,[45] admitting Hutcheson’s proof of the actual disinterestedness of moral and benevolent impulses, had maintained that these (like the desires of knowledge or fame, the delight of reading, hunting and planting, &c.) were derived from self-love by “the power of association.” But a thorough and systematic application of the principle to ethical psychology is first found in Hartley’s Observations on Man (1748). Hartley, too, was the first to conceive association as producing, instead of mere cohesion of mental phenomena, a quasi-chemical combination of these into a compound apparently different from its elements. He shows elaborately how the pleasures and pains of “imagination, ambition, self-interest, sympathy, theopathy, and the moral sense” are developed out of the elementary pleasures and pains of sensation; by the coalescence into really complex but apparently single ideas of the “miniatures” or faint feelings which the repetition of sensations contemporaneously or in immediate succession tends to produce in cohering groups. His theory assumes the correspondence of mind and body, and is applied pari passu to the formation of ideas from sensations, and of “compound vibratiuncules in the medullary substance” from the original vibrations that arise in the organ of sense.[46] The same general view was afterwards developed with much vigour and clearness on the psychical side alone by James Mill in his Analysis of the Human Mind. The whole theory has been persistently controverted by writers of the intuitional school, who (unlike Hartley) have usually thought that this derivation of moral sentiments from more primitive feelings would be detrimental to the authority of the former. The chief argument against this theory has been based on the early period at which these sentiments are manifested by children, which hardly allows time for association to produce the effects ascribed to it. This argument has been met in recent times by the application to mind of the physiological theory of heredity, according to which changes produced in the mind (brain) of a parent, by association of ideas or otherwise, tend to be inherited by his offspring; so that the development of the moral sense or any other faculty or susceptibility of existing man may be hypothetically carried back into the prehistoric life of the human race, without any change in the manner of derivation supposed. At present, however, the theory of heredity is usually held in conjunction with Darwin’s theory of natural selection; according to which different kinds of living things in the course of a series of generations come gradually to be endowed with organs, faculties and habits tending to the preservation of the individual or species under the conditions of life in which it is placed. Thus we have a new zoological factor in the history of the moral sentiments; which, though in no way opposed to the older psychological theory of their formation through coalescence of more primitive feelings, must yet be conceived as controlling and modifying the effects of the law of association by preventing the formation of sentiments other than those tending to the preservation of human life. The influence of the Darwinian theory, moreover, has extended from historical psychology to ethics, tending to substitute “preservation of the race under its conditions of existence” for “happiness” as the ultimate end and standard of virtue.
Before concluding this sketch of the development of English ethical thought from Hobbes to the thinkers of the 19th century, it will be well to notice briefly the views held by different moralists on the question of free-will,—so far, that is, as Free-will. they have been put forward as ethically important. We must first distinguish three meanings in which “freedom” is attributed to the will or “inner self” of a human being, viz. (1) the general power of choosing among different alternatives of action without a motive, or against the resultant force of conflicting motives; (2) the power of choice between the promptings of reason and those of appetites (or other non-rational impulses) when the latter conflict with reason; (3) merely the quality of acting rationally in spite of conflicting impulses, however strong, the non posse peccare of the medieval theologians.[47] It is obvious that “freedom” in this third sense is in no way incompatible with complete determination; and, indeed, is rather an ideal state after which the moral agent ought to aspire than a property which the human will can be said to possess. In the first sense, again, as distinct from the second, the assertion of “freedom” has no ethical significance, except in so far as it introduces a general uncertainty into all our inferences respecting human conduct. Even in the second sense it hardly seems that the freedom of a man’s will can be an element to be considered in examining what it is right or best for him to do (though of course the clearest convictions of duty will be fruitless if a man has not sufficient self-control to enable him to act on them); it is rather when we ask whether it is just to punish him for wrong-doing that it seems important to know whether he could have done otherwise. But in spite of the strong interest taken in the theological aspect of this question by the Protestant divines of the 17th century, it does not appear that English moralists from Hobbes to Hume laid any stress on the relation of free-will either to duty generally or to justice in particular. Neither the doctrine of Hobbes, that deliberation is a mere alternation of competing desires, voluntary action immediately following the “last appetite,” nor the hardly less decided Determinism of Locke, who held that the will is always moved by the greatest present uneasiness, appeared to either author to require any reconciliation with the belief in human responsibility. Even in Clarke’s system, where Indeterminism is no doubt a cardinal notion, its importance is metaphysical rather than ethical; Clarke’s view being that the apparently arbitrary particularity in the constitution of the cosmos is really only explicable by reference to creative free-will. In the ethical discussion of Shaftesbury and sentimental moralists generally this question drops naturally out of sight; and the cautious Butler tries to exclude its perplexities as far as possible from the philosophy of practice. But since the reaction, led by Price and Reid, against the manner of philosophizing that had culminated in Hume, free-will has been generally maintained by the intuitional school to be an essential point of ethics; and, in fact, it is naturally connected with the judgment of good and ill desert which these writers give as an essential element in their analysis of the moral consciousness. An irresistible motive, it is forcibly said, palliates or takes away guilt; no one can blame himself for yielding to necessity, and no one can properly be punished for what he could not have prevented. In answer to this argument some necessarians have admitted that punishment can be legitimate only if it be beneficial to the person punished; others, again, have held that the lawful use of force is to restrain lawless force; but most of those who reject free-will defend punishment on the ground of its utility in deterring others from crime, as well as in correcting or restraining the criminal on whom it falls.
In the preceding sketch we have traced the course of English ethical speculation without bringing it into relation with contemporary European thought on the same subject. And in fact almost all the systems described, from French influence on English ethics. Hobbes downward, have been of essentially native growth, showing hardly any traces of foreign influence. We may observe that ethics is the only department in which this result appears. The physics and psychology of Descartes were much studied in England, and his metaphysical system was certainly the most important antecedent of Locke’s; but Descartes hardly touched ethics proper. So again the controversy that Clarke conducted with Spinoza, and afterwards with Leibnitz, was entirely confined to the metaphysical region. Catholic France was a school for Englishmen in many subjects, but not in morality; the great struggle between Jansenists and Jesuits had a very remote interest for them. It was not till near the close of the 18th century that the impress of the French revolutionary philosophy began to manifest itself in England; and even then its influence was mostly political rather than ethical. It is striking to observe how even in the case of writers such as Godwin, who were most powerfully affected by the French political movement, the moral basis, on which the new social order of rational and equal freedom is constructed, is almost entirely of native origin; even when the tone and spirit are French, the forms of thought and manner of reasoning are still purely English. In the derivation of Benthamism alone—which, it may be observed, first becomes widely known in the French paraphrase of Dumont—an important element is supplied Helvetius. by the works of a French writer, Helvetius; as Bentham himself was fully conscious. It was from Helvetius that he learnt that, men being universally and solely governed by self-love, the so-called moral judgments are really the common judgments of any society as to its common interests; that it is therefore futile on the one hand to propose any standard of virtue, except that of conduciveness to general happiness, and on the other hand useless merely to lecture men on duty and scold them for vice; that the moralist’s proper function is rather to exhibit the coincidence of virtue with private happiness; that, accordingly, though nature has bound men’s interests together in many ways, and education by developing sympathy and the habit of mutual help may much extend the connexion, still the most effective moralist is the legislator, who by acting on self-love through legal sanctions may mould human conduct as he chooses. These few simple doctrines give the ground plan of Bentham’s indefatigable and lifelong labours.