So again, in the modified Benthamism which the persuasive exposition of J.S. Mill afterwards made popular in England, the influence of Auguste Comte (Philosophie positive, 1829-1842, and Système de politique positive, 1851-1854) appears as the chief Comte. modifying element. This influence, so far as it has affected moral as distinct from political speculation, has been exercised primarily through the general conception of human progress; which, in Comte’s view, consists in the ever-growing preponderance of the distinctively human attributes over the purely animal, social feelings being ranked highest among human attributes, and highest of all the most universalized phase of human affection, the devotion to humanity as a whole. Accordingly, it is the development of benevolence in man, and of the habit of “living for others,” which Comte takes as the ultimate aim and standard of practice, rather than the mere increase of happiness. He holds, indeed, that the two are inseparable, and that the more altruistic any man’s sentiments and habits of action can be made, the greater will be the happiness enjoyed by himself as well as by others. But he does not seriously trouble himself to argue with egoism, or to weigh carefully the amount of happiness that might be generally attained by the satisfaction of egoistic propensities duly regulated; a supreme unquestioning self-devotion, in which all personal calculations are suppressed, is an essential feature of his moral ideal. Such a view is almost diametrically opposed to Bentham’s conception of normal human existence; the newer utilitarianism of Mill represents an endeavour to find the right middle path between the two extremes.
It is to be observed that, in Comte’s view, devotion to humanity is the principle not merely of morality, but of religion; i.e. it should not merely be practically predominant, but should be manifested and sustained by regular and partly symbolical forms of expression, private and public. This side of Comte’s system, however, and the details of his ideal reconstruction of society, in which this religion plays an important part, have had but little influence either in England or elsewhere. It is more important to notice the general effect of his philosophy on the method of determining the particulars of morality as well as of law (as it ought to be). In the utilitarianism of Paley and Bentham the proper rules of conduct, moral and legal, are determined by comparing the imaginary consequences of different modes of regulation on men and women, conceived as specimens of a substantially uniform and unchanging type. It is true that Bentham expressly recognizes the varying influences of climate, race, religion, government, as considerations which it is important for the legislator to take into account; but his own work of social construction was almost entirely independent of such considerations, and his school generally appear to have been convinced of their competence to solve all important ethical and political questions for human beings of all ages and countries, without regard to their specific differences. But in the Comtian conception of social science, of which ethics and politics are the practical application, the knowledge of the laws of the evolution of society is of fundamental and continually increasing importance; humanity is regarded as having passed through a series of stages, in each of which a somewhat different set of laws and institutions, customs and habits, is normal and appropriate. Thus present man is a being that can only be understood through a knowledge of his past history; and any effort to construct for him a moral and political ideal, by a purely abstract and unhistorical method, must necessarily be futile; whatever modifications may at any time be desirable in positive law and morality can only be determined by the aid of “social dynamics.” This view extends far beyond the limits of Comte’s special school or sect, and has been widely accepted.
When we turn from French philosophy to German, we find the influence of the latter on English ethical thought almost insignificant until a very recent period. In the 17th century, indeed, the treatise of Pufendorf on the Law of Nature, in which the general view of Grotius was restated German influence on English ethics. with modifications, partly designed to effect a compromise with the doctrine of Hobbes, seems to have been a good deal read at Oxford and elsewhere. Locke includes it among the books necessary to the complete education of a gentleman. But the subsequent development of the theory of conduct in Germany dropped almost entirely out of the cognizance of Englishmen; even the long dominant system of Wolff (d. 1754) was hardly known. Nor had Kant any serious influence in England until the second quarter of the 19th century. We find, however, distinct traces of Kantian influence in Whewell and other writers of the intuitional school, and at a later date it became so strong that its importance on subsequent ethical thought can scarcely be over-estimated.
The English moralist with whom Kant has most affinity is Price; in fact, Kantism, in the ethical thought of modern Europe, holds a place somewhat analogous to that formerly occupied by the teaching of Price and Reid Kant. among English moralists. Kant, like Price and Reid, holds that man as a rational being is unconditionally bound to conform to a certain rule of right, or “categorical imperative” of reason. Like Price he holds that an action is not good unless done from a good motive, and that this motive must be essentially different from natural inclination of any kind; duty, to be duty, must be done for duty’s sake; and he argues, with more subtlety than Price or Reid, that though a virtuous act is no doubt pleasant to the virtuous agent, and any violation of duty painful, this moral pleasure (or pain) cannot strictly be the motive to the act, because it follows instead of preceding the recognition of our obligation to do it.[48] With Price, again, he holds that rightness of intention and motive is not only an indispensable condition or element of the rightness of an action, but actually the sole determinant of its moral worth; but with more philosophical consistency he draws the inference—of which the English moralist does not seem to have dreamt—that there can be no separate rational principles for determining the “material” rightness of conduct, as distinct from its “formal” rightness; and therefore that all rules of duty, so far as universally binding, must admit of being exhibited as applications of the one general principle that duty ought to be done for duty’s sake. This Categorical Imperative. deduction is the most original part of Kant’s doctrine. The dictates of reason, he points out, must necessarily be addressed to all rational beings as such; hence, my intention cannot be right unless I am prepared to will the principle on which I act to be a universal law. He considers that this fundamental rule or imperative “act on a maxim which thou canst will to be law universal” supplies a sufficient criterion for determining particular duties in all cases. The rule excludes wrong conduct with two degrees of stringency. Some offences, such as making promises with the intention of breaking them, we cannot even conceive universalized; as soon as every one broke promises no one would care to have promises made to him. Other maxims, such as that of leaving persons in distress to shift for themselves, we can easily conceive to be universal laws, but we cannot without contradiction will them to be such; for when we are ourselves in distress we cannot help desiring that others should help us.
Another important peculiarity of Kant’s doctrine is his development of the connexion between duty and free-will. He holds that it is through our moral consciousness that we know that we are free; in the cognition that I ought to do what is right because it is right and not because I like it, it is implied that this purely rational volition is possible; that my action can be determined, not “mechanically,” through the necessary operation of the natural stimuli of pleasurable and painful feelings, but in accordance with the laws of my true, reasonable self. The realization of reason, or of human wills so far as rational, thus presents itself as the absolute end of duty; and we get, as a new form of the fundamental practical rule, “act so as to treat humanity, in thyself or any other, as an end always, and never as a means only.” We may observe, too, that the notion of freedom connects ethics with jurisprudence in a simple and striking manner. The fundamental aim of jurisprudence is to realize external freedom by removing the hindrances imposed on each one’s free action through the interferences of other wills. Ethics shows how to realize internal freedom by resolutely pursuing rational ends in opposition to those of natural inclination. If we ask what precisely are the ends of reason, Kant’s proposition that “all rational beings as such are ends in themselves for every rational being” hardly gives a clear answer. It might be interpreted to mean that the result to be practically sought is simply the development of the rationality of all rational beings—such as men—whom we find to be as yet imperfectly rational. But this is not Kant’s view. He holds, indeed, that each man should aim at making himself the most perfect possible instrument of reason; but he expressly denies that the perfection of others can be similarly prescribed as an end to each. It is, he says, “a contradiction to regard myself as in duty bound to promote the perfection of another, ... a contradiction to make it a duty for me to do something for another which no other but himself can do.” In what practical sense, then, am I to make other rational beings my ends? Kant’s answer is that what each is to aim at in the case of others is not Perfection, but Happiness, i.e. to help them to attain those purely subjective ends that are determined for each not by reason, but by natural inclination. He explains also that to seek one’s own happiness cannot be prescribed as a duty, because it is an end to which every man is inevitably impelled by natural inclination: but that just because each inevitably desires his own happiness, and therefore desires that others should assist him in time of need, he is bound to make the happiness of others his ethical end, since he cannot morally demand aid from others, without accepting the obligation of aiding them in like case. The exclusion of private happiness from the ends at which it is a duty to aim contrasts strikingly with the view of Butler and Reid, that man, as a rational being, is under a “manifest obligation” to seek his own interest. The difference, however, is not really so great as it seems; since in another part of his system Kant fully recognizes the reasonableness of the individual’s regard for his own happiness. Though duty, in his view, excludes regard for private happiness, the summum bonum is not duty alone, but happiness combined with moral worth; the demand for happiness as the reward of duty is so essentially reasonable that we must postulate a universal connexion between the two as the order of the universe; indeed, the practical necessity of this postulate is the only adequate rational ground that we have for believing in the existence of God.
Before the ethics of Kant had begun to be seriously studied in England, the rapid and remarkable development of metaphysical view and method of which the three chief stages are represented by Fichte, Schelling and Hegel Hegel. respectively had already taken place; and the system of the latter was occupying the most prominent position in the philosophical thought of Germany.[49] Hegel’s ethical doctrine (expounded chiefly in his Philosophie des Rechts, 1821) shows a close affinity, and also a striking contrast, to Kant’s. He holds, with Kant, that duty or good conduct consists in the conscious realization of the free reasonable will, which is essentially the same in all rational beings. But in Kant’s view the universal content of this will is only given in the formal condition of “only acting as one can desire all to act,” to be subjectively applied by each rational agent to his own volition; whereas Hegel conceives the universal will as objectively presented to each man in the laws, institutions and customary morality of the community of which he is a member. Thus, in his view, not merely natural inclinations towards pleasures, or the desires for selfish happiness, require to be morally resisted; but even the prompting of the individual’s conscience, the impulse to do what seems to him right, if it comes into conflict with the common sense of his community. It is true that Hegel regards the conscious effort to realize one’s own conception of good as a higher stage of moral development than the mere conformity to the jural rules establishing property, maintaining contract and allotting punishment to crime, in which the universal will is first expressed; since in such conformity this will is only accomplished accidentally by the outward concurrence of individual wills, and is not essentially realized in any of them. He holds, however, that this conscientious effort is self-deceived and futile, is even the very root of moral evil, except it attains its realization in harmony with the objective social relations in which the individual finds himself placed. Of these relations the first grade is constituted by the family, the second by civil society, and the third by the state, the organization of which is the highest manifestation of universal reason in the sphere of practice.
Hegelianism appears as a distinct element in modern English ethical thought; but the direct influence of Hegel’s system is perhaps less important than that indirectly exercised through the powerful stimulus which it has given to the study of the historical development of human thought and human society. According to Hegel, the essence of the universe is a process of thought from the abstract to the concrete; and a right understanding of this process gives the key for interpreting the evolution in time of European philosophy. So again, in his view, the history of mankind is a history of the necessary development of the free spirit through the different forms of political organization: the first being that of the Oriental monarchy, in which freedom belongs to the monarch only; the second, that of the Graeco-Roman republics, in which a select body of free citizens is sustained on a basis of slavery; while finally in the modern societies, sprung from the Teutonic invasion of the decaying Roman empire, freedom is recognized as the natural right of all members of the community. The effect of the lectures (posthumously edited) in which Hegel’s “Philosophy of History” and “History of Philosophy” were expounded, has extended far beyond the limits of his special school; indeed, the predominance of the historical method in all departments of the theory of practice is not a little due to their influence.
(H. S.; X.)
D. Ethics since 1879.—Ethical controversies, like most other speculative disputes, have, during the latter part of the 19th and the beginning of the 20th century, centred round Darwinian theories. The chief characteristic of English moral philosophy in its previous history has been its comparative isolation from great movements, sometimes contemporary movements, of philosophical or scientific thought. Ethics in England no less than on the continent of Europe suffered until the time of Bacon from the excessive domination of theological dogma and the traditional scholastic and Aristotelian philosophy. But the moral philosophy of the 18th century, freed from scholastic trammels, was a genuine native product, arising out of the real problem of conduct and reaching its conclusions, at least ostensibly, by an analysis of, and an appeal to, the facts of conduct and the nature of morality. Even at the beginning of the 19th century, when the main interest of writers who belonged to the Utilitarian school was mainly political, the influence of political theories upon contemporary moral philosophy was upon the whole an influence of which the moral philosophers themselves were unconscious; and from the nature of things moral and political philosophy have a tendency to become one and the same inquiry. Mill, it is true, and Comte both encouraged the idea that society and conduct alike were susceptible of strictly scientific investigation. But the attempt not only to treat ethics scientifically, but actually to subordinate the principles of conduct to the principles of existing biological science or group of sciences biological in character, was reserved for post-Darwinian moral philosophers. That attempt has not, in the opinion of the majority of critics, been successful, and perhaps what is most permanent in the contribution of modern times to ethical theory will ultimately be attributed to philosophers antagonistic to evolutionary ethics. Nevertheless the application of the historical method to inquiries concerning the facts of morality and the moral life—itself part of the great movement of thought to which Darwin gave the chief impetus—has caused moral problems to be presented in a novel aspect; while the influence of Darwinism upon studies which have considerable bearing upon ethics, e.g. anthropology or the study of comparative religion, has been incalculable.
The other great movement in modern moral philosophy due to the influence of German, and especially Hegelian, idealism followed naturally for the most part from the revival of interest in metaphysics noticeable in the latter half of the 19th century.