Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, "Equation" to "Ethics" / Volume 9, Slice 7

by Various

But metaphysical systems of ethics are no novelty even in England, and, while the increased interest in ultimate issues of philosophy has enormously deepened and widened men’s appreciation of moral problems and the issues involved in conduct, the actual advance in ethical theory produced by such speculations has been comparatively slight. What is of lasting importance is the re-affirmation upon metaphysical grounds of the right of the moral consciousness to state and solve its own difficulties, and the successful repulsion of the claims of particular sciences such as biology to include the sphere of conduct within their scope and methods. And both evolutionary and idealistic ethics agree in repudiating the standpoint of narrow individualism, alike insist upon the necessity of regarding the self as social in character, and regard the end of moral progress as only realizable in a perfect society.

It is perhaps too much to hope that the long-continued controversy between hedonists and anti-hedonists has been finally settled. But certainly few modern moral philosophers would be found in the present day ready to defend the crudities of hedonistic psychology as they appear in Bentham and Mill. A certain common agreement has been reached concerning the impossibility of regarding pleasure as the sole motive criterion and end of moral action, though different opinions still prevail as to the place occupied by pleasure in the summum bonum, and the possibility of a hedonistic calculus.

The failure of “laissez-faire” individualism in politics to produce that common prosperity and happiness which its advocates hoped for caused men to question the egoistic basis upon which its ethical counterpart was constructed. Similarly the comparative failure of science to satisfy men’s aspirations alike in knowledge and, so far as the happiness of the masses is concerned, in practice has been largely instrumental in producing that revolt against material prosperity as the end of conduct which is characteristic of idealist moral philosophy. To this revolt, and to the general tendency to find the principle of morality in an ideal good present to the consciousness of all persons capable of acting morally, the widespread recognition of reason as the ultimate court of appeal alike in religion or politics, and latterly in economics also, has no doubt contributed largely. In the main the appeal to reason has followed the traditional course of such movements in ethics, and has reaffirmed in the light of fuller reflection the moral principles implicit in the ordinary moral consciousness. It is only in the present day that there are noticeable signs of dissatisfaction with current morality itself, and a tendency to substitute or advocate a new morality based ostensibly upon conclusions derived from the facts of scientific observation.

Darwin himself seems never to have questioned, in the sceptical direction in which his followers have applied his principles, the absolute character of moral obligation. What interested him chiefly, in so far as he made a study of morality, was Darwin. the development of moral conduct in its preliminary stages. He was principally concerned to show that in morality, as in other departments of human life, it was not necessary to postulate a complete and abrupt gap between human and merely animal existence, but that the instincts and habits which contribute to survival in the struggle for existence among animals develop into moral qualities which have a similar value for the preservation of human and social life. Regarding the social tendency as originally itself an instinct developed out of parental or filial affection, he seems to suggest that natural selection, which was the chief cause of its development in the earlier stages, may very probably influence the transition from purely tribal and social morality into morality in its later and more complex forms. But he admits that natural selection is not necessarily the only cause, and he refrains from identifying the fully developed morality of civilized nations with the “social instinct.” Moreover, he recognizes that qualities, e.g. loyalty and sympathy, which may have been of great service to the tribe in its primitive struggle for existence, may become a positive hindrance to physical efficiency (leading as they do to the preservation of the unfit) at a later stage. Nevertheless to check our sympathy would lead to the “deterioration of the noblest part of our nature,” and the question, which is obviously of vital importance, whether we should obey the dictates of reason, which would urge us only to such conduct as is conducive to natural selection, or remain faithful to the noblest part of our nature at the expense of reason, he leaves unsolved.

It was in Herbert Spencer, the triumphant “buccinator novi temporis,” that the advocates of evolutionary ethics found their protagonist. Spencer looked to ideas derived from the biological sciences to provide a solution of all Spencer. the enigmas of morality, as of most other departments of life; and he conceived it “to be the business of moral science to deduce from the laws of life and the conditions of existence what kinds of action necessarily tend to produce happiness and what kinds to produce unhappiness.” It is clear, therefore, that any moral science which is to be of value must wait until the “laws of life” and “conditions of existence” have been satisfactorily determined, presumably by biology and the allied sciences; and there are few more melancholy instances of failure in philosophy than the paucity of the actual results attained by Spencer in his lifetime in his application of the so-called laws of evolution to human conduct—a failure recognized by Spencer himself. His own contribution to ethics was vitiated at the outset by the fact that he never shook himself free from the trammels of the philosophy which his own system was intended to supersede. He began by disclaiming any affinity to Utilitarianism on the part of his own philosophy. He pointed out that the principle of the greatest happiness of the greatest number is a principle without any definite meaning, since men are nowhere unanimous in their standard of happiness, but regard the conception of happiness rather as a problem to be solved than a test to be applied. Universal happiness would require omniscience to legislate for it and the “normal” or, as some would say, “perfect” man to desire it; neither of these conditions of its realization is at present in existence. Further, the principle that “everybody is to count for one, nobody for more than one,” is equally unsatisfactory. It may be taken to imply that the useless and the criminal should be entitled to as much happiness as the useful and the virtuous. While it gives no rule for private as distinct from public conduct, it provides no real guidance for the legislator. For neither happiness, nor the concrete means to happiness, nor finally the conditions of its realization can be distributed; and in the end “not general happiness becomes the ethical standard by which legislative action is to be guided, but universal justice.” Yet the implications of this latter conclusion Spencer never fully thought out. He accepted bodily without farther questioning the hedonistic psychology by which the Utilitarians sought to justify their theory while he rejected the theory itself. Good, e.g. defined by him “as conduct conducive to life,” is also further defined as that which is “conducive to a surplus of pleasures over pains.” Happiness, again, is always regarded as consisting in feeling, ultimately in pleasant feeling, and there is no attempt to apply the same principles of criticism which he had successfully applied to the Utilitarians’ “happiness” to the conception of “pleasure.” And, though he maintains as against the Utilitarians the existence of certain fundamental moral intuitions which have come to be quite independent of any present conscious experience of their utility, he yet holds that they are the results of accumulated racial experiences gradually organized and inherited. Finally, side by side with a theory of the nature of moral obligation thus fundamentally empirical and a posteriori in its outlook, he maintains in his account of justice the existence of the idea of justice as distinct from a mere sentiment, carrying with it an a priori belief in its existence and identical in its a priori and intuitive character with the ultimate criterion of Utilitarianism itself. The fact is that any close philosophical analysis of Spencer’s system of ethics can only result in the discovery of a multitude of mutually conflicting and for the most part logically untenable theories. It is frequently impossible to discover whether he wishes by an appeal to evolutionary principles to reinforce the sanctions and emphasize the absolute character of the traditional morality which in the main he accepts without question from the current opinions about conduct of his age, or whether he wishes to discredit and disprove the validity of that morality in order to substitute by the aid of the biological sciences a new ethical code. The argument, for instance, that intuitive and a priori beliefs gain their absolute character from the fact that they are the result of continued transmission and accumulation of past nervous modifications in the history of the race would, if taken seriously, lead us to the belief that ultimate ethical sanctions are to be sought, not by an appeal to the moral consciousness, but by the investigation of brain tissue and the relation of man’s bodily organism to its environment. Yet such a view would be totally at variance with much that Spencer says (especially in his treatment of justice) concerning the trustworthiness and inevitable character of men’s constant appeal to the intuitions of their moral consciousness. Moreover, the very fact itself of the possibility of inheriting acquired moral characteristics is still hotly debated by those biologists with whom should rest the ultimate verdict. Again, the argument that “conduct is good or bad according as its total effects are pleasurable or painful,” and that ultimately “pleasure-giving acts are life-sustaining acts,” seems to involve Spencer in a multitude of unverified assumptions and contradictory theories. In the first place it is never clear whether Spencer regards the fact that a particular course of conduct is accompanied by a feeling of pleasure as a test of its life-preserving and life-sustaining character, or whether he wishes us to use as our criterion of what is pleasant in conduct the fact that the conduct in question seems conducive to the continued existence of man’s organic life. He apparently passes from one criterion to the other as best suits the purpose of the moment. He does not prove the coincidence of life-sustaining and pleasant activities. He assumes throughout that the pleasant is the opposite of what is painful, and seems unaware of the difficulty of determining by means of terms so highly abstract the specific character of moral action. We find in his theory no satisfactory attempt to discriminate between the pleasure aimed at by the altruist and the immediate pleasure of egoistic action. Similarly he disregards the distinction between pleasant feeling as an immediate motive of conduct and the idea of the attainment of future pleasure whether by the race or by the individual. Spencer is involved in effect in most of the confusions and contradictions of hedonistic psychology.

Nor is his attempt to construct a scientific criterion out of data derived from the biological sciences productive of satisfactory results. He is hampered by a distinction between “absolute” and “relative” ethics definitely formulated in the last two chapters of The Data of Ethics. Absolute ethics would deal with such laws as would regulate the conduct of ideal man in an ideal society, i.e. a society where conduct has reached the stage of complete adjustment to the needs of social life. Relative ethics, on the other hand, is concerned only with such conduct as is advantageous for that society which has not yet reached the end of complete adaptation to its environment, i.e. which is at present imperfect. It is hardly necessary to say that Spencer does not tell us how to bring the two ethical systems into correlation. And the actual criteria of conduct derived from biological considerations are almost ludicrously inadequate. Conduct, e.g., is said to be more moral in proportion as it exhibits a tendency on the part of the individual or society to become more “definite,” “coherent” and “heterogeneous.” Or, again, we should recognize as a test of the “authoritative” character of moral ideas or feelings the fact that they are complex and representative, referring to a remote rather than to a proximate good, remembering the while that “the sense of duty is transitory, and will diminish as fast as moralization increases.” In fact, no acceptable scientific criterion emerges, and the outcome of Spencer’s attempt to ascertain the laws of life and the conditions of existence is either a restatement of the dictates of the moral consciousness in vague and cumbrous quasi-scientific phraseology, or the substitution of the meaningless test of “survivability” as a standard of perfection for the usual and intelligible standards of “good” and “right.”

A similar criticism might fairly be passed upon the majority of philosophers who approach ethics from the standpoint of evolution. Sir Leslie Stephen, for instance, wishes to substitute the conception of “social health” for that Leslie Stephen. of universal happiness, and considers that the conditions of social health are to be discovered by an examination of the “social organism” or of “social tissue,” the laws of which can be studied apart from those laws by which the individuals composing society regulate their conduct. “The social evolution means the evolution of a strong social tissue; the best type is the type implied by the strongest tissue.” But on the important question as to what constitutes the strongest social tissue, or to what extent the analogy between society as at present constituted and organic life is really applicable, we are left without certain guidance. The fact is that with few exceptions evolutionary moral philosophers evade the choice between alternatives which is always presented to them. They begin, for the most part, with a belief that in ethics as in other departments of human knowledge “the more developed must be interpreted by the less developed”—though frequently in the sequel complexity or posteriority of development is erected as a standard by means of which to judge the process of development itself. They are not content to write a history of moral development, applying to it the principles by which Darwinians seek to explain the development of animal life. But the search of origins frequently leads them into theories of the nature of that moral conduct whose origin they are anxious to find quite at variance with current and accepted beliefs concerning its nature. The discovery of the so-called evolution of morality out of non-moral conditions is very frequently an unconscious subterfuge by which the evolutionist hides the fact that he is making a priori judgments upon the value of the moral concepts held to be evolved. To accept such theories of the origin of morality would carry with it the conviction that what we took for “moral” conduct was in reality something very different, and has been so throughout its history. The legitimate inference which should follow would be the denial of the validity of those moral laws which have hitherto been regarded as absolute in character, and the substitution for all customary moral terms of an entirely new set based upon biological considerations. But it is precisely this, the only logical inference, which most evolutionary philosophers are unwilling to draw. They cannot give up their belief in customary morality. Professor Huxley maintained, for example, in a famous lecture that “the ethical progress of society depends not on imitating the cosmic process, still less in running away from it, but in combating it” (Romanes Lecture, ad fin.). And very frequently arguments are adduced by evolutionists to prove that men’s belief in the absolute character of moral precepts is one of the necessary means adopted by nature to carry out her designs for the social welfare of mankind. Yet the other alternative, to which such reasoning points, they are reluctant to accept. For the belief that moral obligation is absolute in character, that it is alike impossible to explain its origin and transcend its laws, would make the search for a scientific criterion of conduct to be deduced from the laws of life and conditions of existence meaningless, if not absurd.

Perhaps the one European thinker who has carried evolutionary principles in ethics to their logical conclusion is Friedrich Nietzsche. Almost any system of morality or immorality might find some justification in Nietzsche’s Nietzsche. writings, which are extraordinarily chaotic and full of the wildest exaggerations. Yet it has been a true instinct which has led popular opinion as testified to by current literature to find in Nietzsche the most orthodox exponent of Darwinian ideas in their application to ethics. For he saw clearly that to be successful evolutionary ethics must involve the “transvaluation of all values,” the “demoralization” of all ordinary current morality. He accepted frankly the glorification of brute strength, superior cunning and all the qualities necessary for success in the struggle for existence, to which the ethics of evolution necessarily tend. He proclaimed himself, before everything else, a physiologist, and looked to physiology to provide the ultimate standard for everything that has value; and though his own ethical code necessarily involves the disappearance of sympathy, love, toleration and all existing altruistic emotions, he yet in a sense finds room for them in such altruistic self-sacrifice as prepares the way for the higher man of the future. Thus, after a fashion, he is able to reconcile the conflicting claims of egoism and altruism and succeed where most apostles of evolution fail. The Christian virtues, sympathy for the weak, the suffering, &c., represent a necessary stage to be passed through in the evolution of the Übermensch, i.e. the stage when the weak and suffering combine in revolt against the strong. They are to be superseded, not so much because all social virtues are to be scorned and rejected, as because in their effects, i.e. in their tendency to perpetuate and prolong the existence of the weak and those who are least well equipped and endowed by nature, they are anti-social in character and inimical to the survival of the strongest and most vigorous type of humanity. Consequently Nietzsche in effect maintains the following paradoxical position: he explains the existence of altruism upon egoistical principles; he advocates the total abolition of all altruism by carrying these same egoistical principles to their logical conclusion; he nevertheless appeals to that moral instinct which makes men ready to sacrifice their own narrow personal interests to the higher good of society—an instinct profoundly altruistic in character—as the ultimate justification of the ethics he enunciates. Such a position is a reductio ad absurdum of the attempt to transcend the ultimate character of those intuitions and feelings which prompt men to benevolence. Thus, though incidentally there is much to be learned from Nietzsche, especially from his criticism of the ethics of pessimism, or from the strictures he passes upon the negative morality of extreme asceticism or quietism, his system inevitably provides its own refutation. For no philosophy which travesties the real course of history and distorts the moral facts is likely to commend itself to the sober judgment of mankind however brilliant be its exposition or ingenious its arguments. Finally, the conceptions of strength, power and masterfulness by which Nietzsche attempts to determine his own moral ideal, become, when examined, as relative and unsatisfactory as other criteria of moral action said to be deduced from evolutionary principles. Men desire strength or power not as ends but as means to ends beyond them; Nietzsche is most convincing when the Übermensch is left undefined. Imagined as ideal man, i.e. as morality depicts him, he becomes intelligible; imagined as Nietzsche describes him he reels back into the beast, and that distinction which chiefly separates man from the animal world out of which he has emerged, viz. his unique power of self-consciousness and self-criticism, is obliterated.

It was upon this crucial difficulty, i.e. the transition in the evolution of morality from the stage of purely animal and unconscious action to specifically human action,—i.e. action T.H. Green. directed by self-conscious and purposive intelligence to an end conceived as good,—that the polemic of T.H. Green and his idealistic followers fastened. And it is perhaps unfortunate that metaphysical doctrines enunciated chiefly for the purposes of criticism not in themselves vitally necessary to the theory of morality propounded should have been regarded as the main contribution to ethical theory of idealist writers, and as such treated severely by hostile critics. Green’s principal objection to evolutionary moral philosophy is contained in the argument that no merely “natural” explanation of the facts of morality is conceivable. The knowing consciousness,—i.e. so far as conduct is concerned the moral consciousness,—can never become an object of knowledge in the sense in which natural phenomena are objects of scientific knowledge. For such knowledge implies the existence of a knowing consciousness as a relating and uniting intelligence capable of distinguishing itself from the objects to which it relates. And more particularly the existence of the moral consciousness implies “the transition from mere want to consciousness of wanted object, from impulse to satisfy the want to effort for the realization of the wanted objects, implies the presence of the want to a subject which distinguishes itself from it.” Consequently the facts of moral development imply with the emergence of human consciousness the appearance of something qualitatively different from the facts with which physiology for instance deals, imply a stratum as it were in development which no examination of animal tissues, no calculation of consequences with regard to the preservation of the species can ever satisfactorily explain. However far back we go in the history of humanity, if the presence of consciousness be admitted at all, it will be necessary to admit also the presence to consciousness of an ideal which can be accepted or rejected, of a power of looking before and after, and aiming at a future which is not yet fully realized. But unfortunately the temporary exigencies of criticism made it necessary for Green to emphasize the metaphysic of the self, i.e. to insist upon the necessity of a critical examination of the pre-requisites of any form of self-consciousness and especially of the knowing consciousness, to such an extent that critics have lost sight of the real dependence of his metaphysic upon the direct evidence of the moral consciousness. The philosophic value, the sincerity, the breadth and depth of his treatment of moral facts and institutions have been fully recognized. What has not been adequately realized is that the metaphysical basis of his system of ethics—the argument, for example, contained in the introduction to the Prolegomena—is unfairly treated if divorced from his treatment of morals as a whole, and that it can be justly estimated only if interpreted as much as the conclusion as the starting-point of moral theory. The doctrine of the eternity of the self, for instance, against which much criticism (e.g. Taylor, The Problem of Conduct, chap. ii.) has been directed, though it is chiefly expressed in the language of epistemology, has its roots nevertheless in the direct testimony of moral experience. For morality implies a power in the individual of rising above the interests of his own narrower self and identifying himself in the pursuit of a universal good with the true interests of all other selves. Similarly the conception of the self as a moral unity arises naturally out of the impossibility of finding the summum bonum in a succession of transient states of consciousness such as hedonism for example postulates. Good as a true universal can only be realized by a true self, and both imply a principle of unity not wholly expressible in terms of the particulars which it unifies. But whether the idealistic interpretation of the nature of universal good be the true one, i.e. whether we are justified in identifying that self-consciousness which is capable of grasping the principle of unity with the principle of unity which it grasps is a metaphysical and theistic problem comparatively irrelevant to Green’s moral theory. It would be quite possible to accept his criticisms of naturalism and hedonism while rejecting many of the metaphysical inferences which he draws. A somewhat similar answer might be returned to those critics who find Green’s use of the term “self-realization” or “self-development” as characteristic of the moral ideal unsatisfactory. It is quite easy to exhibit the futility of such a conception if understood formally for the practical purposes of moral philosophy. If the phrase be understood to mean the realization of some capacities of the self it does not appear to discriminate sufficiently between the good and bad capacities; while the realization under present conditions of all the capacities of a self is impossible. And to aim so far as is possible at all-round development would again ignore the distinction between vice and virtue. But used in the sense in which Green habitually uses it self-realization implies, as he puts it, the fulfilment by the good man of his rational capacity or the idea of a best that is in time, i.e. the distinction between the good and the bad self is never ignored, but is the fundamental assumption of his theory. And if it be urged that the expression is in any case tautological, i.e. that the good is defined in terms of self-realization and self-realization in terms of the good, it may be doubted whether any rational system of ethics can avoid a similar imputation. Green would admit that in a certain sense the conception of “good” is indefinable, i.e. that it can only be recognized in the particulars of conduct of which it is the universal form. Only, therefore, to those philosophers who believe in the existence of a criterion of morality, i.e. a universal test such as that of pleasure, happiness and the like, by which we can judge of the worth of actions, will Green’s position seem absurd; since, on the contrary, such conceptions as those of “self-development” or “self-realization” seem to have a definite and positive value if they call attention to the metaphysical implications of morality and accurately characterize the moral facts. What ambiguity they possess arises from the ambiguity of morality itself. For moral progress consists in the actualization of what is already potentially in existence. The striking merit of Green’s moral philosophy is that the idealism which he advocates is rooted and grounded in moral habits and institutions: and the metaphysic in which it culminates is based upon principles already implicitly recognized by the moral consciousness of the ordinary man. Nothing could be farther from Green’s teaching than the belief that constructive metaphysics could, unaided by the intuitions of the moral consciousness, discover laws for the regulation of conduct.

But although Green’s loyalty to the primary facts of the moral consciousness prevented him from constructing a rationalistic system of morals based solely upon the conclusions of metaphysics, it was perhaps inevitable that the revival of interest in metaphysics so prominent in his own speculations should lead to a more daring criticism of ethical first principles in other writers. Bradley’s Ethical Studies had presented with great brilliancy an idealist theory of morality not very far removed from that of Green’s Prolegomena. But the publication of Appearance and Reality by the same author marked a great advance in philosophical criticism of ethical postulates, and a growing dissatisfaction with current reconciliations between moral first principles and the conclusions of metaphysics. Appearance and Reality was not primarily concerned with morals, yet it inevitably led to certain conclusions affecting conduct, and it was no very long time before these conclusions were elaborated Taylor. in detail. Professor A.E. Taylor’s Problem of Conduct (1901) is one of the most noteworthy and independent contributions to Moral Philosophy published in recent years. But it nevertheless follows in the main Bradley’s line of criticism and may therefore be regarded as representative of his school. There are two principal positions in Professor Taylor’s work:—(1) a refusal to base ethics upon metaphysics, and (2) the discovery of an irreconcilable dualism in the nature of morality which takes many shapes, but may be summarized roughly as consisting in an ultimate opposition between egoism and altruism. With regard to the first of these Taylor says (op. cit. p. 4) that his object is to show that “ethics is as independent of metaphysical speculation for its principles and methods as any of the so-called ‘natural sciences’; that its real basis must be sought not in philosophical theories about the nature of the Absolute or the ultimate constitution of the Universe, but in the empirical facts of human life as they are revealed to us in our concrete everyday experience of the world and mankind, and sifted and systematized by the sciences of psychology and sociology.... Ethics should be regarded as a purely ‘positive’ or ‘experimental’ and not as a ‘speculative’ science.” With regard to the second position one quotation will suffice (op. cit. p. 183). “Altruism and egoism are divergent developments from the common psychological root of primitive ethical sentiment. Both developments are alike unavoidable, and each is ultimately irreconcilable with the other. Neither egoism nor altruism can be made the sole basis of moral theory without mutilation of the facts, nor can any higher category be discovered by the aid of which their rival claims may be finally adjusted.”