"The new ethics is based upon facts and is applied to facts" (p. 18).
"Man wants something, so he conceives the idea how good it would be if he had it…. Only by studying facts will he be enabled to realise his ideals" (pp. 19 and 20).
"If you wish to exist, obey reason. Reason teaches us how to regulate our actions in conformity with the order of natural laws. If we do regulate them in conformity with the order of natural laws, they will stand; otherwise not. In the former case they will be good, they will agree with the cosmical conditions of existence; in the latter case they are bad, they will not agree with the cosmical conditions of existence; therefore they will necessarily produce disorder and evil" (pp. 31, 32).
It appears to me clear from this, that the reason why we must regulate our actions to conform with natural laws, must be the fact that otherwise they cannot "stand," which is explained more in detail in what follows, to mean that they are constituted to produce "disorder and evil,"—which in its turn must be surely understood as meaning that disorder is itself an evil. If disorder were no evil, and if no further evils resulted from actions which are not "in conformity with the order of natural laws," what foundation would Dr. Carus in that case be able to give his ethics? I wholly agree with Dr. Carus that our conduct if it is to be ethical must support itself upon as profound a comprehension of the relations of reality as physical science, psychology, and social science alone can furnish. But this requirement can only be made good through and by the principle of welfare. It has validity only for the person who wills that his conduct shall "stand" and produce no evil, either in extended or in limited circles. If pain and death were not evils, this requirement would have no validity.
To judge from his somewhat indefinite expressions one might suspect in Dr. Carus here a votary of egoistic hedonism, were it not that a number of other passages in his book exclude this suspicion.
However, it seems quite clear to me that his final criterion must coincide with the principle of welfare. His ethics is an ethics of expediency, in that his ultimate criterion is the influence of actions on the life of mankind.
4) Dr. Carus justly emphasises the relation of ethics to our world-conception at large. But this connection does not mean that ethics can be derived by deduction from a philosophical system previously given. Ethics is an independent discipline which starts from its own peculiar assumptions (which cannot of course stand in contradiction to other established assumptions), although it is obliged to make much use of the results furnished by other sciences. Ethics has an independent foundation in the laws of feeling and volitional life, just as the theory of knowledge has its foundation in the laws of sensations and perceptions. In conformity with the law of economy, (which must prevail in science even though it should not prevail in nature,) we must restrict the established postulates of the single sciences to the least possible limit. If after doing this agreement between the single sciences finally occurs, this result will be all the more valuable.
According to Dr. Carus ethics is to be derived now from a philosophical total world-conception, as according to his view ("The Ethical Problem," p. 71) it originally arose through the influence of the positive religions.[130] Very weighty objections can be made in my opinion against this latter assumption. It is a fact that the lower a religion stands the less ethical character it possesses, and the very lowest religions it is probable possess no ethical value whatever. The question then arises how religion gradually acquired its ethical character. The ethical ideas which were perceived in the nature of the deity must have had a natural origin, and this origin can be sought only in the life of man with men. The ethical norms and ideas developed themselves here spontaneously and have been just as spontaneously projected or hypostatised as the attributes of divinity. In the history of the religion of Greece we can see clearly exhibited the development of gods as powers of nature to gods as the expression of an ethical order of nature. Compare for instance, the Dodonæan and the Homeric Zeus with the Zeus that appears in the ideal belief of Æschylus. The experiences are made in human life that lead to the formation of divine ideals. Gods grow better and more gentle according as men themselves grow better and gentler. Religious conceptions are idealised experiences. If religion is a factor in the development of ethics it is because man conceives and represents his essential ideals in a religious form. The movement proceeds therefore from experience to experience; that which acts on nature is, as Shakespeare says, always an art that has been produced by nature itself. How could man understand the meaning of the ethical qualities attributed to his deities if he were not acquainted to some extent with these qualities through experience?
[130] Dr. Carus expresses himself differently in The Open Court (1890, p. 2549), where religion and ethics are called twins; whereas in The Ethical Problem the latter is the daughter of the former.
That which distinguishes philosophical from theological ethics is not the fact that the former is constructed on the basis of some philosophical system and the latter upon ecclesiastical dogmatism, but the fact that philosophical ethics brings out into full consciousness the psychological basis upon which ethical life has actually always more or less indirectly builded, and draws all the consequences implied in this. In this it furnishes an independent contribution to a philosophical system.