On the Ethics of Naturalism

by W. R. Sorley

Psychologically, it seems to be best supported by Schopenhauer's doctrine of will or desire as an incessant painful striving, pleasure being merely the negative of this pain, and always coming short of completely satisfying it. But this position involves a double error in psychological analysis, and is relinquished even by Hartmann, though he still regards pleasure as in all cases satisfaction of desire. Desire is itself merely a secondary or derived fact in human nature, consequent on the inhibition of volitional energy.[164] The pleasures we call passive are independent of it; and those which attend upon activity, but are not themselves part of the end of action, are also enjoyed without being striven after in order to satisfy a want. Further, it is a mistake to look upon the pleasure of attainment as a mere negation of the pain of desire. The painful element in desire comes from the inhibition of the attempted realisation of an ideal object. In unsatisfied desires, it is true, the pain is in proportion to the strength of the restrained longing. But, if the inhibition is overcome, the pain is not equal to the strength of the desire, but only to the amount of opposition that has to be conquered in satisfying it. Hence, not only are there other pleasures than those of satisfied desire, but even the pleasure got from such satisfaction is something more than a mere recompense for the pain accompanying the desire.

(β) from the facts of human life;

The support got by pessimism from the facts of human life is more difficult to estimate at its true value. It is obvious that pleasure and pain are intermingled in almost every experience; and the proportion in which they are mixed varies greatly in different circumstances and according to the susceptibilities of different persons. If we ask a number of people whether life is on the whole pleasant to them, not only do we receive a variety of answers which it is hard to sum up and average, but the answers we get are apt to reflect the feeling of the moment rather than to represent an impartial estimate of the pleasure and pain of a lifetime. Thus experience seems unable to give us a trustworthy answer as to the average pleasure-value of life; but, if its verdict is correct, that to some life is pleasant, though to many painful, this shows that a surplus of pain does not follow from the nature of life, and thus destroys the position of thoroughgoing pessimism, which looks upon this as the worst of all possible worlds.

(b) that the evolution of life does not tend to pleasure.

(b) It may still be maintained, however—and this is the position which chiefly concerns us here—that the course of evolution does not tend to increase the pleasure in life at the expense of the pain in it, and that, therefore, even although pleasure and evolution may both of them be possible ends of conduct, they are ends which point in different directions and lead to different courses of action.

(α) Incompleteness of the evolutionist argument.

It is necessary for the evolutionist who holds that the development of life does not tend to increased pleasure, to meet the argument already adduced[165] to show their correspondence. Nor does that argument seem to be altogether beyond criticism. To compare progress or development with pleasure, we ought to know exactly what is meant by both terms. Yet it is impossible to have a clear notion of progress without an idea of the end to which it tends, and this has not yet been obtained. It is largely on account of the difficulty of obtaining such an idea that some evolutionists seem to have been driven to measure progress in terms of pleasure, just as, owing to the difficulty of estimating and summing up pleasures, some hedonists have been induced to measure them by the progress of evolution. What we have now to see is whether the correspondence assumed between progress and pleasure actually exists. And, to avoid the tautology of saying that progress is increase of life, we must judge of it simply by empirical observation of the nature of human activity and of the course of human affairs.

Now the attempted identification of pleasurable and life-promoting activities rests on an incomplete account of the motives and results of action. For, in the first place, even admitting that pleasure and avoidance of pain are the only motives to action, the influence of natural selection has not prevented actions hurtful to life being sometimes accompanied by pleasant sensations. Its tendency to do so has been much more effective in the lower orders of animal life than in the higher. The latter, especially man, possess the power of representing ideal states in the imagination, and are thus able to avoid actions hurtful to life, although these actions are pleasant at the time. For the hurtful consequences of the action may be so vividly represented in idea as to outweigh the influence of the present pleasure which could be got from its enjoyment.[166]