With regard to the criterion or standard of morality,—the second question to which I have to call attention,—they held that the distinction between right and wrong depended upon the consequences of an action in the way of pleasure and pain. That action was right which on the whole and in the long run would bring pleasure or happiness to those whom it affected: that action was wrong which on the whole and in the long run would bring pain rather than pleasure to those whom it affected.
From their view as to the origin of moral ideas, the school might more properly be called the Empirical School. It is from their views on the question of the standard of value, or the criterion of morality, that it claimed, and that it received, the name Utilitarian[1]. On both these points the Utilitarian School was opposed by an energetic but less compact body of writers, known as Intuitionists.
[Footnote 1: It seems to have been through J.S. Mill's influence that the term obtained currency. It was used by him as the name of a "little society to be composed of young men agreeing in fundamental principles" which he formed in the winter of 1822-23. He "did not invent the word, but found in one of Galt's novels, the 'Annals of the Parish.'" "With a boy's fondness for a name and a banner I seized on the word, and for some years called myself and others by it as a sectarian appellation" ('Autobiography,' pp. 79, 80; cf. 'Utilitarianism,' p. 9 n.) A couple of sentences from Galt may be quoted: "As there was at the time a bruit and a sound about universal benevolence, philanthropy, utility, and all the other disguises with which an infidel philosophy appropriated to itself the charity, brotherly love, and well-doing inculcated by our holy religion, I set myself to task upon these heads…. With well-doing, however, I went more roundly to work. I told my people that I thought they had more sense than to secede from Christianity to become Utilitarians, for that it would be a confession of ignorance of the faith they deserted, seeing that it was the main duty inculcated by our religion to do all in morals and manners to which the new-fangled doctrine of utility pretended." Mill is wrong in supposing that his use of the term "was the first time that any one had taken the title of Utilitarian"; and Galt, who represents his annalist as writing of the year 1794, is historically justified. Writing in 1781 Bentham uses the word 'utilitarian,' and again in 1802 he definitely asserts that it is the only name of his creed ('Works,' x. 92, 392). M. Halévy ('L'évolution de la doctrine utilitaire,' p. 300) draws attention to the presence of the word in Jane Austen's 'Sense and Sensibility,' published in 1811.]
The Intuitionists maintained—to put the matter briefly—that the moral consciousness of man could not be entirely accounted for by experiences of the kind laid stress on by the Utilitarians. They maintained that moral ideas were in their origin spiritual, although they might be called into definite consciousness by the experience of the facts to which they could be applied. Experience might call them forth into the light of day; but it was held that they belonged, in nature and origin, to the constitution of man's mind. On this ground, therefore, the school was properly called Intuitional: they held that moral ideas were received by direct vision or intuition, as it were, not by a process of induction from particular facts.
And, in the second place, with regard to the criterion of morality, that also (they held) was not dependent on the consequences in the way of happiness and misery which the Utilitarians emphasised. On the contrary, moral ideas themselves had an independent validity; they had a worth and authority for conduct which could not be accounted for by any consequences in which action resulted: belonging as they did to the essence of the human spirit, they also had authority over the conduct of man's life.
Now the ethical controversies of last century were almost entirely about these two points and between these two opposed schools. No doubt the two questions thus discussed did go very near to the root of the whole matter. They pointed to the consideration of the question of man's place in the universe and his spiritual nature as determining the part which it was his to play in the world. They suggested, if they did not always raise, the question whether man is entirely a product of nature or whether he has a spiritual essence to which nature may be subdued. But the larger issues suggested were not followed out. Common consent seemed to limit the discussion to the two questions described; and this limitation of the controversy tended to a precision and clearness in method, which is often wanting in the ethical thought of the present day, disturbed as it is by new and more far-reaching problems.
This limitation of scope, which I venture to select as the leading characteristic of last century's ethical enquiries, may be further seen in the large amount of agreement between the two schools regarding the content of morality. The Utilitarians no more than the Intuitionists were opponents of the traditional—as we may call it—the Christian morality of modern civilisation. They both adopted and defended the well-recognised virtues of truth and justice, of temperance and benevolence, which have been accepted by the common tradition of ages as the expression of man's moral consciousness. The Intuitionists no doubt were sometimes regarded—they may indeed have sometimes regarded themselves—as in a peculiar way the guardians of the traditional morality, and as interested more than their opponents in defending a view in harmony with man's spiritual essence and inheritance. But we do not find any attack upon the main content of morality by the Utilitarian writers. On the contrary, they were interested in vindicating their own full acceptance of the traditional morality. This is, in particular, the case with John Stuart Mill, the high-minded representative of the Utilitarian philosophy in the middle of last century. "In the golden rule of Jesus of Nazareth," he says, "we read the complete spirit of the ethics of utility. To do as one would be done by, and to love one's neighbour as oneself, constitute the ideal perfection of utilitarian morality."[1]
[Footnote 1: Utilitarianism, 9th ed., pp. 24, 25.]
No doubt Mill was a practical reformer as well as a philosophical thinker, and he wished on certain special points to revise the accepted code. He says that "the received code of ethics is by no means of divine right, that mankind has still much to learn as to the effects of actions on the general happiness."[1] He would even take this point—the modifiability of the ordinary moral code—as a sort of test question distinguishing his own system from that of the intuitional moralists; and in one place he says that "the contest between the morality which appeals to an external standard, and that which grounds itself on internal conviction, is the contest of progressive morality against stationary—of reason and argument against the deification of mere opinion and habit. The doctrine that the existing order of things is the natural order, and that, being natural, all innovation upon it is criminal, is as vicious in morals as it is now at last admitted to be in physics and in society and government."[2]
[Footnote 1: Ibid., p. 35.]