Recent Tendencies in Ethics / Three Lectures to Clergy Given at Cambridge

by W. R. Sorley

[Footnote 2: Dissertations, ii. 472.]

A passage such as this leads us to ask, What exactly is the extent of the modifications which Mill seeks to make in the ordinary scale of values? Does he, for instance, wish to invert any ordinary moral rules? Would he do away with, or in any important respect modify, the duties of truth or justice, temperance or benevolence? Far from it He only suggests, as many moralists of both parties have suggested, that in the application of moral law to the details of experience certain modifications are required. How far he goes in this direction may be seen from his own instance, that of truth. He would admit certain exceptions to the law of truth; he would give the less rigorous answers to the time-honoured questions as to whether one should tell the truth to an invalid in a dangerous illness or to a would-be criminal. But Mill always asserts the sanctity of the general principle; and, on this account, he holds that "in order that the exception may not extend itself beyond the need, and may have the least possible effect in weakening reliance on veracity, it ought to be recognised and, if possible, its limits defined; and if the principle of utility is good for anything, it must be good for weighing these conflicting utilities against one another, and marking out the region within which one or the other preponderates[1]." He holds that there are such limits to veracity. He even thinks—though here he is not quite correct—that such limits have been acknowledged by all moralists[2]. He would have been correct if he had said that they had been acknowledged by moralists of all schools: the admission of these limits is not peculiar to Utilitarians. But he vigorously defends the validity of the general rule, and maintains that, in considering any possible exception, we have to take account not merely of the present utility of the falsehood, but of its effect upon the sanctity of the general principle in the minds of men. The Utilitarian doctrine is expressly used by him to confirm the ordinary general laws of the moral consciousness. Nay, these rules—such as the duties of being temperate and just and benevolent—were, according to Mill, themselves the result of experiences of utility on the part of our predecessors, and from them handed down to us by the tradition of the race. No doubt in this Mill is applying a theoretical view too easily to a question of history. It is one thing to maintain, as he does, that utility is the correct test of morality; it is another thing altogether to say that our ordinary moral rules are the records or expressions of earlier judgments of utility. The former statement is made as a controversial statement which is admitted to be so far doubtful that most men need to be convinced of it. The latter statement could only be true if nobody had ever doubted the former—if everybody in past ages had accepted utility as the standard of morality. But, for our present purpose, his attitude to this question is of interest only as bringing out the point that the different schools of ethical thought during last century had a large basis of common agreement, and that this basis of common agreement was their acknowledgment of the validity of the moral rules recognised by the ordinary conscience.

[Footnote 1: Utilitarianism, p. 34.]

[Footnote 2: Ibid., p. 33.]

The Utilitarians no more than the Intuitionists sought to make any fundamental change in the content of right and of wrong as acknowledged by modern society. Their controversies were almost entirely of what may be called an academic kind, and, however decided, would have little effect upon a man's practical attitude. But it would not be possible to make any such confident assertion regarding the ethical controversies of the present day. We have no longer the same common basis of agreement to rely upon that our predecessors had a generation ago. There are many indications in recent literature that the suggestion is now made more readily than it was twenty or thirty years ago that the scale of moral values may have to be revised; and it seems to me that the ethical controversies of the coming generation will not be restricted to academic opponents whose disputes concern nothing more than the origin of moral ideas and their ultimate criterion. Modern controversy will involve these questions, but it will go deeper and it will spread its results wider: it appears as if it would not hesitate to call in question the received code of morality, and to revise our standard of right and wrong. One school at any rate has already made a claim of this sort, and the extravagance of its teaching has not prevented it from attracting adherents.

It is on this ground, therefore,—because I believe that the ethical question is no longer so purely an academic question as it was some years ago, because it affects not only the philosophic thinker but the practical man who is concerned with the problems of his day,—that I have selected the topic for these lectures. It is not merely that many modern writers assert some general doctrine as to the relativity of right and wrong. So much was implied, though it was not much laid stress upon, in the utilitarian doctrine. For the utilitarian conduct is right according to the amount of happiness it produces: goodness is relative to its tendency to produce happiness. But a much greater importance may attach to the assertion of the relativity of morals when one couples that doctrine with the idea now prevalent of the indefinitely great changes which the progress of the race brings about, not only in the social order but also in the structure and faculties of man himself.

Hence it is not surprising to find that there are at the present day some writers who ask for nothing less than a revision of the whole traditional morality, and in whose minds that demand is connected with the dominant doctrine of progress as it is expressed in the theory of evolution.

Perhaps we might trace the beginnings of this controversy as to the content of what is right and what is wrong to an older opposition in ethical thought, an opposition which especially affects the utilitarian doctrine—the controversy of Egoism and Altruism. If we look at these two conceptions of egoism and altruism as the Utilitarians did, if we regard the conception of egoism as having to do with one's own personal happiness, and that of altruism as describing the general happiness, the happiness of others rather than of oneself, then obviously the questions arise whether the conduct which produces the greatest happiness of others will or will not also produce the greatest happiness of the individual agent, and which should be chosen in the event of their disagreement. Is my happiness and that which will tend to it always to be got on the same lines of conduct as those which will bring about the greatest happiness of the greatest number?

The Utilitarian writers of last century were of course conscious of this problem, conscious that there was a possible discrepancy between egoistic conduct and altruistic conduct; but they agreed to lay stress upon altruistic results as determining moral quality. Their tendency was to minimise the difference between the egoistic and the altruistic effects of action, and in so far as a difference had to be allowed to emphasise the importance of the claims of the community at large, that is, roughly speaking, to take the altruistic standpoint. Recent and more careful investigators have brought out more exactly the extent and significance of the divergence. In particular this was done with perfect clearness and precision by the late Professor Sidgwick. He showed that the difference—although it might be easily exaggerated—was yet real and important, that the two systems did not mean the same thing, that we could not rely upon altruistic conduct always being for individual benefit, that there was no 'natural identity' between egoism and altruism. He held that morality, to save it from an unsolved dualism, required a principle capable of reconciling the discrepancy between the conduct in accordance with the axiom of Benevolence and the conduct in accordance with the equally rational axiom of Self-love.[1]

[Footnote 1: Professor Sidgwick's last words on the question are as follows: "If then the reconciliation of duty and self-interest is to be regarded as a hypothesis logically necessary to avoid a fundamental contradiction in one chief department of our thought, it remains to ask how far this necessity constitutes a sufficient reason for accepting this hypothesis…. Those who hold that the edifice of physical science is really constructed of conclusions logically inferred from self-evident premises, may reasonably demand that any practical judgments claiming philosophic certainty should be based on an equally firm foundation. If, on the other hand, we find that in our supposed knowledge of the world of nature propositions are commonly taken to be universally true, which yet seem to rest on no other grounds than that we have a strong disposition to accept them, and that they are indispensable to the systematic coherence of our beliefs,—it will be more difficult to reject a similarly supported assumption in ethics, without opening the door to universal scepticism" ('Methods of Ethics,' 6th ed., pp. 506, 507).]