Practical Ethics

by William De Witt Hyde

Instead of regarding society as a whole, and self as a member of that whole, it is possible to regard self as distinct and separate from society, and to make the interests of this separated and detached self the end and aim of action.—This temptation is self-interest. It consists in placing the individual self, with its petty, private, personal interests, above the social self, with the large, public, generous interests of the social order.

From one point of view it is easy to cheat society, and deprive it of its due. We can shirk our social obligations; we can dodge subscriptions; we can stay at home when we ought to be at the committee meeting, or the public gathering; we can decline invitations and refuse elections to arduous offices, and at the same time escape many of the worst penalties which would naturally follow from our neglect. For others, more generous and noble than we, will step in and take upon themselves our share of the public burdens in addition to their own. We may flatter ourselves that we have done a very shrewd thing in contriving to reap the benefits without bearing the burdens of society. There is, as we shall see, a penalty for negligence of social duty, and that too most sure and terrible. Self-interest is the seed, of which meanness is the full-grown plant, and of which social constraint and slavishness are the final fruits.

THE VICE OF DEFECT.

Lack of public spirit is meanness.—The mean man is he who acknowledges no interest and recognizes no obligation outside the narrow range of his strictly private concerns. As long as he is comfortable he will take no steps to relieve the distress of others. If his own premises are healthy, he will contribute nothing to improve the sanitary condition of his village or city. As long as his own property is secure he cares not how many criminals are growing up in the street, how many are sent to prison, or how they are treated after they come there. He favors the cheapest schools, the poorest roads, the plainest public buildings, because he would rather keep his money in his own pocket than contribute his share to maintain a thoroughly efficient and creditable public service. He will give nothing he can help giving, do nothing he can help doing, to make the town he lives in a healthier, happier, purer, wiser, nobler place. Meanness is the sacrifice of the great social whole to the individual. It is selfishness, stinginess, and ingratitude combined. It is the disposition to receive all that society contributes to the individual, and to give nothing in return. It is a willingness to appropriate the fruits of labors in which one refuses to bear a part.

THE VICE OF EXCESS.

The officious person is ready for any and every kind of public service, providing he can be at the head of it. There is no end to the work he will do if he can only have his own way.—He wants to be prime mover in every enterprise: to be chairman of the committee; to settle every question that comes up; to "run" things according to his own ideas. Such people are often very useful. It is generally wisest not to meddle much with them. The work may not be done in the best way by these officious people; but without them a great deal of public work would never be done at all. The vice, however, seriously impairs one's usefulness. The officious person is hard to work with. Men refuse to have anything to do with him. And so he is left to do his work for the most part alone. Officiousness is, in reality, social ambition; and that again as we saw resolves itself into sentimentality;—the regard for what we and others think of ourselves, rather than straightforward devotion to the ends which we pretend to be endeavoring to promote. Officiousness is self-seeking dressed up in the uniform of service. The officious person, instead of losing his private self in the larger life of society, tries to use the larger interests of society in such a way as to make them gratify his own personal vanity and sense of self-importance.

THE PENALTY.

All meanness and self-seeking are punished by lack of freedom or constraint; though frequently the constraint is inward and spiritual rather than outward and physical.—We have seen that to the man of generous public spirit society presents a career for the unfolding and expansion of his social powers. To such a man society, with its claims and obligations, is an enlargement of his range of sympathy, a widening of his spiritual horizon, and on that account a means of larger liberty and fuller freedom.

To the mean and selfish man, on the contrary, society presents itself as an alien force, a hard task-master, making severe requirements upon his time, imposing cramping limitations on his self-indulgence, levying heavy taxes upon his substance; prescribing onerous rules and regulations for his conduct.

By excluding society from the sphere of interests with which he identifies himself, the mean man, by his own meanness, makes society antagonistic to him, and himself its reluctant and unwilling slave. Serve it to some extent he must; but the selfishness and meanness of his own attitude toward it, makes social service, not the willing and joyous offering of a free and devoted heart, but the slavish submission of a reluctant will, forced to do the little that it cannot help doing by legal or social compulsion.