II. RIGHT AND WRONG:
THE SCIENTIFIC GROUND OF THEIR DISTINCTION.[1]
The questions which are here to be considered are especially and peculiarly everybody’s questions. It is not everybody’s business to be an engineer, or a doctor, or a carpenter, or a soldier; but it is everybody’s business to be a citizen. The doctrines and precepts which guide the practice of the good engineer are of interest to him who uses them and to those whose business it is to investigate them by mechanical science; the rest of us neither obey nor disobey them. But the doctrines and precepts of morality, which guide the practice of the good citizen, are of interest to all; they must be either obeyed or disobeyed by every human being who is not hopelessly and forever separated from the rest of mankind. No one can say, therefore, that in this inquiry we are not minding our own business, that we are meddling with other men’s affairs. We are in fact studying the principles of our profession, so far as we are able; a necessary thing for every man who wishes to do good work in it.
Along with the character of universal interest which belongs to our subject there goes another. What is everybody’s practical business is also to a large extent what everybody knows; and it may be reasonably expected that a discourse about Right and Wrong will be full of platitudes and truisms. The expectation is a just one. The considerations I have to offer are of the very oldest and the very simplest commonplace and common sense; and no one can be more astonished than I am that there should be any reason to speak of them at all. But there is reason to speak of them, because platitudes are not all of one kind. Some platitudes have a definite meaning and a practical application, and are established by the uniform and long-continued experience of all people. Other platitudes, having no definite meaning and no practical application, seem not to be worth anybody’s while to test; and these are quite sufficiently established by mere assertion, if it is audacious enough to begin with and persistent enough afterward. It is in order to distinguish these two kinds of platitude from one another, and to make sure that those which we retain form a body of doctrine consistent with itself and with the rest of our beliefs, that we undertake this examination of obvious and widespread principles.
First of all, then, what are the facts?
We say that it is wrong to murder, to steal, to tell lies, and that it is right to take care of our families. When we say in this sense that one action is right and another wrong, we have a certain feeling toward the action which is peculiar and not quite like any other feeling. It is clearly a feeling toward the action and not toward the man who does it; because we speak of hating the sin and loving the sinner. We might reasonably dislike a man whom we knew or suspected to be a murderer, because of the natural fear that he might murder us; and we might like our own parents for taking care of us. But everybody knows that these feelings are something quite different from the feeling which condemns murder as a wrong thing, and approves parental care as a right thing. I say nothing here about the possibility of analyzing this feeling, or proving that it arises by combination of other feelings; all I want to notice is that it is as distinct and recognizable as the feeling of pleasure in a sweet taste or of displeasure at a toothache. In speaking of right and wrong, we speak of qualities of action which arouse definite feelings that everybody knows and recognizes. It is not necessary, then, to give a definition at the outset; we are going to use familiar terms which have a definite meaning in the same sense in which everybody uses them. We may ultimately come to something like a definition; but what we have to do first is to collect the facts and see what can be made of them, just as if we were going to talk about limestone, or parents and children, or fuel.
It is easy to conceive that murder and theft and neglect of the young might be considered wrong in a very simple state of society. But we find at present that the condemnation of these actions does not stand alone; it goes with the condemnation of a great number of other actions which seem to be included with the obviously criminal action, in a sort of general rule. The wrongness of murder, for example, belongs in a less degree to any form of bodily injury that one man may inflict on another; and it is even extended so as to include injuries to his reputation or his feelings. I make these more refined precepts follow in the train of the more obvious and rough ones, because this appears to have been the traditional order of their establishment. ‘He that makes his neighbor blush in public,’ says the Mishna, ‘is as if he had shed his blood.’ In the same way the rough condemnation of stealing carries with it a condemnation of more refined forms of dishonesty: we do not hesitate to say that it is wrong for a tradesman to adulterate his goods, or for a laborer to scamp his work. We not only say that it is wrong to tell lies, but that it is wrong to deceive in other more ingenious ways; wrong to use words so that they shall have one sense to some people and another sense to other people; wrong to suppress the truth when that suppression leads to false belief in others. And again, the duty of parents toward their children is seen to be a special case of a very large and varied class of duties toward that great family to which we belong—to the fatherland and them that dwell therein. The word duty which I have here used, has as definite a sense to the general mind as the words right and wrong; we say that it is right to do our duty, and wrong to neglect it. These duties to the community serve in our minds to explain and define our duties to individuals. It is wrong to kill any one; unless we are an executioner, when it may be our duty to kill a criminal; or a soldier, when it may be our duty to kill the enemy of our country; and in general it is wrong to injure any man in any way in our private capacity and for our own sakes. Thus if a man injures us, it is only right to retaliate on behalf of other men. Of two men in a desert island, if one takes away the other’s cloak, it may or may not be right for the other to let him have his coat also; but if a man takes away my cloak while we both live in society, it is my duty to use such means as I can to prevent him from taking away other people’s cloaks. Observe that I am endeavoring to describe the facts of the moral feelings of Englishmen, such as they are now.
The last remark leads us to another platitude of exceedingly ancient date. We said that it was wrong to injure any man in our private capacity and for our own sakes. A rule like this differs from all the others that we have considered, because it not only deals with physical acts, words and deeds which can be observed and known by others, but also with thoughts which are known only to the man himself. Who can tell whether a given act of punishment was done from a private or from a public motive? Only the agent himself. And yet if the punishment was just and within the law, we should condemn the man in the one case and approve him in the other. This pursuit of the actions of men to their very sources, in the feelings which they only can know, is as ancient as any morality we know of, and extends to the whole range of it. Injury to another man arises from anger, malice, hatred, revenge; these feelings are condemned as wrong. But feelings are not immediately under our control, in the same way that overt actions are: I can shake anybody by the hand if I like, but I cannot always feel friendly to him. Nevertheless we can pay attention to such aspects of the circumstances, and we can put ourselves into such conditions, that our feelings get gradually modified in one way or the other; we form a habit of checking our anger by calling up certain images and considerations, whereby in time the offending passion is brought into subjection and control. Accordingly we say that it is right to acquire and to exercise this control; and the control is supposed to exist whenever we say that one feeling or disposition of mind is right and another wrong. Thus, in connection with the precept against stealing, we condemn envy and covetousness; we applaud a sensitive honesty which shudders at anything underhand or dishonorable. In connection with the rough precept against lying, we have built up and are still building a great fabric of intellectual morality, whereby a man is forbidden to tell lies to himself, and is commanded to practice candor and fairness and open-mindedness in his judgments, and to labor zealously in pursuit of the truth. In connection with the duty to our families, we say that it is right to cultivate public spirit, a quick sense of sympathy, and all that belongs to a social disposition.
Two other words are used in this connection which it seems necessary to mention. When we regard an action as right or wrong for ourselves, this feeling about the action impels us to do it or not to do it, as the case may be. We may say that the moral sense acts in this case as a motive; meaning by moral sense only the feeling in regard to an action which is considered as right or wrong, and by motive something which impels us to act. Of course there may be other motives at work at the same time, and it does not at all follow that we shall do the right action or abstain from the wrong one. This we all know to our cost. But still our feeling about the rightness or wrongness of an action does operate as a motive when we think of the action as being done by us; and when so operating it is called conscience. I have nothing to do at present with the questions about conscience, whether it is a result of education, whether it can be explained by self-love, and so forth; I am only concerned in describing well-known facts, and in getting as clear as I can about the meaning of well-known words. Conscience, then, is the whole aggregate of our feelings about actions as being right or wrong, regarded as tending to make us do the right actions and avoid the wrong ones. We also say sometimes, in answer to the question, ‘How do you know that this is right or wrong?’ ‘My conscience tells me so.’ And this way of speaking is quite analogous to other expressions of the same form; thus if I put my hand into water, and you ask me how I know that it is hot, I might say, ‘My feeling of warmth tells me so.’