Produced by Charles Aldarondo, Charles Franks
and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team
PROBLEMS OF CONDUCT
AN INTRODUCTORY SURVEY OF ETHICS
BY
DURANT DRAKE
A.M. (Harvard) Ph.D. (Columbia)
Associate Professor of Ethics and Philosophy of Religion at Wesleyan
University
BOSTON NEW YORK CHICAGO
1914
TO THE DEAR TWO WHOSE INTEREST IN PROBLEMS OF CONDUCT FIRST AWAKENED MINE AND WHOSE EAGERNESS TO KNOW AND DO REMAINS UNDIMMED BY THE YEARS MY FATHER AND MY MOTHER
PREFACE
This book represents in substance a course of lectures and discussions given first at the University of Illinois and later at Wesleyan University. It was written to meet the needs both of the college student who has the added guidance of an instructor, and of the generalreader who has no such assistance. The attempt has been made to keep the presentation simple and clear enough to need no interpreter, and by the list of readings appended to each chapter, to make a self directed further study of any point easy and alluring. These references are for the most part to books in English, easily accessible, and both intelligible and interesting to the ordinary untrained reader or undergraduate. Some articles from the popular reviews have been included, which, if not always authoritative, are interesting and suggestive.
The function of the instructor who should use this as a textbook would consist, first, in making sure that the text was thoroughly read and understood; secondly, in raising doubts, suggesting opposing views, conducting a discussion with the object of making the student think for himself; and, thirdly, in adding new material and illustration and directing the outside readings which should supplement this purposely brief and summary treatment. The books to which reference is made in the lists of readings, and other books approved by the instructor, should be kept upon reserved shelves for the constant use of the class in the further study of questions suggested by the text or raised in the classroom.
It will be noticed that the disputes and the technical language of theorists have been throughout so far as possible avoided. The discussion of historical theories and isms' is unnecessarily bewildering to the beginner; and the aim has been rather to keep as close as possible to the actual experience of the student and the language of everyday life. Far more attention is given than in most books on ethics to concrete contemporary problems. After all, an insight into the fallacies of the reasoning of the various ethical schools, an ability to know what they are talking about and glibly refute them, is of less importance than an acquaintance with, and a firm, intelligent attitude toward, the vital moral problems and movements of the day. I have prayed to be saved from academic abstractness and remoteness, and to go as straight as I could to the real perplexities from which men suffer in deciding upon their conduct. The purpose of a study of ethics is, primarily, to get light for the guidance of life. And so, while referring to authors who differ from the views here expressed, I have sought to impart a definite conception of relative values, to offer a thread for guidance through the labyrinth of moral problems, and to effect a heightened realization of the importance and the possibilities of right living.
It is necessary, indeed, in order to justify and clarify our concrete moral judgments, that we should reach clear and firmly grounded conclusions upon the underlying abstract questions. And the habit of laying aside upon occasion one's instinctive or habitual moral preferences and discussing with open mind their justification and rationality is of great value to the individual and to society. Hence the first two Parts of this volume take up, as simply as is consonant with the really intricate questions involved, the history of the development of human morality and the psychological foundation of moral obligations and ideals. The exposition of the meaning of right and wrong there unfolded serves as a basis for the sound solution of the confused concrete issues, private and then public, which are discussed in the remainder of the volume.
An introductory outline of any subject must inevitably be superficial. To explain all the discriminations that are important to the specialist, to justify thoroughly all the positions taken, to do adequate justice to opposing views, would require ten volumes instead of one. And though there is a crying need of scholarly and elaborate discussion of the endless problems of morality, there is a prior need for the student of surveying the field, seeing what the problems are, how they are related, and what is approximately certain. The impression left by many ethical treatises, that everything is matter for dispute and no moral judgments are reliable, seems to me unfortunate; I have preferred to incur the charge of dogmatism rather than to fall into that error to offer a clear cut set of standards, to which exception will be taken by this critic or that, rather than to hold out to the student a chaos of confused possibilities.
No originality of viewpoint is claimed for this book. Its raison d'etre is simply to provide a clearer, more concrete, and more concisely comprehensive view of the nature of morality and its summons to men than has seemed to me available. I have drawn freely upon the thoughts of ethical teachers, classic and contemporary. These ideas are, or ought to be, common property; and it has been impracticable to trace them to their sources and offer detailed acknowledgment. Nothing has been presented here that has not first passed through the crucible of my own thinking and experience; and where the sparks came from that kindled each particular thought I am sure I do not know.
Portions of chapters xxi and xxix have appeared in the Forum and North American Review respectively; to the editors of these periodicals my thanks are due for permission to reprint.
DURANT DRAKE.
MlDDLETOWN, CONN, August 3, 1914.
CONTENTS
INTRODUCTORY.
What is the field of ethics? Why should we study ethics?
PART I. THE EVOLUTION OF MORALITY
CHAPTER I. THE ORIGIN OF PERSONAL MORALITY… How early in the evolutionary process did personal morality of some sort emerge? What were the main causes that produced personal morality? How far has the moralizing process been blind and how far conscious?
CHAPTER II. THE ORIGIN OF SOCIAL MORALITY… How early was social morality developed? By what means was social morality produced? How has morality been fostered by the tribe?
CHAPTER III. OUTWARD DEVELOPMENT-MORALS… What is the difference between morals and non-moral customs? What, in general, has been the direction of moral progress? What definition of morality emerges from this? Is moral progress certain?
CHAPTER IV. INWARD DEVELOPMENT-CONSCIENCE… What are the stages in the history of moral guidance? Out of what has conscience developed? What is conscience now? What is the value of conscience?
CHAPTER V. THE INDIVIDUALIZING OF CONSCIENCE… Why did not the individualizing of conscience occur earlier? What forces made against custom-morality? Conservatism vs. radicalism. What are the dangers of conventional morality?
CHAPTER VI. CAN WE BASE MORALITY UPON CONSCIENCE… What is the meaning of "moral intuitionism"? Do the deliverances of different people's consciences agree? If conscience everywhere agreed in its dictates, could we base morality upon it? What is the plausibility of moral intuitionism?
PART II. THE THEORY OF MORALITY
CHAPTER VII. THE BASIS OF RIGHT AND WRONG… What is the nature of that intrinsic goodness upon which ultimately all valuations rest? What is extrinsic goodness? What sort of conduct, then, is good? And how shall we define virtue?
CHAPTER VIII. THE MEANING OF DUTY… Why are there conflicts between duty and inclination? Must we deny that duty is the servant of happiness? Does the end justify the means? What is the justification of justice and chivalry?
CHAPTER IX. THE JUDGMENT OF CHARACTER… Wherein consists goodness of character? Can we say, with Kant, that the only good is the Good Will? What evils may go with conscientiousness? What is the justification of praise and blame? What is responsibility?
CHAPTER X. THE SOLUTION OF PERSONAL PROBLEMS… What are the inadequacies of instinct and impulse that necessitate morality? What factors are to be considered in estimating the worth of personal moral ideals? Epicureanism vs. Puritanism. What are the evils in undue self-indulgence? What are the evils in undue self-repression?
CHAPTER XI. THE SOLUTION OF SOCIAL PROBLEMS… Why should we be altruistic? What is the exact meaning of selfishness and unselfishness? Are altruistic impulses always right? What mental and moral obstacles hinder altruistic action? How can we reconcile egoism and altruism?
CHAPTER XII. OBJECTIONS AND MISUNDERSTANDINGS… Do men always act for pleasure or to avoid pain? Are pleasures and pains incommensurable? Are some pleasures worthier than others? Is morality merely subjective and relative?
CHAPTER XIII. ALTEBNATIVE THEORIES… Is morality "categorical," beyond need of justification? Should we live "according to nature," and adjust ourselves to the evolutionary process? Is self-development, or self-realization, the ultimate end? Is the source of duty the will of God?
CHAPTER XIV. THE WORTH OF MORALITY… Morality as the organization of human interests. Do moral acts always bring happiness somewhere? Is there anything better than morality?
PART III. PERSONAL MORALITY
CHAPTER XV. HEALTH AND EFFICIENCY… What is the moral importance of health? Can we attain to greater health and efficiency? Is continued idleness ever justifiable? Are competitive athletics desirable? Is it wrong to smoke?
CHAPTER XVI. THE ALCOHOL PROBLEM… What are the causes of the use of alcoholic drinks? What are the evils that result from alcoholic liquors? What should be the attitude of the individual toward alcoholic liquors? What should be our attitude toward the use of alcoholic liquors by others?
CHAPTER XVII. CHASTITY AND MARRIAGE… What are the reasons for chastity before and fidelity after marriage? What safeguards against unchastity are necessary? What are the factors in an ideal marriage? 1Is divorce morally justifiable?
CHAPTER XVIII. FELLOWSHIP, LOYALTY, AND LUXURY… what social relationships impose claims upon us? What general duties do we owe our fellows? Are the rich justified in living in luxury? Is it wrong to gamble, bet, or speculate?
CHAPTER XIX. TRUTHFULNESS AND ITS PROBLEMS… What are the reasons for the obligation of truthfulness? What exceptions are allowable to the duty of truthfulness? In what directions are our standards of truthfulness low? The ethics of journalism.
CHAPTER XX. CULTURE AND ART… What is the value of culture and art? What is most important in cultural education? What dangers are there in culture and art for life? Should art be censored in the interests of morality?
CHAPTER XXI. THE MECHANISM OF SELF-CONTROL… What are our potentialities of greater self-control? A practicable mechanism of self-control. Various accessories and safeguards.
CHAPTER XXII. THE ATTAINABILITY OF HAPPINESS… The threefold key to happiness: I. Hearty allegiance to duty. II. Hearty acquiescence in our lot. III. Hearty appreciation of the wonder and beauty in life. Can we maintain a steady under glow of happiness?
PART IV. PUBLIC MORALITY
CHAPTER XXIII. PATRIOTISM AND WORLD-PEACE… What is the meaning and value of patriotism? How should patriotism be directed and qualified? What have been the benefits of war? What are the evils of war? What can we do to hasten world-peace?
CHAPTER XXIV. POLITICAL PURITY AND EFFICIENCY… What are the forces making for corruption in politics? What are the evil results of political corruption? What is the political duty of the citizen? What legislative checks to corruption are possible?
CHAPTER XXV. SOCIAL ALLEVIATION… What is the duty of the State in regard to: I. Sickness and preventable death? II. Poverty and inadequate living conditions? III. Commercialized vice? IV. Crime?
CHAPTER XXVI. INDUSTRIAL WRONGS… In our present organization of industry, what are the duties of businessmen: I. To the public? II. To investors? III. To competitors? IV. To employees? What general remedies for industrial wrongs are feasible?
CHAPTER XXVII. INDUSTRIAL RECONSTRUCTION… Ought the trusts to be broken up, or regulated? What are the ethics of the following schemes: I. Trade-unions and strikes? II. Profit-sharing, cooperation, consumers' leagues? III. Government regulation of prices, profits, and wages? IV. Socialism?
CHAPTER XXVIII. LIBERTY AND LAW… What are the essential aspects of the ideal of liberty? The ideal of individualism. The ideal of legal control. Should existing laws always be obeyed?
CHAPTER XXIX. EQUALITY AND PRIVILEGE… What flagrant forms of inequality exist in our society? What methods of equalizing opportunity are possible? What are the ethics of: I. The single tax? II. Free trade and protection? III. The control of immigration? IV. The woman's movement?
CHAPTER XXX. THE FUTURE OF THE RACE… In what ways should the State seek to better human environment? What should be done in the way of public education? hat can be done by eugenics? What are the gravest moral dangers of our times?
PROBLEMS OF CONDUCT
INTRODUCTORY
What is the field of ethics?
To know what exists, in its stark reality, is the concern of natural science and natural philosophy; to know what matters, is the field of moral philosophy, or ethics. The one group of studies deals with facts simply as facts, the other with their values. Human life is checkered with the sunshine and shadow of good and evil, joy and pain; it is these qualitative differences that make it something more than a meaningless eddy in the cosmic whirl. Natural philosophy (including the physical and psychological sciences), drawing its impartial map of existence, is interesting and important; it informs us about our environment and ourselves, shows us our resources and our powers, what we can do and how to do it. Moral philosophy asks the deeper and more significant question, What SHALL we do? For the momentous fact about life is that it has differences in value, and, more than that, that we can MAKE differences in value. Caught as we are by the irresistible flux of existence, we find ourselves able so to steer our lives as to change the proportion of light and shade, to give greater value to a life that might have had less. This possibility makes our moral problem. What shall we choose and from what refrain? To what aims shall we give our allegiance? What shall we fight for and what against?
For the savage practically all of his activity is determined by his imperative needs, so that there is little opportunity for choice or reflection upon the aims of his life. He must find food, and shelter, and clothing to keep himself warm and dry; he must protect himself from the enemies that menace him, and rest when he is tired. Nor are most of us today far removed from that primitive condition; the moments when we consciously choose and steer our course are few and fleeting. Yet with the development of civilization the elemental burdens are to some extent lifted; men come to have superfluous strength, leisure hours, freedom to do something more than merely earn their living. And further, with the development of intelligence, new ways of fulfilling the necessary tasks suggest themselves, moral problems arise where none were felt before. Men learn that they have not made the most of their opportunities or lived the best possible lives; they have veered this way and that according to the moment's impulse, they have been misled by ingrained habits and paralyzed by inertia, they have wandered at random for lack of a clear vision of their goal. The task of the moralist is to attain such a clear vision; to understand, first, the basis of all preference, and then, in detail, the reasons for preferring this concrete act to that. Here are a thousand impulses and instincts drawing us, with infinite further possibilities suggesting themselves to reflection; the more developed our natures the more frequently do our desires conflict. Why is any one better than another? How can we decide between them? Or shall we perhaps disown them all for some other and better way.
Man's effort to solve these problems is revealed outwardly in a multitude of precepts and laws, in customs and conventions; and inwardly in the sense of duty and shame, in aspiration, in the instinctive reactions of praise, blame, contentment, and remorse. The leadings of these forces are, however, often divergent, sometimes radically so. We must seek a completer insight. There must be some best way of solving the problem of life, some happiest, most useful way of living; its pursuit constitutes the field of ethics. Nothing could be more practical, more vital, more universally human.
Why should we study ethics?
(1) The most obvious reason for the study of ethics is that we may get more light for our daily problems. We are constantly having to choose how we shall act and being perplexed by opposing advantages. Decide one way or the other we must. On what grounds shall we decide? How shall we feel assured that we are following a real duty, pursuing an actual good, and not being led astray by a mere prejudice or convention? The alternative is, to decide on impulse, at haphazard, after some superficial and one-sided reflection; or to think the matter through, to get some definite criteria for judgments, and to face the recurrent question, what shall we do? In the steady light of those principles. [Footnote: Cf. Matthew Arnold, Essays in Criticism, vol. i: "Marcus Aurelius," opening paragraph: "The object of systems of morality is to take possession of human life, to save it from being abandoned to passion or allowed to drift at hazard, to give it happiness by establishing it in the practice of virtue; and this object they seek to attain by presenting to human life fixed principles of action, fixed rules of conduct. In its uninspired as well as in its inspired moments, in its days of languor or gloom as well as in its days of sunshine and energy, human life has thus always a clue to follow, and may always be making way towards its goal.">[
(2) In addition to the fact that we all have unavoidable problems which we must solve one way or another, a little familiarity with life, an acquaintance with the biographies of great and good men, should lead us to suspect that beyond the horizon of these immediate needs lie whole ranges of beautiful and happy living to which comparatively few ever attain. There are better ways of doing things than most of us have dreamed. The study of ethics should reveal these vistas and stimulate us to a noble discontent with our inferior morals. [Footnote: Cf. Emerson, in a letter to Fraulein Gisela von Arnim: "In reading your letter, I felt, as when I read rarely a good novel, rebuked that I do not use in my life these delicious relations; or that I accept anything inferior or ugly.">[ Such a forward look and development of ideals not only adds greatly to the worth of life but prepares a man to meet perplexities and temptations which may some day arise. It pays to educate one's self for future emergencies by meditating not only upon present problems but upon the further potentialities of conduct, right and wrong, that may lie ahead, and building up a code for one's self that will make life not only richer but steadier and more secure.
(3) Another advantage of a systematic study of ethics is that it can make clearer to us WHY one act is better than another; why duty is justified in thwarting our inclinations and conscience is to be obeyed. Not only is this an intellectual gain, but it is an immense fortification to the will. There comes a time in the experience of every thinking man when a command not reinforced by a reason breeds distrust, and when until he can intelligently defend an ideal he will hesitate to give it his allegiance. Morality, to be depended upon, must be not a mere matter of breeding and convention, or of impulse and emotion, but the result of rational insight and conscious resolve. To many people morality seems nothing but convention, or an arbitrary tyranny, or a mysterious and awful necessity, something extraneous to their own desires, from which they would like to escape. To be able to refute these skeptics, expose the sophisms and specious arguments by which they support their wrongdoing, and show that they have chosen the lesser good, is a valuable help to the community and to one's own integrity of conduct. Too often the people perish for lack of vision; an understanding of the naturalness and enormous desirability of morality, together with an appreciation of its main injunctions, would enlist upon its side many restless spirits who now chafe under a sense of needless restraint and seek some delusory freedom which leads to pain and death. Morality is simply the best way of living; and the more fully men realize that, the more readily will they submit themselves to the sacrifices it requires.
(4) Finally, a study of ethics should help us to see what are the prevalent sins and moral dangers of our day, and thus arouse us to put the weight of our blame and praise where they are needed. Widespread public opinion is a force of incalculable power, which is largely unused. Politics and business, and to a far greater extent than now private life, will become clean and honest and kind just so soon as a sufficient number of people wake up and demand it. We have the power to make sins which are now generally tolerated and respectable, so odious, so infamous, that they will practically disappear. There are certain of the older forms of sin which the race in its long struggle upward has so effectually blacklisted that only a few perverts now lapse into them; we have execrated out of existence whole classes of cruelty and vice. But with the changing and ever more complex relations of society new forms of sin continually creep in; these we have not yet come to brand with the odium they deserve. Leaders of society and pillars of the church are often, and usually without disturbance of conscience, guilty of wrongdoing as grave in its effects, or graver, than many of the faults we relentlessly chastise. On the other hand, many really useful reforms are blocked because they awaken old prejudices or cross silly and meaningless conventions. The air is full of proposals, invectives, causes, movements; how shall we know which to espouse and which to reject, or where best to lend a hand? We need a consistent and well-founded point of view from which to judge. To get such a sane and far-sighted moral perspective; to see the acts of our fellow men with a proper valuation; to be able to point out the insidious dangers of conduct which is not yet as generally rebuked as it ought to be; and at the same time to emancipate ourselves and others from the mistaken and merely arbitrary precepts that are intermingled with our genuine morality, and so attain the largest possible freedom of action, such should be the outcome of a thorough study of ethical principles and ideals.
PART I
THE EVOLUTION OF MORALITY
CHAPTER I
THE ORIGIN OP PERSONAL MORALITY
In almost any field it is wise to precede definition by an impartial survey of the subject matter. So if we are to form an unbiased conception of what morality is, it will be safest to consider first what the morals of men actually have been, how they came into being, and what function they have served in human life. Thus we shall be sure that our theory is in touch with reality, and be saved from mere closet-philosophies and irrelevant speculations. Our task in this First Part will be not to criticize by reference to any ethical standards, but to observe and describe, as a mere bit of preliminary sociology, what it is in their lives to which men have given the name "morality," of what use it has been, and through the action of what forces it has tended to develop. With these data in mind, we shall be the better able, in the Second Part, to formulate our criteria for judging the different codes of morality; we shall find that we are but making explicit and conscious the considerations that, unexpressed and unrealized, have been the persistent and underlying factors in their development. How early in the evolutionary process did personal morality of some sort emerge? Of course the words (in any language) and the explicit conceptions "morality," "duty," "right," "wrong," etc, are very late in appearance, presupposing as they do a power of reflection and abstraction which develops only in man and with a considerable civilization. Even in the Homeric poems, which reflect a degree of mental cultivation in some respects equal to our own, these concepts hardly appear. But ages earlier, far back in the course of animal evolution, there emerged phenomena which we may consider rudimentary forms of morality; and all early human history was replete writh unanalyzed and unformulated moral struggles. Concretely, we mean by personal morality courage, industriousness, self-control, prudence, temperance, and other similar phenomena, which have this in common, that they involve a crossing of earlier-developed impulses and redirection of the individual's conduct, with the result, normally, that his welfare is enhanced. Exceptions to this result will be considered later; but the point to be noted at the outset is that personal morality is not at first the outcome of reflection, or a purely human affair. If we were to take the term "morality" in a narrower sense, as meaning conscious obedience to a sense of duty or to the moral law, it would obviously be a late product. But morality in this sense is only an ultimate development of what in its less conscious and reflective forms dates far back in pre-human history.
Take courage, for example, which may be briefly defined as action in spite of the instinct of fear and contrary to its leading. Nearly all of the higher animals exhibit courage in greater or less degree, and there are many touching instances of it recorded to the credit of those we best know. Industriousness, again, is proverbial in the case of bees and ants "Go to the ant, thou sluggard!"—and noteworthy in the case of many birds, of beavers, and a long list of other animals. Prudence may be illustrated by the case of the camel who fills himself with water enough to last for many desert days, or that of the bird who builds her nest with remarkable ingenuity and pains out of the reach of invaders. Whether or not we shall attribute self-control to the lower animals is a mere matter of definition; in the looser sense we may credit with it the hungry fox who does not touch the bait whose dangerous nature he vaguely suspects. Temperance is probably one of the latest of the virtues, and is rather conspicuously absent in much of human history and biography; but perhaps students of animal psychology can guarantee instances to which the name might fairly be given.
In lesser degree, then, but unmistakably present, we find the same sort of conduct appearing in the animals to which we give in man the names courage, prudence, etc. Purely instinctive these acts usually are though we may see even in the animals the beginnings of mental conflicts, of reasoning, of reflection. But morality (if we keep to the wider sense of the term) is none the less morality when it is instinctive and natural. Morality is a general name for certain KINDS of conduct, certain redirections of impulse. These redirections appeared in animal life long before the emergence of what we may call man from his ape-like ancestry; and all of our self-conscious moral idealism is but a continuation and development of the process then begun. Any theory of right and wrong must take account of the fact that morality, unlike art, science, and religion, is not an exclusively human affair. In contrast with these late and purely human innovations, it is hoary with antiquity and the possession, in some rudimentary form or other, of nearly the whole realm of organic life.
What were the main causes that produced personal morality?
How did these germinal forms of courage, prudence, industriousness, etc, first come into existence? The answer to this question will also show what are the main underlying causes that promote these virtues today.
(1) They are in part due to certain organic needs and cravings which exist independently of the individual's environment. Hunger and thirst imperiously check the tendency to laziness, or heedlessness, and stimulate to industriousness and prudence. To this day the mere need of food and clothing and shelter is the main bulwark of these virtues. The acquisitive impulse, which is also rather early in appearance, has an increasing share in this sort of moralization. The craving for action, which is the natural result of abundant nervous and muscular energy, the combative instinct, the joy of conquest and achievement, and the sexual impulse, go far in counteracting cowardice and inertia. The artistic impulse, when it emerges in man, long before the dawn of history, makes against caprice for orderliness, self-control, and patience. Ambition is a potent force in human affairs. The desire for the approval of others, which is prehuman, makes for all the virtues.
(2) But in addition to these inward springs of morality there is the constant pressure of a hostile environment. Cold, storms, rivers that block journeys, forests that must be felled, treacherous seas that lure with promise and exact toll for carelessness, arouse men out of their torpor and aid the development of the virtues we have been considering. The necessity of rearing some sort of shelter makes against laziness for industry and perseverance. The dangers of wind or flood check heedlessness in the choice of location for the home and foster prudence and foresight. In the harsher climates man is more goaded by nature; hence more moral progress has, probably, been effected in the temperate than in the tropical zones.
(3) A third and very important source lies in the mutual hostility of the animal species and of men. Slothfulness and recklessness mean for the great majority of animals the imminent risk of becoming the prey of some stronger animal. Among tribes of men the ceaseless struggles for supremacy have pricked cowardice into courage, demanded self-control instead of temper, supplanted gluttony and drunkenness by temperance. Cruel as has been the suffering caused by war, and deplorable as most of its effects, it did a great deal in the early stages of man's history to promote the personal virtues, alertness, moderation, caution, courage, and efficiency.
In the latest stages of man's development, conscious regard for law and custom, the fear of gods, the explicit recognition of duty and conscience, and the direct pursuit of ideals-all the reflective considerations that we may lump together under the word "conscientiousness"-play their ever increasing part and complicate the psychological situation. But even in modern civilized man the underlying animal forces count for far more. And without them the later self-conscious forces would not have come into play at all. There is a small class of people who are dominated throughout their activities by consciously present ideals or obedience to religious injunctions. But the average man still acts mainly under the pressure of the more primitive forces which we have enumerated.
How far has the moralizing process been blind and how far conscious?
(1) To a very large extent the moralizing process has been a merely mechanical one. Through slight differences in nerve-structure individuals have varied a little in their response to the pressure of inward cravings and outward perils. The braver, the more prudent, the more industrious have had a better chance of survival. So by the process which we have come to call natural selection there has been a continual weeding-out of the relatively lazy, cowardly, reckless, and imprudent. Much of our morality is the result of tendencies thus long cultivated by the ruthless methods of nature; we inherit a complex nervous organization, the outcome of ages of molding and selection, which now instinctively and easily responds to stimuli with a certain degree of inbred morality. This is the case much more than is apparent upon the surface. The child seems very unmoral, the mere prey of passing impulses; but latent in his brain are many aptitudes and tendencies which will at the proper time ripen and manifest themselves. The period of adolescence is that during which the changes in mental structure which were effected during the later stages of evolution are being made in the mind of this new individual; he reenacts, as it were, in a few years, the history of the race, and emerges without any conscious effort, the possessor of the fruits of that long struggle of which he was always the heir.
(2) In all the later stages of animal evolution, however, moral development is largely conscious, or semi-conscious. Besides our inner inheritance of altered brain-paths there is a social inheritance of habits which each generation adopts by imitation of its predecessors. Without any deliberate intention, the young of every species imitate their parents, and then the older members of the flock or herd. "Suggestion" is said by some to be the chief means of moralization; we are brave or industrious because we see others practicing these virtues and naturally do as they do. At any rate, whichever are more important, the inherited tendencies or those acquired by contagion, both of these factors play a large part in the development of the individual's morals.
(3) The third method of moral development is that which we call "learning by experience." The pain or dissatisfaction which a wrong impulse brings in its train, the satisfaction which follows a moral act, are remembered, and recur with the recurrence of a similar situation, becoming perhaps the decisive factors in steering the animal or man toward his true welfare. Many animals quite low in the organic scale learn by experience; and though of course the degree of consciousness that accompanies these readjustments varies enormously, this method of moralization may be said to be always, like the preceding, a more or less conscious process. Learning by experience is subject, of course, to many mistaken judgments; the fallacy of post hoc propter hoc leads many learners to avoid perfectly innocent acts as supposedly involving some evil result with which they were once by chance connected; and the true causes of the evils are often overlooked. Even when dimly conscious readjustments become highly conscious deliberation, the results of that deliberation may be less forwarding morally than the unconscious and merciless grinding of natural selection.
More and more, of course, as men grew in power of reflection, did they consciously shape their morals; and this intelligent selection, which has as yet played a comparatively small role, is bound, as men become more and more rational, to supersede in importance the other factors in moral evolution. But in the later phases of evolution all three of these processes blend together; and it would be impossible for the keenest analyst to tell how much of his conduct was determined in each of these ways.
H. Spencer, Data of Ethics (also published as the first part of his
Principles of Ethics), chap. I and chap. II, through sec. 4; or J.
Fiske, Cosmic Philosophy, part II, chap, XXII, first half, to "We are
now prepared to deal." L. T. Hobhouse, Morals in Evolution, part
I, chap. I, secs. 1-4. I. King, Development of Religion, pp. 48-59
A great mass of concrete material will be found in E. Westermarck's
Origin and Development of Moral Ideas, H. O. Taylor's Ancient Ideals,
W. E. H. Leeky's History of European Morals.
CHAPTER II
THE ORIGIN OF SOCIAL MORALITY
How early was social morality developed?
By social morality we mean, concretely, such virtues as tender and fostering love, sympathy, obedience, subordination of selfish instincts to group-demands, the service of other individuals or of the group. These habits are later in development than some of the personal virtues, but long antedate the differentiation of man from the other animals. Instances of self-sacrificing devotion of parent to offspring among birds and beasts are too common to need mention. Devotion to the mate, though less developed, is early present in many species. The strict subordination of ants and bees to the common welfare is a well-known marvel, the latter enthusiastically and poetically described by Maeterlinck in his delightful Life of the Bees. The stern requirements of obedience to the unwritten laws of the herd, which make powerful so many species of animals individually weak, are graphically, though of course with exaggeration, set forth by Kipling in his Jungle Book. Many sorts of animals, such as deer and antelopes, might long ago have been exterminated but for their mutual cooperation and service. Affection and sympathy in high degree are evident in some sub-human species. When we come to man, we find his earliest recorded life based upon a social morality which, if crude, was in some respects stricter than that of today. It is a mistake to think of the savage as Rousseau imagined him, a freehearted, happy-go-lucky individualist, only by a cramping civilization bowed under the yoke of laws and conventions. Savage life is essentially group-life; the individual is nothing, the tribe everything. The gods are tribal gods, warfare is tribal warfare, hunting, sowing, harvesting, are carried on by the community as a whole. There are few personal possessions, there is little personal will; obedience to the tribal customs, and mutual cooperation, are universal. [Footnote: As an example of the solidarity of barbarous tribes, note how Abimelech, seeking election as king, says to "all the men of Shechem": "Remember that I am your bone and your flesh." (Judges IX, 2.) Later, "all the tribes of Israel" say to David, "Behold, we are thy bone and thy flesh." (2 Sam. V, 1.) Of savage life as observed in modern times we have many reports like this: "Many strange customs and laws obtain in Zululand, but there is no moral code in all the world more rigidly observed than that of the Zulus." (R. H. Millward, quoted by Myers, History as Past Ethics, p. 11.) Compare this: "A Kafir feels that the 'frame that binds him in' extends to the clan. The sense of solidarity of the family in Europe is thin and feeble compared to the full-blooded sense of corporate union of the Kafir clan. The claims of the clan entirely swamp the rights of the individual." (Kidd, Savage Childhood, p. 74.) An elaborate and stern social morality, then, long preceded verbally formulated laws; it was a matter of instinct and emotion long before it was a matter of calculation or conscience. The most primitive men acknowledge a duty to their neighbors; and the subsequent advance of social morality has consisted simply in more and more comprehensive answers to the questions, What is my duty? and Who is my neighbor? At first, the neighbor was the fellow tribesman only, all outsiders being deemed fair prey. Every member of the clan instinctively arose to avenge an injury to any other member, and rejoiced in triumphs over their common foes. We still have survivals of this primitive code in the Corsican vendettas and Kentucky feuds. With the growth of nations, the cooperative spirit came to embrace wider and wider circles; but even as yet there is little of it in international relations. The old double standard of morality persists in spite of the command to which we give theoretic allegiance-"Ye have heard that it hath been said, Thou shalt love thy neighbor, and hate thine enemy. But I say unto you, Love your enemies!" From the same lips came the final answer to the question, "Who is my neighbour?" It can be found in the tenth chapter of the Gospel according to Luke. By what means was social morality produced?
(1) The earliest source of social morality lies in the maternal instinct; the first animal that took care of its young stood at the beginning of this wonderful advance. The originating causes of the first slight care of eggs or offspring lay, no doubt, in some obscure physiological readjustments, due to forces irrelevant to morality. But the young that had even such slight care had a survival advantage over their rivals, and would transmit the rudimentary instinct to their offspring. Thus, given a start in that direction, natural selection, steadily favoring the more maternally disposed, produced species with a highly developed and long continuing maternal love. In similar manner but in lesser degree a paternal instinct was developed. The existence of these instincts implied the power of sympathy and altruistic action that is, action by one individual for another's welfare. From sympathy for offspring to sympathy for mate and other members of the group was but a step; and all sympathetic action may have its ultimate source in mother love.
(2) Not only was natural selection early at work in the rivalry for existence between individuals, protecting those stocks that had the stronger maternal and paternal instincts, but it played an important part in the struggle between groups. Those species that developed the ability to keep together for mutual protection or for advantage. And within a species those particular herds or flocks or tribes that cooperated best outlived the others. With the strongest animals, such as lions and tigers, and with the weakest, such as rabbits and mice, the instinct to stand by one another is of no value and so was never fostered by natural selection. But in many species of animals of intermediate strength, that by cooperation might be able to resist attack or overcome enemies that they would singly be impotent against, the cooperative instinct became strongly developed. Notably in such case was man; and we find group consciousness, tribal loyalty, continually enhanced by the killing off of the tribes in which it was feebler. The dominant races in man's internecine struggles have been those of passionate patriotism and capacity for working together. Nature has socialized man by a repeated application of the method hinted at in the adage "United we stand, divided we fall." Successful war demands loyalty and obedience, self-forgetfulness and mutual service. It demands also the cessation of internal squabbling, the restraint of individual greed, lust, and caprice. At first instinctive, these virtues came with clearing consciousness to be deliberately cultivated by the tribe, in ways which we shall in a moment indicate.
(3) As in the development of personal morality, the hostility of inanimate nature, coupled with the urgency of inner needs, has also played its part in the socialization of man. The satisfying of hunger, protection against storm, flood, and other physical calamities, is greatly forwarded by cooperation. The rearing of a shelter, for example, that shall be at all comfortable and secure, demands the labor of several. With the development of civilization, mutual assistance and the division of labor become more and more imperative. As man developed more and more into a reflective animal, the comprehension of these advantages became clearer and clearer to him. Resentment against mere individualism grew keener; and any member whose laziness or passions led him to pull apart from the common good had to incur the anger of his fellows. Under these three heads—the selection of the maternal instinct, with its potentialities of universal sympathy, through the struggle between individuals; the selection of the various powers of loyalty and cooperation through the struggle between groups; and the production of cooperative habits through the struggle with inanimate nature-we may group the causes of social morality in man. How has morality been fostered by the tribe? Social morality, like personal morality, is passed on from generation to generation by heredity and by imitation. Both, in historic man, are also deliberately cultivated by the tribe. We have discriminated between the two aspects of morality for theoretic reasons which will later become apparent; but no discrimination is possible or needful for the savage. Courage and prudence and industriousness and temperance in its members are assets of the tribe, and are included among its requirements. We shall now consider in what ways the group brings pressure to bear upon the individual and influences his moral development.
(1) It needs no great powers of observation to convince the members of a tribe severally that immorality of any sort-laziness, cowardice, unrestrained lust, recklessness, quarrelsomeness, insubordination, etc. in another member is detrimental to him personally. His own security and the satisfaction of his needs are thereby in some degree decreased. Contentment at the morality of the other members of the group, and anger at their immorality, are therefore among the earliest psychological reactions. No men, however savage, are insensitive to these attitudes of their fellows; and the emotional response of others to their acts is from the beginning a powerful force for morality. When contentment becomes explicitly expressed, becomes praise, commendation, honor; when anger becomes openly uttered blame, contempt, ridicule, rebuke, their power is well nigh irresistible. A civilized man, with his manifold resources, may defy public opinion; the savage, who cannot with safety live alone and has few personal interests to fill his mind, is unavoidably subject to its sting. His impulses and passions lead him often to immoral conduct, but he is pretty sure to suffer from the condemnation of his fellows. The memory of that penalty in his own case, or the sight of it in the case of others, may be a considerable deterrent; while, on the other hand, the craving for applause and esteem may be a powerful incentive.
(2) Even among some of the animals, the resentment against the misconduct of a member of the herd finds expression in outward punishment maltreatment or death. Among men, punishments for the immoral and outward honors for the virtuous antedate history. Decorations, tattoos, songs, for the conspicuously brave and efficient, death or some lesser penalty for the cowardly, the traitorous, the insubordinate, figure largely in primitive life. These honors are capricious, uncertain, and transitory; but they are undoubtedly more stimulating to the savage, who lives in the moment, than they are in the more complex existence of the modern man. And while in general the savage is more callous to punishments, he has to fear much severer penalties than our humane conscience allows. They are inflicted, of course, with greatest frequency for those sins which instinctively arouse the hottest anger; that in turn varies with different types of men and various accidental circumstances that have determined the tribal points of view. But in general it is the virtues that most obviously benefit the tribe that are rewarded, and those that most obviously harm it that are punished.
(3) Another important means of securing morality in the tribe is the education of the young. This includes not only deliberate instruction, encouragement, and warning, but various symbolic rites and customs, whose value in impressing the plastic minds of the boys and girls of the tribe is only half realized. Initiation into manhood is accompanied in many races of men by solemn ceremonies, which instill into the youth the necessity and glory of courage, endurance, self-control, and other virtues. The maidens are taught by equally solemn rites the obligatoriness of chastity. The lowest races studied by anthropologists which, however, represent, of course, the result of ages of evolution have commonly an elaborate provision for the guidance of the young into the paths of the tribal morals.
(4) Further, all occasions upon which the tribe gets together for common work or play strengthen the group loyalty and make the group welfare appeal to the member as his own good. Hunting expeditions and wars, the sowing and reaping of the communal harvest, births, marriages, and deaths, in which usually the group as a whole takes a keen interest, feasts and dances, bard recitals, in common undertakings, dangers, calamities, triumphs, and celebrations, merge the individuality of the separate members into a unity. In many primitive races these influences are so strong that the individual has scarcely any separate life, but lives from childhood till death for the tribe and its welfare.
(5) Religion is, until late in civilization, almost wholly a group affair. The gods are tribal gods, their commands are chiefly the more obvious duties to the tribe. The fear of their displeasure and the hope of their assistance are among the most powerful of the sanctions of early morality. Where a special set of men are set aside as priests, to foster the religious consciousness and insure obedience to the divine behests, he is rash who dares openly to transgress. The idea of "taboo" of certain acts which must not be done, certain objects which must not be touched, etc. i extraordinarily prominent among many early peoples. The taboo may not be clearly connected with a divine prohibition; but, whether vague and mysterious or explicit, it brings the awe of the supernatural to bear upon daily conduct. The worship of the gods is one of the most important of the common activities, covered by the preceding paragraph, which make for the unifying of a tribe; and the sense of their presence and jealous interest in its welfare one of the strongest motives that restrain the individual from cowardice or lust or any anti-social conduct.
(6) With the development of language, the moral experience of a people becomes crystallized into maxims, proverbs, and injunctions, which the elders pass on to the boys and girls together with their comments and personal instruction. Oral precepts thus condense the gist of recurrent experience for the benefit of each new generation. Such saws as "Honesty is the best policy," "Lies are short lived," "Ill gotten gains do not prosper," date, no doubt, well back toward the origin of articulate language. The gathering antiquity of this inherited counsel adds prestige to the personal authority of the old men who love to repeat it; and the customs once instinctive and unconsciously imitated, or adopted from fear and the hope of praise, are now consciously cultivated as intrinsically desirable. There is, of course, very little realization of WHY some acts are commended and others prohibited; the mere fact that such and such are the tribal customs, that thus and so things have been done, is enough. Primitive peoples are highly innovation. So that the moral habits which were established before the age of reflection and articulate speech remain for the most part after they have become crystallized into precepts and commands, and by this articulating process become much more firmly entrenched. Then from the existence of miscellaneous maxims and prohibitions, taught by the elders and linked with whatever impulsive and haphazard punishments are customary, to the formulation of legal codes, with definite penalties attached to specific infringements, is an easy transition. With the invention of written language these laws could become still better fixed and more clearly known. The appointment of certain men of authority as judges, to investigate alleged cases of transgression and award the proper penalties, completes the evolution of a civilized legal system, the most powerful of all deterrents from flagrantly anti- social acts. Dewey and Tufts, Ethics, chaps. II, III. H. Spencer, Data of Ethics, chap. II, secs. 5, 6. J. Fiske, Cosmic Philosophy, part II, chap. XXII, second half. A. Sutherland, Origin and Growth of the Moral Instinct, vol. I. C. S. Wake, Evolution of Morality, vol. I, chaps. V, VI, VII. P. V. N. Myers, History as Past Ethics, chap. I. P. Kropotkin, Mutual Aid, chaps. I-IV. L. T. Hobhouse, Morals in Evolution, part I, chaps. I-III. Westermarck, op. cit, chap. XXXIV. J. Fiske, Through Nature to God, part II, "The Cosmic Roots of Love and Self-Sacrifice." C. Read, Natural and Social Morals, chap. III.
CHAPTER III
OUTWARD DEVELOPMENT—MORALS
What is the difference between morals and non-moral customs?
MORALITY, before it is a matter of legal prescription or of reflective insight, is a matter of instinctive and unconsciously imitated habit. That this is so is shown by the fact that many ethical terms are by their etymology connected with the idea of custom. "Morals" and "morality" are from the Latin mores, usually translated "customs," "ethics," from a Greek root of similar sense. The German Sitten has the same fused meanings. Most of our present-day morality is a matter of custom or convention; and there are those who make a complete identification of the two concepts, morality being simply to them conventional habits of conduct. But a little thought will show that there is a distinction in our common usage; the two categories overlap, but are not identical. On the one hand, our highest moral ideals have never become customary; we long, in our best moments, to make them habitual, but seldom actually attain them. The morals of Jesus, of Buddha, of Marcus Aurelius, have never become habits with any but the saints, yet we recognize them as the high-water mark of human morality. On the other hand, many of our customs have no moral aspect. I may have a fixed habit of going from my home to my office by a certain one out of a number of equally advantageous routes. All of the members of my set may habitually pronounce a given word in a certain way rather equally correct. But about such habits there is nothing moral or immoral. In a word, MORALS ARE CUSTOMS THAT MATTER, OR ARE SUPPOSED TO MATTER; standards to which each member of a group is expected by the other members to conform, and for the neglect of which he is punished, frowned upon, scorned, or blamed. Toward these standards he feels, therefore, a vague or definite pressure, the reflection in him of he feelings of his fellows.
The line between mere habits or manners and morals is differently drawn in different times and places, according to the differing ideas as to what matters. The same actions which are moral to one community ( i.e, arouse feelings or judgments of commendation) may be immoral to another community ( i.e., arouse reprobation or scorn) and non-moral to a third ( i.e., arouse no such response at all). For example, in one tribe tattooing may be a mere matter of personal liking, of no importance and with no group-judgment upon it; yet certain habits with regard to it may become widespread. In another tribe certain tattoos may be thought to be enjoined by the god, and their neglect deemed a matter of serious importance to the tribe as a whole; tattooing may here be said to be a part of the tribal morals. To us moderns it is probably a morally indifferent affair; but if we should learn it to be seriously deleterious to the body, it would again become a moral matter. In short, morals are customs that affect, or are supposed to affect, a man's life or that of his tribe for weal or woe. Obviously, this discrimination is not consciously made by savages; indeed, to this day, such distinctions are enveloped in a haze for the average man. Men do not realize the raison d'etre of morals. They follow them because their fathers did or their fellows do; because they inherit instincts that drive them in their direction or inevitably imitate those who have formed the habits before; because they feel a pressure toward them and are uncomfortable if they hold out against it. When pressed for a justification of their conduct, they are usually surprised at the inquiry; such action seems obviously the thing to do, and that is the end of it. Or they will hit upon some of the secondary sanctions that have grown up about these habits the penalties of the law, the commandment of the gods, or what not. But with our resources of analysis and reflection, it is not difficult to discern that the various forces at work have been such as to preserve, in general, habits which made for the welfare of individual or tribe and discard the harmful ones. It is, then, not merely habits, but habits that matter, moral habits, with whose growth and alteration we are here concerned. What, in general, has been the direction of moral progress? We have noted the main causes at work in the production of morality; we now ask in what general direction these forces push. We have in mind the concrete virtues which have been developed; but what common function have these habits of conduct, so produced, had in human life? What has been the net result of the process? At first sight a generalized answer seems impossible. All sorts of chance causes bring about local alterations in morals. The momentary dominance of an impulse ordinarily weak, the whim of a ruler, the self-interest of classes, superstitious interpretation of omens, the attribution of some success to a prior act which may have had nothing to do with it such accidental and irrational sources of morals, and the resulting codes, are numberless. But as in the process of organic evolution the various obscure physiological alterations which produce variations of type are all overruled and guided in a few directions of value to the species by the law of natural selection, so in the evolution of in all directions are subject to the law of the survival of the fittest. It is really of comparatively little importance to discover how a given moral habit first arose; it may have arisen in a hundred different ways in a hundred different places; indeed, the precise origin of most of the cardinal virtues lies too far back in the mists of the past to be traced with assurance. But the important truth to observe is not the particular details of their haphazard origin but the causes of their survival. Overlaying the countless originating causes of moral ideals are two main preservation—causes, two constant factors which retain certain of the innumerable impulses for one reason or other momentarily dominant. These are of extreme significance for a comprehension of the function of morality in life.
(1) In the first place, a certain number of these blind, hit-or-miss experiments in conduct were, as we have seen, of use to individuals or the tribe in increasing their chances of survival in the ceaseless rivalry for life. The inclemency's of nature and the enmity of the beasts and other men kill more often the less moral than the more moral. So that in general and in the long run those that developed the higher moral habits outlived the others and transmitted their morals to the future. Even within historic times this same weeding-out process has been observable. On the whole, the races and the individuals with the more advanced moral standards survive, while those of lower standards perish. This law accounts, for instance, in some measure probably for the relatively greater increase of whites than of Negroes in the United States, in spite of the higher birth rate of the latter. Other causes are, to be sure, also at work in this competition for life; for one thing, the long period of intercommunication between European races has largely weeded out the stocks most liable to certain diseases, while the antecedent isolation of savage tribes, with no such elimination at work, allows them to fall victims in greater numbers to European diseases when mutual contact is established. But the degree of the moralization of a people has been certainly one of the criteria of survival; and thus by a purely mechanical elimination mankind has grown more and more moral. It hardly needs to be added that the conscious selection of codes that tend to preserve life is a factor of growing importance in insuring movement in this same direction. Altogether, moral progress consists primarily in an increasing adaptation of codes to the preservation of life.
(2) Morality, however, makes not only for life, thus insuring its own perpetuation; it makes also for happiness. Arbitrary and tyrannous rules, cruel or needlessly prohibitive customs, engender restlessness, and are not stable. Such barbarous morals may long persist, propped by the power of the rulers, the superstitions of the people, and all the forces of conservatism; but sooner or later they breed rebellion and are cast aside. On the other hand, more rational codes promote peace and security, banish fear and hatred, and make for all the benefits of civilization. Such codes are in relatively more stable equilibrium and gradually tend to replace the others. All morality is, of course, in one aspect, a restraint upon desire, a check upon impulse; rebelliousness against its decrees will be perpetually recurrent until human nature itself is completely refashioned and men have no inordinate and dangerous desires. But while all codes of conduct are repressive at the moment of passion, they vary widely in the degree in which they satisfy or thwart man's deeper needs. Such institutions as the gladiatorial games of Rome, human sacrifice, or slavery, were fruitful of so much pain that they were bound in time to perish. In contrast with these cruel customs, the prohibitions of the Jewish law, the Ten Commandments, for example, were so humane, so productive of security and concord and a deep-rooted and lasting satisfaction, that they persisted and became the parent of much of our present day morality. An increasing part in this progress has been played by the conscious recognition of the advantages of code over code; but long before such explicit perception of advantage, the blind instincts and emotions of men were making for the gradual humanizing of morals, the selection of ideals and laws that make for human happiness. As civilization advances, the consideration of mere preservation counts for less, and that of happiness for more; the margin, the breathing space, for liberal interests, grows. Men become interested in causes for which they willingly risk their lives. But, except as these causes are fanatical, off the real track of moral progress, they make for human happiness. And the center of interest can never shift too far. For not only is premature death, an evil in itself, it precludes the cultivation of the humane pursuits that life might have allowed.
Men have to learn to find their happiness not in what saps health or invites death, but in what makes for health and life. What definition of morality emerges from this? The foregoing summary permits us to formulate a definition of morality. Historically, there has been a gradual, though not continuous, progress toward CODES OF CONDUCT WHICH MAKE FOR THE PRESERVATION OF LIFE AND FOR HAPPINESS. These codes have received an imaginative consecration, and all sorts of secondary sanctions; but it is their underlying utility that is of ultimate importance. Very simple and obvious causes have continually tended to destroy customs which made in the contrary direction and to select those which, however originating, made for either or both of these two ends. It is these customs, important for the welfare of the individual or tribe, which we call morality. If the original instincts of mankind had been delicately enough adjusted to their needs, there would have been no need of these secondary and overruling impulses, and the differentiation of impulse and duty, of the natural and the spiritual man, would never have arisen. But actually, mankind inherited from its brute ancestry instincts which, unguided, wrought great harm. Without the development of some system of checks men would forever have been the prey of overindulgence, sexual wantonness, civil strife, and apathy. They would have remained beasts and never won their dominance on the earth. Even rudimentary moral codes came as an amelioration of this dangerous and unhappy situation; they enabled men, by abstention from dangerous passions and from idleness, to make their lives efficient, interesting, and comparatively free from pain; by cooperation and mutual service to resist their enemies and develop a civilization. Morality thus has been the greatest instrument of progress, the most fundamental of man's achievements, the most important part of the wisdom of the race.
Is moral progress certain?
A measure of hopefulness is to be won from the observation that, quite apart from the conscious effort of men, natural laws have been making for moral progress. And unquestionably there has been a great advance in morality within historic times. We are forever past the age of cannibalism, of human torture, of slavery, of widespread infanticide. War is on the wane and may vanish within a few generations. Never before was there so much sympathy, so much conscious dedication to human service, in the world. We are apt to idealize the past; we sigh for a "return to nature," or to the golden age of Greece. And there is some justification in our regrets. Simplicity of living, hospitality, courage, patriotism one virtue or another has been more conspicuous in some particular age than ever before or since. Moral progress wavers, and not all that is won is retained. But on the whole there can be no doubt that we stand on a higher level morally than the Greeks who had vices and sins that we scarcely hear of today and incomparably higher than savage races. Even within a lifetime one can see the wave of moral advance push forward. Yet this observable progress is not so certain of continuance that we can lapse into inertia and trust it to go on of itself. With the softening of the struggle for existence among men, with the disappearance of danger from wild animals, and the increasing conquest over nature, the chief means of moral progress hitherto are being removed. More and more we must rely on man's conscious efforts on personal consecration and self-mastery, on improved and extended legislation, on the growth of a moralized public opinion, on organizations and institutions that shall work for specific causes. Moreover, with the changing situations in which man finds himself, and especially with the growing complexification of society, new opportunities for sin and new temptations continually arise. No sooner is one immoral habit stamped out than another begins insidiously, and perhaps unnoticed, to form. The battle-line moves on, but new foes constantly appear; it will not be an easy road to the millennium. On the whole, our material and intellectual advance has outrun our moral progress; at present our chief need is to catch up morally. [Footnote: Cf. Alfred Russel Wallace, in his last book, Social Environment and Moral Progress (p. 50): "This rapid growth of wealth and increase of our power over Nature put too great a strain upon our crude civilization and our superficial Christianity; and it was accompanied by various forms of social immorality, almost as amazing and unprecedented.">[ We may note several reasons for this eddy in the moralizing process, this counter-movement toward the development of new sins and the renascence of old ones.
(1) With the growth of large cities and the development of individual interests we come to live less and less in one another's eyes. In primitive life it is almost impossible for a man to indulge in any vice or sin without its being immediately known to his fellows; but today millions live such isolated lives in the midst of crowded communities that all sorts of immorality may flourish without detection. Under early conditions foodstuffs or other goods were consumed if not by the producer, at least by his neighbors; and any adulteration or sham was a dangerous matter. Today we seldom know who slaughtered the meat or canned the fruit we eat, who made the clothing or utensils we use; shoddy articles and unwholesome food can be sold in quantity with little fear of the consumer's anger. All sorts of intangible and hardly traceable injuries can be wrought today by malicious or careless men injuries to reputation, to credit, to success. In a city the criminal can hide and escape far more easily, can associate with his own kind, have a certain code of his own (cf. "honor among thieves"), and more completely escape the pangs of conscience, than under the surveillance of village life. In a hundred ways there are increased opportunities for doing evil with impunity. [Footnote: Cf. E. A. Ross, Sin and Society, pp. 32: "The popular symbol for the criminal is a ravening wolf; but alas, few latter day crimes can be dramatized with a wolf and a lamb as the cast! Your up-to-date criminal presses the button of a social mechanism, and at the other end of the land or the year innocent lives are snuffed out. As society grows complex, it can be harmed in more ways. Each advance to higher organization runs us into a fresh zone of danger, so there is more than ever need to be quick to detect and foil the new public enemies that present themselves. The public needs a victim to harrow up its feelings. The injury that is problematic, or general, or that falls in undefined ways upon unknown persons, is resented feebly, or not at all. The fiend who should rack his victim with torments such as typhoid inflicts would be torn to pieces. The villain who should taint his enemy's cup with fever germs would stretch] [Footnote continued from previous page: hemp. But think of it!-the corrupt boss who, in order to extort fat contracts for his firm, holds up for a year the building of a filtration plant designed to deliver his city from the typhoid scourge, and thereby dooms twelve hundred of his townspeople to sink to the tomb through the flaming abyss of fever, comes off scatheless.">[
(2) With the gentler conditions of civilized life there is a general tendency toward the relaxing of social restraints. The harsh penalties of early days would shock us by their cruelty; and early codes are full of prohibitions and injunctions on matters which are now left to the individual conscience. Needlessly cramping and cruel as these primitive laws often were, they were powerful deterrents, and their lapse has often been followed by greater moral laxity. The passionate pursuit of liberty, which has been so prominent in modern times, though on the whole of great advantage to man, has not been without its ill effects.
(3) The monotonously specialized and unnatural work, which confines a large proportion of our men, women, and youths today, promotes restlessness and the craving for excitement. The normal all-round occupations of primitive men tended to work off their energies and satisfy their natural impulses. But the dulled and tired worker released from eight or ten hours' drudgery in a factory is apt to be in a psychological state that demands variety, excitement, pleasure at any cost. It does not pay to repress human nature too much, or to try to make out of a red-blooded young man or woman a mere machine. Gambling, drunkenness, prostitution, and all sorts of pathological vices flourish largely as a reaction from the dullness and monotony of the day's work. We are paying this heavy penalty for our increase of material efficiency at the expense of normal human living.
(4) With the increased possibilities of undetected sin, above mentioned, and the opportunity which criminals now have of forming within a city a little community of their own which permits them fellowship without rebuke for their sins, there have arisen whole classes of vice-caterers. These men and women make their living by tempting others to sin; the allurements which they set before the young constitute a great check to moral advance, and even threaten continually a serious moral degeneration. The keepers of gambling houses, saloons, and houses of prostitution, the venders of vile pictures and exciting reading matter, the proprietors of indecent dance-halls and theaters, of the "shows" of all sorts that flourish chiefly through their offering of sexual stimulation these are the worst sinners of our times, for they cause thousands of others to sin, and deliberately undermine the moral structure so laboriously reared, and at such heavy cost. Conspicuous in commercialized vice-catering is the Casino of Monte Carlo, where thousands of lives have been ruined. The business of seducing and kidnapping girls-the "white slave trade" flourishes secretly in our great cities. Associations of liquor producers and sellers are very powerful social and political forces. One of the greatest problems before the race is how to exterminate these human beasts of prey that live at the expense of the moral deterioration and often utter ruin of their victims.
(5) While the older racial and national barriers between peoples are breaking down, so that the possibilities of human brotherhood and cooperation are laterally increasing, and the wretched fratricidal wars between peoples coming toward an end, [Footnote: As I read the proof sheets of this book (August, 1914), news comes of the outbreak of what may prove the costliest and one of the least excusable wars of history. Nevertheless, the end of international wars draws near.] Other barriers, between upper and lower classes, are thickening, new antagonisms and antipathies that threaten yet much friction and unhappiness and a retardation of moral progress. Rich are becoming farther and farther consciousness is on the increase, class-wars in the form of strikes, riots, and sabotage, are ominous symptoms. Masses of the laboring class believe that a great class-war is not only inevitable but desirable. Such conflicts, however, besides their material losses, engender hatred, cruelty, lust, greed, and all sorts of other forms of immorality. No one can predict how far such struggles may go in the future toward undoing the socializing process which at best has so many obstacles to meet and moves so slowly. Many forces are at work, however, for moral uplift. The spread of education, teaching men to think, to discern evils, and to comprehend the reasons for right conduct, the increasing influence of public opinion through newspapers and magazines, the growing number of organizations working to eradicate evils, the gradual increase of wise legislation, the reviving moral pressure of the Christian Church such signs of the times should give us courage as well as show us where we can take hold to help. Morality is not static, a cut-and-dried system to be obeyed or neglected, but a set of experiments, being gradually worked out by mankind, a dynamic, progressive instrument which we can help ourselves to forge. There is room yet for moral genius; we are yet in the early and formative stage of human morality. We should not be content with past achievement, with the contemporary standards of our fellows. If we give our keenest thought and our earnest effort, there is no knowing what noble heights of morality we may be helping the future to attain.
Dewey and Tufts, Ethics, chap. IV. Hobhouse, op. cit, part II, chaps. II, VIII. Westermarck, op. cit, chap. VII. Sutherland, op. cit, vol. II, chaps. XIX-XXI. W. G. Sumner, Folkways, chaps. I, II, XI. Sir H. Maine, Village Communities. C. Darwin, Descent of Man, part I, chap. v. J. G. Schurman, Ethical Import of Darwinism. W. I. Thomas, Source Book for Social Origins, part VII. C. Read, Natural and Social Morals, chap. VI. I. King, Development of Religion, chap. XI. On the question of moral progress: Dewey and Tufts, Ethics, pp. 187-92. W. Bagehot, Physics and Politics, chap. VI. H. G. Wells, New Worlds for Old, chap.I, secs. 2-4. J. Bryce, in the Atlantic Monthly, vol. 100, p. 145. E. Root, The Citizen's Part in Government, pp. 96-123. J. S. Mackenzie, Manual of Ethics (2d ed.), chap. XV. A. R. Wallace, Social Environment and Moral Progress.
CHAPTER IV
INWARD DEVELOPMENT—CONSCIENCE
What are the stages in the history of moral guidance?
THERE may be said to be five stages in the history of moral guidance: guidance by instinct, by custom, by law and precept, by conscience, and by insight. No one of these guides is discarded with the development of the others; we rely today upon all of them in varying degree. Their evolution overlaps; the alteration of instinct still goes on, changing laws and customs still bring their pressure to bear from without upon the individual; while our conscience and our insight have their roots far back in the past. Yet the prominence of each of these factors in turn marks a successive stage in the evolution of moral control. Inherited instinct, and then custom, unconsciously passed on by imitation and to some extent taught with a dimly conscious purpose, shape the crude morality of the animals though the other means of guidance are not wholly absent even in them. Among savages legal codes, unwritten and perhaps not even clearly formulated, yet exacting and strictly enforced by penalties, come to form an important supplement to instinct, custom, and proverbial wisdom. But quite as important is the gradual development of an inward guide—those very various secondary impulses and inhibitions which we hump together because of their common function and call the moral sense or conscience. We shall now consider briefly the origin of this internal steering-apparatus. The latest and most mature guide of all, reflective insight, arises in marked degree only when abstraction and analysis. There is no problem connected with its origin except the general problems of the development of human reason. How moral insight may be trained and brought to bear upon conduct will, it is hoped, be clear to the student who patiently studies this volume.
Out of what has conscience developed?
The "conscience" of our moralizing and religious literature figures as a sharply defined and easily recognizable "faculty," like "will" or "reason." But this classification, though useful, is misleading by its simplicity. If we observe by introspection what goes on in our minds when we "will" or "reason" or "listen to conscience," we shall find all sorts of emotions, ideas, impulses, surging back and forth, altering from moment to moment, never twice the same. At another period of our lives, or in another man's mind, the psychological stuff pigeonholed under these names may be almost entirely different. A great many diverse mental elements have at one time or other taken the role of, or formed an ingredient in, the function we label "conscience." We will enumerate the more important:
(1) Experience quickly teaches her pupils that certain acts to which they feel a strong impulse will lead to an aftermath of pain or weariness, or will stand in the way of other goods which they more lastingly desire or more deeply need. The memory of these consequences of acts remains as a guide for future conduct, not so often in the form of a clearly recognized memory as in a dim realization that the dangerous act must be avoided, a vague pressure against the pull of momentary inclination, or an uncomprehended feeling of impulsion toward the less inviting path. This residuum of the moral experience of the individual is one ingredient in what we call his conscience.
(2) But there is much more than this. The individual is a member of a group. The customs and expectations of this group not only bear upon him from without but find a reflection in his own motor mechanism. He hears the voice of the community in his heart, an echo of the general condemnation and approval. This acquired response, the reverberation of the group judgment, may easily supplant his personal inclinations. Primitive man is sensitive to the judgments and emotional reactions of his fellows; the tribal point of view is unquestioned and authoritative over him. So important is this pressure in his mental life, though not understood or recognized for what it is, that conscience is denned by many moralists as the pressure of the judgment of the tribe in the mental life of its members, or in similar terms. Paulsen calls it "the existence of custom in the consciousness of the individual." This is to neglect unjustly the other sources of the sense of duty; but certainly the pulls and pushes arising from these two sources, which we may call the inner aspect of individual moral experience and of loyalty to the community-morals, reinforcing one another as they generally do, produce a very powerful form of conscience.
(3) A number of primitive emotions join forces with them. Sympathy is generally on their side, and the instinctive glow of patriotism or pride in the tribe's success. The shrinking from disapproval, the craving for esteem, the very early emotions of shame and vanity, help to pull away from the self-indulgent or selfish impulse. The spontaneous admiration of others for their virtues and anger at them for their sins is applied involuntarily by a man to himself; contempt for his own weakness and joy in his superiority according to the generally accepted code are powerful deterrents. The consciousness of the resentment that others will feel if he does evil, the instinctive application to himself of a trace of the resentment he would feel toward him or toward these fellow tribesmen of is-such complex states of mind complicate his mental processes and help check his primary instincts.
(4) To these ingredients we must early add the more or less conscious fear of the penalties of the tribal law, of the vengeance of chiefs or powerful members of the tribe, of the tribal gods and their jealous priests. These fears may be but dimly felt and not clearly discriminated; but however subconscious they may be in a given case of moral conflict, they play a large part. The peace of mind that accompanies a sense of conformity to the will of rulers or of gods, contrasted with the anxiety that follows infraction, gives a greatly increased weight to that growing pressure of counter instincts which comes so largely to override a man's animal nature. Most of the sources of conscience thus date far back beyond the dawn of history. But they can be pretty safely inferred from the earliest records, from a study of existing savage races, and from the study of childhood. The definite conception of "conscience" is very late, scarcely appearing until very modern times. And the fact that conscience itself, even in its rudimentary forms, was much later in growth than the underlying animal instincts which it developed to control and guide, is shown by its late development in the child-not, normally, until the beginning of the third year. The early life of the individual parallels the evolution of the race; and the later-developed faculties in the child are those which arose in the later stages of human progress. But the existence of our well-defined moral sense, with its significant role in modern life, needs no supernatural explanation. It has grown up and come to be what it is as naturally as have our language, our customs, and our physical organs.
What is conscience now? It is a valuable exercise in introspection to observe a case of "conscience" in one's own life and note of what mental stuff it is made. When a number write down their findings without mutual suggestion, the results are usually widely divergent. Any of the original ingredients hitherto mentioned may be discovered, or other personal factors. There may be present to consciousness only a vague uneasiness or restlessness, or there may be a sophisticated recurrence of the concepts of "conscience," "duty," etc. The one universal fact is that there is a conflict between some primitive impulse or passion and some maturer mental checks. Any sort of mental stuff that serves the purpose of controlling desire will do; we must define conscience in terms not of content but of function. There is no such unity in the material as the single name seems to imply; and whether or not that name shall be given to a given psychological state is a matter of usage in which there is considerable variation.
In general, we reserve the name "conscience" for the vaguer and more elusive restraints and leadings, the sense of reluctant necessity whose purpose we do not clearly see although we feel its pressure, the accumulated residuum of long inner experience and many influences from without. Our minds retain many creases whose origin we have forgotten; we veer away from many a pleasant inclination without knowing why. These unanalyzed and residual inhibitions that grip us and will not let us go, form a contrasting background to our more explicit motives and often count for more in our conduct. The very lack of comprehension serves in less rational minds to enhance their prestige with an atmosphere of awe and mystery. These strange checks and promptings that well up in a man's heart are which he must not dare to disobey. The voice of God in our hearts we may, indeed, well conceive them to be. The attempt to analyze into its psychological elements and trace the natural genesis of conscience, as of morality in general must not be taken as an attempt to discredit it or to read God out of the world. For God works usually, if not universally, through natural laws; and the historical viewpoint, that sees everything in our developed life as the outcome of ages of natural evolution, is not only rich in fruitful insight, but entirely consistent with a deep religious feeling. For hortatory or inspirational purposes we do not need to make this analysis; it has, indeed, its practical dangers. It tends to rob the glory from anything to analyze it into its parts and study the natural causes that produced it. The loveliest painting is but a mess of pigments to the microscope, the loveliest face but a mess of cells and hairs and blood vessels. There is something gruesome and inhuman about embryology and all other studies of origins.
While we are analyzing an object, or tracing its genesis, we are not responding to it as a whole or feeling its beauty and power. The mystery, the spell, vanishes; we cease to thrill when we dissect. But knowledge proceeds by analysis, and gains by a study of origins and causes. And the temporary emotional loss should be more than balanced by the value of the insight won. We need not linger too long at our dissecting. The discovery that conscience is an explicable and natural development does not preclude a realization of the awfulness of obligation, the sacredness of duty, any more than a geologist must cease to thrill at the grandeur and beauty of the Grand Canyon because he has studied the composition of the rocks and understands the causes that have slowly, through the ages, wrought this miracle. So we need feel no sense of duty is not something imposed upon human nature from without; it is of its very substance, it has developed step by step with our other faculties, slowly crystallizing through millenniums of human and pre-human experience. In the abstract, then, we may say that conscience is a name for ANY SECONDARY IMPULSES OR INHIBITIONS WHICH CHECK AND REDIRECT MAN'S PRIMARY IMPULSES, FOR A GREATER GOOD; any later developed aversions or inclinations, judgments of value or feelings of constraint, which guide a man in the teeth of his animal nature toward a better way of life PROVIDED THAT THESE SUPERIMPOSED IMPULSES ARE NOT EXPLICIT ENOUGH TO BE CLASSIFIED UNDER SOME OTHER HEAD. For example, we may be pulled up sharply from a course of self-indulgence by a conscious realization of the harm we are doing to others thereby; this bridling state of mind, whether chiefly emotional or more intellectual, we may call sympathy, or an altruistic instinct, or love. But when we feel the pressure from these same mental states incipiently aroused, when our motor-mechanism half automatically steers us away from the selfish act, without our consciously formulating a specific name for the new impulse or recognizing any articulate motive, we are apt to give this mental push the more general name of conscience. So if we consciously reckon up, balance advantages, and decide on the less inviting act in recognition of its really greater worth to us, we say we act from prudence or insight, we are reasonable about it; while if the grumbling of the prudential motives remain subterranean, subconscious, they play the role of conscience. Conscience is, on such occasions, but inarticulate common sense. Usually, however, prudential and altruistic motives would both be discovered if the dumb driving of conscience were to be made articulate. The reverberation of parental teachings, of sermons heard and books read, of the opinions and emotions of our fellows, might be found, all bent and fused into a combined "suggestion," a mental push, a "must" or "ought," from whose influence we find it difficult to escape.
The detailed psychological analysis of cases of conscience and the study of its genesis are of no essential ethical interest, except as they show us that the sense of duty is not an ultimate, irreducible element in our consciousness, or make clearer to us its function and value. Conscience is the general name for coercion upon conduct from within the mind. The important thing to note is the useful purpose, which, in its so widely varying forms, it serves. Whatever its sources or its exact nature in contemporary man, it is one of the most valuable of our assets. To a more explicit statement of its value we must now turn. What is the value of conscience?
It would seem, at first glance, as if the development of reason should make conscience unnecessary. When we are able to discern the consequences of our acts, formulate and weigh our motives and aims, what need of these vague pre-rational promptings and inhibitions? Why not train men to supplant a blind sense of duty by a conscious insight, a rational valuation of ends and means? Is not reason, as it has been recently called, "the ultimate conscience"? [Footnote: G. Santayana, Reason in Science, p. 232; where also the following: "So soon as conscience summons its own dicta for revision in the light of experience and of universal sympathy, it is no longer called conscience, but reason.">[
(1) Conscience is valuable on account of our ignorance. Individually we have not had experience enough to guide us in our crises; conscience is the representative in us of the wisdom of the race. In many cases we should never reason out the right solution of a problem; we lack the data. But we can lean upon the racial experience. Many past experiences, now forgotten, have gone to the molding of this faculty. The need of action is often imminent, there is no time for the long study of the situation which alone could form a sure insight into the conduct it demands. We need readymade morals. Moreover, we are subject to bias, to individual one sidedness, and to the distortion of passion; in the stress of temptation we are not in a mood to reason judicially, even if we have the necessary data. Altogether, insight, though in the long run the critic of conscience, is not a practical substitute. What conscience tells us is more apt to be true than what at the moment seems a rational judgment.
(2) Conscience is also valuable in view of our rebelliousness. Conventional morality is external, and would continually arouse revolt, were it not reinforced by an inward prompting. If external motives and penalties alone bore upon us we should chafe under them, and under the stress of passion or longing throw them aside. Even if these external sanctions were reinforced by insight into the rationality of morality, that insight might still leave us rebellious and unpersuaded. Knowledge alone is feeble, marginal in our lives. We often sin in the full knowledge of the penalties awaiting us. We need something more dynamic, pressure as well as information. Conscience is such a driver. Its commands weigh upon us, and will not be stilled. Reason plays but a weak part in the best of us; and to counteract our incurable waywardness, our recurrent longings for what cannot be had without too great a cost, we need not only the presence of law and convention, not only the weak voice of knowledge, but the stern summons of this powerful psychological response. Nature was wise when she evolved this function as a bulwark against our weakness, a bit between our because of our forgetfulness. Over and over again we say, "I didn't stop to think." If our conscience had been properly acute, it would have made us stop. Insight, however comprehensive and clear, is apt to remain somewhere in a locked drawer in our minds when the hot blooded impulse appears. If we were but to pause and reflect, we should be sensible and kind. But our intellect is dulled by our emotions, it does not get working. We need a more instinctive, a deeper-rooted mechanism, an imperious "Halt!" at the brief moment between the thought of sin and the act. Conscience is not only a teacher and a driver, it is a sentinel. Its red flag stops us at the brink of many a disaster, and we have it to thank for many an otherwise forgotten duty performed.
To sum up: Instinct and desire are lacking in proper adjustment to the needs of life. Society seeks to control them by the pressure of law and custom. These powerful forces, however, are external, and, savoring more or less of tyranny, tend at times to awaken a rebellious spirit in the hotheaded. So a perpetual antinomy would exist between internal impulse and external constraint, were it not that that external constraint is reflected within the individual mind by a secondary and overlying set of inhibitions and promptings which we call variously the "moral sense," the "sense of duty," or "conscience." We often do not know or remember consciously at the moment of decision what the law ordains or the wisdom of the race teaches. But we have an inward monitor. We often hang back from a recognized duty. But we feel an inward push. When the wrong impulse is pungent and enticing, and the right one insipid and tame, when we would forget if we could the perils of sin, conscience surges up in us and saves us from ourselves. It is a mechanism of extreme value, which nature has evolved in us for imposing on our weak and vacillating wills action that makes for a truer good than we should otherwise choose. No wonder, then, if we reverence this saving power within us, and crown it with a halo as the divine spark in the midst of our grosser nature. The more we revere it, the brighter the glamour it has for us, the stronger it grows and the more it helps us. The apotheosis of conscience has been of immense use in leading men to heed its voice and obey its leading. Yet this blind allegiance has its dangers; conscience has often been a cruel tyrant. It is by no means an always-safe guide, as we shall presently note. And as men grow more and more adjusted by instinct and training to their real needs, they will have less and less need of this helmsman. After all, there is something wrong with a life that needs conscience; it is a transition help for the long period of man's maladjustment. Spencer looks forward, a little too hopefully, perhaps, to a time in the measurable future when we shall have outgrown the need of it, when we shall wish to do right and need no compulsion, outer or inner. And Emerson, in a well known passage, writes: "We love characters in proportion as they are impulsive and spontaneous. When we see a soul whose acts are all regal, graceful, and pleasant as roses, we must thank God that such things can be and are, and not turn sourly on the angel and say, 'Crump is a better man with his grunting resistance to all his native devils.'" A Chinese proverb says, "He who finds pleasure in vice and pain in virtue is still a novice in both." The saint is he who has learned really to love virtue, in its concrete duties, better than all the allurements of sin; to him we may say, as Virgil said to Dante, "Take thine own pleasure for thy guide henceforth." But until we are saints it is wise for us to cultivate conscientiousness, the habit of obedience, even when it costs, to that inward urging which is, on the whole, for most of us, our safest guide.
F. Paulsen, System of Ethics, book II, chap. V, secs. 1, 2, 5. H.
Spencer, DATA OF ETHICS, chap. VII, secs. 44-46. S. E. Mezes,
ETHICS, DESCRIPTIVE AND EXPLANATORY, chaps. V, VIII.
Sutherland, op. cit, chap. XV. F. Thilly, INTRODUCTION TO
ETHICS, chap. III. Westermarck, op. cit, chap. V. Darwin,
DESCENT OF MAN, partt. I, chap. III. J. H. Hyslop, ELEMENTS
OF ETHICS, chaps. VI, VII. J. S. Mill, UTILITARIANISM, chap.
v. H. W. Wright, SELF-REALIZATION, part. I, chap. IV.
CHAPTER V
THE INDIVIDUALIZING OF CONSCIENCE
Conscience as we have seen, is the result of a fusion of elements coming from personal experience and tribal judgment. In its early phases the latter elements predominate; conscience may be fairly called the inner side of custom. Primitive men have little individuality and involuntarily reflect the general attitude. But with widening experience and growing mental maturity, conscience, like man's other faculties, tends to become more individual and divergent, until we find, in civilized life, a man standing out for conscience' sake against the opinion of the world. The individualization of conscience, with the consequent clash of ideals, gives the study of morality much of its interest and difficulty; it will be worthwhile to note some of its causes. Why did not the individualizing of conscience occur earlier?
(1) In primitive man there is not much opportunity for the development of individuality. There are few personal possessions, there is little scope for the exercise of peculiar talents, there is little power of reflection, to develop strongly individual ideas. The self-assertive instincts are to considerable extent still dormant for lack of stimulus to call them forth. The individual is content to take his place in the group life, and it seldom occurs to him to question the group- judgment.
(2) In primitive life there is a drastic repression of any incipient rebelliousness, through the enforcement of custom or explicit law in the ways we have indicated; the fear of a heavy discouragement to any innovator. If men dared to defy the community morals, they were very likely to be put to death before the habit of free judgment had much time to spread. There was thus a sort of artificial selection for survival of the conventional type, and weeding-out of the freethinker and moral genius. Even in historic times this process has continued and been an enormous clog on human progress. The man of revolutionary moral insight has had to pay the penalty, if not of death as in the case of Socrates or of Jesus-at least of ridicule and ostracism, of excommunication and isolation as, in our own day, with Tolstoy. Many and many a saint who might have been a beacon-light to mankind has lived under the curses or sneers of his fellows and died in loneliness, to be soon forgotten. A few have, after years of opposition, obtained a following and accomplished great reforms, as did Buddha, Mohammed, St. Francis, and Luther. But none can count the potential reformers, the men of new insight, of individual moral judgment, who have been crushed by the weight of group-opposition. Man has been the worst enemy of his own progress.
(3) There is another aspect to this selective process, noted before in another context- the struggle for existence between groups. So intense are these tribal struggles in early society that harmony within a group is absolutely necessary. Individualization means disorganization; and whatever communities developed free thought and divergent ideas were at a disadvantage when it came to action. Many such groups, ahead of their rivals in individual moral development, were wiped out by barbaric armies that gave unquestioning obedience to the tribal will and worked together like a machine. Up to a certain stage in human development individuality was an undesirable variation and was ruthlessly repressed, sometimes by the execution of the particular offenders, sometimes by the destruction of the group to which they belonged and which they by their divergence weakened. What forces made against custom-morality? Against these repressive forces, however, other forces were from early times urging men on to reject the tyranny of custom. Those inward promptings that we call conscience were continually tending to become less the echo of the group conventions and more the expression of the individual's needs and deepest desires.
(1) At bottom, of course, lay the natural restlessness and passions of men, the impatience of control, the longing for liberty, and the craving for self-expression. The combative instinct, pride, obstinacy, and notably the sex-instinct, were from earliest times spurring men on to a disregard of the conventional and the formation of individual standards.
(2) We may make special mention of the love of power over others, which has been one of the deep roots of the perpetual internecine struggles of man. There is a need of leadership in every group; and this need is felt more and more keenly as the groups increase in size. At first the authority of the elders suffices, or of strong men who push to the fore at times of crisis, as in the case of the so called judges, the military dictators, as we might better call them, of early Israel. But as Israel, grown in numbers, and feeling the need of greater unity and readiness, clamored for a king, so generally, at a certain stage of culture, permanent chiefs of some sort become necessary. Now the chief, enjoying his sense of power, usually imposed his will upon the people; his individuality, at least, had more or less free play. And thus, through the changing decrees of successive rulers, all sorts of varying standards became realized, and the rigidity of early custom was steadily loosened.
(3) In the hunting stage of primitive life, and even in the pastoral stage, there was little private property, and hence little opportunity for the development of the acquisitive instinct. But with the transition to an agricultural life, and still more with the growth of commerce and the arts, private accumulation became possible. Individual initiative began to pay; the smarter and more ingenious could outstrip their fellows by breaking through the crust of custom, while those who were hidebound by a conventional conscience were at a disadvantage. To a large extent this lawlessness or innovation in conduct came into conflict with the individual's conscience. But the question "Why not?" would at once arise; if possible, a man would justify his act to himself. And to some degree those new ways of acting would swing conscience over to their side.
(4) In earliest times each tribe lived, very, much to itself and developed its own morals, under the stress of similar forces, but without much influence from the experience of other groups. It was thus exceedingly difficult for it to conceive of any other ways of doing things; the ancestral customs were accepted as inevitable, like the sun and the rain. Inter-tribal conflicts first gave, perhaps, a vantage point for mutual criticism. A clan that by some custom had an obvious advantage over its neighbors would naturally be imitated as soon as men became quick-witted enough to understand its superiority. The taking of prisoners, the exchange of hostages or envoys, friendly missions and journeys, would give insight into one another's life. With the development of commerce, this mutual criticism of morals would be greatly accelerated. So the authority of local conventions and standards would be discredited, custom would become more fluid, and individual judgment find freer play. Especially would the more observant, the more traveled, the more reflective, tend to vary from the ideals of their neighbors.
(5) In various other ways, apart from the mutual influence of divergent group-customs, the progress of civilization tends to produce variations in ideals. The increase of knowledge, the development of science and philosophy, bring floods of new ideas to burst the old dams; deepening insight reveals the irrationality of old ideas to the leaders of thought. The progress of the arts gives new interests and valuations. The spiritual seers and prophets see visions of a better order and proclaim new gospels. The development of classes and castes allows to the aristocracy more leisure to think and criticize; the institution of slavery, in particular, produced a class of slave-owners with ample time to dissect their inherited conceptions.
(6) Finally, where, under favoring conditions, the danger of war in which man has for the most part lived became less acute, custom generally grew laxer. It is the imperious necessity of selfpreservation that has been the greatest conservative force; warlike states have demanded strict allegiance and looked with suspicion upon deviations from the group ideals. But peoples that, whether from a fortunate geographical situation or because of their marked superiority in numbers and power over their neighbors have escaped this need of perpetual self-defense could afford to relax their vigilance for conformity. And the very notable increase in individual variations in conduct and ideal during the past century has been largely owing to the era of comparative peace. We seem to be reaching the age when the advantage is to lie not with the nation that has the most rigid customs, but with the nation that shows the most individual initiative and progress.
Conservatism vs. radicalism
We have become forever emancipated from the tyranny of custom morality under which the majority of men have lived. Legislation is, to be sure, continually on the increase, shutting men out from the ever-new ways they discover to prey upon their fellows. But nevertheless, the freedom with which men may now live their own lives according to their own ideas is almost a new phenomenon upon the earth. When we compare the free range that our individuality has with the tyranny of public opinion even so recently as the lifetime of our Puritan grandparents, when we see the new experiments in personal life and social legislation which are being tried on every hand, when we read a few of the thousands of books and magazines and newspapers that are pouring a continual flood of new ideas into the world, we must realize the immense change from the stereotyped customs of nearly all past epochs. In each of our forty eight States different codes are showing their relative advantages; here woman's suffrage is on trial, there the initiative and referendum, there the recall. Almost every sort of possible marriage law, it would seem, is being tried somewhere. It is a time of moral confusion, of the unsettling of old conceptions and a groping, stumbling progress toward the new.
In such a situation it is no wonder that we have two types of thought, two sets of forces, at work. On the one hand we have the conservatives, the "stand-patters," the maintainers of the existing order; on the other hand are the progressives, the radicals, the reformers of the existing order. For the former the moral standards of their particular age and country tend to have an absolute and unconditional worth, which must not be criticized or questioned. The necessity of allegiance to morality has been so deeply stamped upon their minds that it has become a loyalty to the particular brand of morality they have grown up in, however flagrantly inadequate or tyrannous it may be. For the latter a commendable impatience with the imperfect is apt to foster a blindness to the value that almost always lies in ancient customs and a lack of regard for the need of stability and common agreement on some plane. These iconoclasts, vociferous in condemnation, are often most empty handed, giving us nothing wiser or more advantageous wherewith to replace the conventions they discard. So it is difficult to say whether humanity is more in danger from the red-handed radicalism which destroys the precious fruit of long experience, or from the obstinate obstructionists who by the dead weight of their apathy or the positive pull-back of their antagonism delay the remedying of existing evils. The ideal lies in keeping morality plastic while giving its approved forms our hearty allegiance. Widely different ideals are theoretically conceivable; but we live in a specific time and place and must defer to the code of our fellows; it is along these lines, and by gradual steps, that progress must be made. We must be on the alert for new suggestions, but slow to tear down till we can build better. The greatest of prophets, keenly as he saw the flaws in existing standards, proclaimed that he came not to destroy but to fulfill. It is evident enough to the impartial observer that our present chaos and mutual antagonism of conflicting view-points is not ideal; we need to work out of this disorder into some sane and stable order; when we can find the best way of life we must discard these manifold variations, most of which are foolish and ill-advised. The undesirability of this contemporary disagreement, which in some matters amounts to almost a complete moral anarchy, is enough to explain the pull back of the conservatives. And it is precisely the purpose of such a volume as this to help in the crystallizing of definite and universally accepted moral principles for personal and social life. But, on the other hand, this temporary chaos is more pregnant with promise than the older blind acquiescence in full light of criticism and experiment to bear upon the laws and customs of the past.
"New occasions teach new duties, Time makes ancient good uncouth."
We should reverence the great seers and lawmakers of the past; but their true disciples are not those who slavishly accept their dicta, they are rather those who think for themselves, as they did, and contribute, as they did, toward the slow progress of man.
What are the dangers of conventional morality?
The reasons why we cannot be content with our fathers' conservatism in morals, and our fathers' custom-bound conscience, may be summarized as follows:
(1) Conventional morality is almost necessarily too general; it is not elastic enough to fit the infinite variations in specific cases, not detailed enough to fit all needs. It therefore often causes needless and cruel repression; the most sensitive and aspiring spirits have often revolted from the morality of their times because of its harshness. It is well for the marriage-tie to be binding; divorce has generally been deemed unchristian. But if this judgment is rigidly enforced, special cases arise, very piteous, very pathetic, crying out for a more discriminating rule. Our forebears, with their grave realization of the dangers of frivolousness, forbade by law and a stern public opinion many innocent and wholesome diversions. Such injustices are inevitable where custom has unchecked sway. The general aim and result may be very salutary, but the application is too sweeping, and brings suffering to many unfortunate individuals, or to the community as a whole, by its indiscrimination.
(2) But even in its general result custom may be harmful. Morals have developed blindly, as we have seen, through all sorts of irrational influences, swayed this way by class interest, by rulers or priests, veered that way by superstition, passion, and stupidity. Morality has not understood itself; and the natural forces which have developed it into its enormous usefulness have not always weeded out the baneful elements. The persecution of heretics was sheer mistake, but it was acceded to by practically the entire Church in the Middle Ages, and practiced with utter conscientiousness. The hostility of the Puritans to music and art was pure folly, though it seemed to them their grim duty.
(3) New situations are continually arising, new sins appearing. Conventional morality, while sometimes over-severe against old and well-recognized sins, lags far behind in its branding of the newer forms. The evils arising from the modern congestion of population, the unscrupulousness of modern business, the selfishness of politicians, the servility of newspapers to the "interests" and to advertisers, for example, find too little reprobation in our established moral codes. "Business is business" has been said by respectable church-members. A successful American boss, when asked if he was not in politics for his pocketbook, said, "Of course! Aren't you?" with no sense of shame. Probably he was very "moral" along the old lines, an excellent father, a kind husband, an agreeable neighbor; but his conventional code, shared by most of his contemporaries, did not include the reprobation of the practice of politics for private gain. In the upper classes are many people who are "good" by the old standards, but who are unhelpful and trivial-minded, mere parasites devoted to sport or society, with never a qualm of conscience for their selfishness. The old standards need the constant infusion of new blood; our consciences need to be adjusted to our new relations and deeper insight. [Footnote: Cf. Rosa, Sin and Society, p. 14: "One might suppose that an exasperated public would sternly castigate these modern sins. But the fact is, the very qualities that lull the conscience of the sinner blind the eyes of the onlookers. People are sentimental; and bastinado wrongdoing not according to its harmfulness, but according to the infamy that has come to attach to it. Undiscerning, they chastise with scorpions the old authentic sins, but spare the new. They do not see that blackmail is piracy, that embezzlement is theft, that speculation is gambling that deleterious adulteration is murder. The cloven hoof hides in patent leather; and today, as in Hosea's time, the people 'are destroyed for lack of knowledge.'">[
(4) Custom-morality tends to literalism, a mere formal observance of law or custom without the true spirit of service, without any inward sweetness or power. Christ's condemnation of the Pharisees will occur to every one; the parable of the Pharisee and publican, and that of the widow's mite, among others, are classic illustrations of a cut-and dried formalism in morality. Such a legalism Paul found could not save him. And forever the prophets and spiritual leaders of men have had to burst the bonds of tradition to awaken a real love of and devotion to the good. The letter killeth, and a punctilious observance of rules may choke out the aspirations of the soul.
(5) Finally, conflicts between customs inevitably arise. Which shall a man obey? The moral perplexity thus caused gives a great deal of its poignancy to the tragedy of life. When one accepted ideal pulls us one way, and another standard, to which we have given allegiance, calls us the other, when we cry out with Desdemona, "I do perceive here a divided duty," the only solution lies in the development of insight and a recognition of the transition-nature of much of our accepted code. If for no other reason, to avoid these conflicts of ideals we must comprehend the ultimate aims of morality and take existing standards with a sort of tentative allegiance. It should be clear, then, that the individualizing of conscience, which has been going on observably in recent times, is, in spite of its dangers, a necessary and desirable process. Dewey and Tufts, ETHICS, chaps, V. IX. W. Bagehot, PHYSICS AND POLITICS, chaps. II, VI. F. Paulsen, SYSTEM OF ETHICS, part II, chap. V, sec. 6. S. E. Mezes, ETHICS, chap, VII, pp. 164-83. J. H. Coffin, THE SOCIALIZED CONSCIENCE, pp. 12-23.
CHAPTER VI
CAN WE BASE MORALITY UPON CONSCIENCE?
What is the meaning of "moral intuitionism"?
With the growth of individualism in morals, the relaxing of the constraint of publicly accepted standards, there is, of course, a dangerous drift toward self-indulgence and moral nihilism. It becomes all the more necessary that conscience be strong and sensitive, that inner restraints take the place of outer. In the lack of a mature moral insight, which is one of the latest of mental developments, and indeed, where it exists, to reinforce its pale affirmations with greater impulsive power, a stern sense of duty is a veritable rock of salvation. Many a people have perished, many a brilliant hope of civilization been lost, because of its lack. So we cannot wonder when moralists put it forward as the foundation- stone of all morality and seek to build their systems upon it. To a man who has been bred to obey the inner voice, it seems the very source and basis of the right; it is so inescapable, so authoritative, that it cannot be deemed derived, or evolved by a mechanical process of selection. It figures as something ultimate and unanalyzable, if not frankly supernatural; that it is a mere instrument in the attainment of an ulterior end, to be used or rejected according to its observed usefulness is an abhorrent thought.
There has thus arisen a school of philosophers who base their justification of morality entirely upon the deliverances of conscience. Their theories vary in detail and have received sundry names; we will group them here for convenience under the general caption "moral intuitionism." As a rule they steer clear of the historic point of view; they refuse to believe that conscience has a natural history. Nor are they usually keen at psychological analysis; the numberless variations in form which conscience assumes in different individuals are, for their purposes, better ignored. Instead of analyzing the moral sense into its components and describing the mental stuff of which it is composed, instead of tracing its genesis and studying the forces that have produced it, they wax eloquent over its importance and universality. As preachers they are admirable. But the foundation they provide for morality is slippery. It amounts to saying, "We ought to do right because we know we ought!" When we ask how we can be sure, in view of the general fallibility of human conviction, that we are not mistaken in our assurance, and following a false light, they can but reiterate in altered phraseology that we know because we know.
To these intuitionists, and to the popular mind very often, the approval or disapproval of conscience is immediate, intuitive, and unerring. Its authority is absolute and not to be questioned. We have this faculty within us that tells us as surely what is right and what wrong as our color-sense tells us what is red and what green. Some people may, to be sure, be color-blind, or have defective consciences; but the great mass of unsophisticated people possess this innate guide and commandment, a quite sufficient warrant for all our distinctions of good and evil. Honest men do not really differ in their moral judgments. They may misunderstand one another's concepts and engage in verbal disputes; but at bottom their moral sense approves and disapproves the same acts. Our moral differences come mainly from the deluding effects of passion and the sophisticated ingenuities of the intellect. We should "return to nature," go by ourselves alone, and listen to the inner voice. If we sincerely listen and obey we shall always do right. [Footnote: "But truth and right, founded in the eternal and, is what every man can judge of, when laid before him. 'T is necessarily one and the same to every man's understanding, just as light is the same, to every man's eyes." (S. Clarke, Discourse upon Natural Religion, 1706.)]
We cannot but recognize a certain amount of practical truth in this picture. But it is over-simplified, and it is fundamentally unsatisfactory to the intellect. We shall now pass in review its most obvious inadequacies.
Do the deliverances of different people's consciences agree?
Nothing is more notorious to an unbiased observer than the conscientious differences between men. Even among members of a single community, with closely similar inheritance and environment, we find marked divergence in moral judgment. And when we compare widely different times and places we are apt to wonder if there is any common ground. It is only a very smug provincialism that can attribute the alien standards of other races and nations to a disregard of the light. Mohammedans and Buddhists have believed as firmly in, and fought as passionately for, their moral convictions as Christians have for theirs. When we survey the vast amount of material amassed by anthropologists, we find that, as has been often said, there is hardly a vice that has not somewhere been deemed a virtue, and hardly a virtue but has been branded as a vice. History is full of the pathos of havoc wrought by conscientious men, of foolish and ruinous acts which they have braced themselves to do for conscience' sake. One has but to think of the earnest and prayerful inquisitors and persecutors in the mediaeval Church, of the Puritans destroying the stained-glass windows and paintings of the Madonna, of the caliph who destroyed the great Alexandrian library, bereaving the world at one blow of that priceless culture-inheritance. Written biography, fiction which truly represents life, and individual memory are full of conscience have sundered those who truly loved and wrought irremediable pain and loss. Lately the newspapers told us of the heroic suicide of General Nogi and his wife, who felt it their duty not to survive their emperor. To a Catholic Christian this imperious dictate of the Japanese conscience would be a deadly sin. And so it goes. There is no need to multiply instances of what can be observed on every hand. Conscience reflects the traditions and influences amid which a man grows up.
But if the deliverances of different men's consciences conflict, how shall we know which to trust? If any particular command of the inner voice may be morally wrong, how can we trust it at all? There are obviously morbid and perverted consciences; but if conscience itself is the ultimate authority, and is not to be justified and criticized by some deeper test, what right have we to call any of its manifestations morbid or perverted? Is it not a species of egotism to hold one's own moral discernment as superior to another's; and if so, do we not need some criterion by which to judge between them? Surely the diversity of its judgments makes conscience an impossible foundation for morality; we should have as many codes as consciences and fall into a hopeless confusion. If conscience everywhere agreed in its dictates, could we base morality upon it? Even, however, if conscience led us all in the same direction, would that prove its authority? Perhaps we should all be following a will o' the wisp, and foolishly sacrificing our desires to an idol of the tribe, a universal superstition. Must it not show its credentials before it can legitimately command our allegiance? It is but one specific type of impulse among many; why should it be given the reins, the control over all? Do we say, because conscience makes for our best welfare? The answer would, in general, be true; but we should then be putting as our test and ultimate authority the attainment of our welfare, which would be to abandon the point of view we are discussing. Conscience claims authority. But that might conceivably be mere impudence and tyranny. Moreover, there are those who feel no call to follow conscience; how could we prove to them that they ought? Is it not the height of irrationality to bow down before an unexplained and mysterious impulse and allow it to sway our conduct without knowing why? If the "ought" is really shot out of the blue at us, if there is no justification, no imperious demand for morality but the existence of this inner push, why might we not raise our heads, refuse to be dominated by it, and live the life of free men, following the happy breezes of our desires? That is precisely what many have done, men who have reached maturity enough of mind to see the emptiness of following an ingrained impulse simply because it exists, but not a full enough maturity to see beyond to the real justification and significance of conscience.
A further realization of the inadequacy of the intuitive theory comes when we observe that conscience is by no means always clear in its dictates. It often leaves us in the lurch. Developed in us as it has been by circumstance and suggestion, it helps us usually only in certain recognized types of situation. When new cases arise, it is hopelessly at sea. As a practical working principle, conscientiousness is not only apt to be a perverted and provincial guide, it is insufficient for the solving of fresh and difficult problems. The science casnistry has been developed in great detail to supply this lack, to apply the well-recognized deliverances of a certain accepted type of conscience to the various possibilities of situation. These systems, however, reflect the idiosyncrasies of their makers, and have never won wide approbation. Morality must remain largely experimental, individual. Conscience will play a very useful role in spurring us to our recognized duty in the commoner situations, but for all the more delicate decisions we need a more ultimate touchstone. We must grasp the underlying principles of right conduct, and weigh the relative goods attainable by each possible act. A well-balanced and normal conscience will save us the recurrent reasoning out of typical perplexities, but it must be supplemented by an insight into the ends to be aimed for and kept rather strictly in its place.
What is the plausibility of moral intuitionism?
It is never wholly satisfactory merely to refute a theory; we must see its plausibility and understand its appeal if we are to be sure of doing it justice. In the case of the intuition-theory it is easy to discern the reasons that have kept it alive? though it has never been at all widespread among thinking men? in spite of the obvious objections that can be raised to it.
(1) Perhaps the original source of the doctrine was a certain sort of religious faith; it follows easily as a corollary to the belief in God. If God commands us to do right, it is felt, He must have given us some way to know what is right. The inner voice of conscience may be just such a God-given guide; therefore it is such a guide; therefore it is infallible. A natural piece of a priori reasoning, on a par with the Christian Scientist's syllogism: God is good; a good God would not permit evil to exist; therefore there is no evil. Unfortunately a priori reasoning has to yield to actual experience. Since we see that conscience is not infallible and evil does exist, there must be some fallacy in the arguments.
(2) Another source of the doctrine's strength lies in its simplicity. It is a great mental relief to drop the tangle of confusing considerations, to stop trying to reason out one's course of action, and follow a supposedly reliable guide. The intuition-theory goes naturally with a moral conservatism which dreads the chaos and uncertainty that follow upon the doubt of established moral habits. It is so much more comfortable to feel that one has already the one divine and ultimate code, that one has always done right because one has steadily obeyed the inner light! It is reassuring to divide the world into the sheep and the goats? if one can believe one's self a sheep. But what O dismay! what if one were after all a goat! A great deal of mental anguish has been caused by the pseudo-simplicity of this dichotomy. There is no such clean-cut and clearly visible line between right and wrong; there is instead a bewildering maze of goods. Hardly any choice but involves a sacrifice, hardly any ideal but has its disadvantages. One learns with experience to be wary of these simple theories, these closet theories which collapse when they are brought out into the light of day.
(3) We must, however, be just. The fact of the reliability of conscience, and the wisdom of following its guidance, holds over a wide range of human experience and the experience which is most apparent upon the surface. For all ordinary cases we of Christendom agree without hesitation that murder is wrong, and lying, and stealing. It seems a waste of time to try to justify our instinctive verdict, and the attempt would only be bewildering to most men. It is only when brought face to face with some alien code that we see the need of digging below intuition. A missionary to the South Seas may be confronted with men to whom the killing of other tribesmen and the accumulation of skulls is a glorious and honorable feat, or to whom skillful lying is an enviable and proud accomplishment. But most of us live among neighbors whose conscience is comfortably like our own, and only occasionally become seriously perplexed. In the great mass of everyday occasions we do know our duty intuitively, and we do agree with one another. We recognize a duty at sight without realizing its teleology. It is not, indeed, an innate faculty; it was acquired during our formative years; it is not infallible. But the forces which have gone to the making of it are similar in all our lives, and the products are more alike than unlike.
(4) Finally, it is true that to obey conscience is, in a sense, to do right, to be moral, no matter how distorted conscience may be. Conscientiousness is in itself a virtue. To this point we shall later return. We need only say here that conscientiousness is not enough. Life is not so simple a matter as that. We need judgment, sanity, insight, as well as a strong sense of duty. We need to correct and train conscience, to adjust it to our real needs, to recognize that it is a means, not an end.
Our discussion, though rapid, should show that we cannot start with the "ought" of our conscience, or moral sense, and erect our moral theory upon that. Conscience itself needs to be explained. Its commands need to be justified by reference to some more ultimate criterion. It needs to be pruned of its fanaticism, developed where it is weak, and kept in line with our growing insight into what is best in conduct. Ruskin once summed the matter up by saying, "Obey thy conscience! But first be sure it is not the conscience of an ass!" Conscience may be a very dangerous guide. And even where it is normal and useful it must not be invested with any absolute and irrational authority.
Historical study, then, reveals the growth of personal and social morality through the action of forces, which tend to drive men into conduct that makes for their welfare more surely than did their primitive animal impulses. Conscience arises through these same forces. Though subject to perversion and infinitely variant in detail, community-morals and individual conscience have been the chief means of making man's life safe and wisely directed. The criterion that emerges from such a study is not, however, the bald existence of codes of morals, or of conscience, but the human welfare which those codes and that conscience exist to serve. To an exposition of the ways in which morality serves and should increasingly serve human welfare, we now turn.
Classic intuitional theories will be found developed in: Price, Review of the Chief Questions and Difficulties of Morals (1757), Shaftesbury, An Inquiry Concerning Virtue or Merit (1699). F. Hutcheson, An Inquiry Concerning Moral Good and Evil (1725). Joseph Butler, Fifteen Sermons upon Human Nature, II, III (1726). J. Martineau, Types of Ethical Theory (1885).
Criticisms of the intuitional theories will be found in: S. E. Mezes, Ethics, chap. III; Dewey and Tufts, Ethics, chap. XVI, sec. 3; F. Paulsen, System of Ethics, part II, chap. V, sec. 4; H. Spencer, Data of Ethics, chap. II, sec. 14; chap. IV, sec. 20; Muirhead, Elements of Ethics, secs. 32-35. H. Rashdall, The Theory of Good and Evil, book I, chap. IV. W. Fite, Introductory Study of Ethics,
PART II
THE THEORY OF MORALITY
CHAPTER VII
THE BASIS OF RIGHT AND WRONG
HISTORICAL knowledge without critical insight leads to moral nihilism, the conviction of the pre-Socratic Sophists that, since every time and people has its own standards, there is no real objective right and wrong. Morality is seen to be not a fixed code sent readymade from heaven, but a set of habits and intuitions that have had a natural origin and development. Our particular moral code is perceived to be but one out of many, our type of conscience psychologically on the same level with the strange, and to us perverted, sense of duty of alien races. How can we judge impartially between our standards and those of the Fiji Islanders? What warrant have we for saying that our code is a better one than theirs? Or how do we know that the whole thing is not superstition?
What is the nature of that intrinsic goodness upon which ultimately all valuations rest?
As a matter of fact, underneath the manifold disagreements as to good and bad, there is a deep stratum of absolute certainty. It is only in the more complex and delicate matters that doubt arises; all men share in those elementary perceptions of good and bad that make up the bulk of human valuation. To men everywhere it is an evil to be in severe physical pain or to be maimed in body, to be shut away from air, from food, from other people. It is a good to taste an appetizing dish, to exercise when well and rested, to hear harmonious music, to feel the sweet emotion of love. The fact that men agree upon judgments does not prove them true; but these are not judgments, they are perceptions. [Footnote: Or affections. Let no one quarrel about the psychological terms used; the only important matter is to note the fact, however it be phrased, that "good" and "bad" in their basic usage are DESCRIPTIVE terms. A toothache is bad just as indisputably as the sky is blue. The word "bad" has a definite meaning, just as the word "blue" has; and the toothache is, among other things, precisely what we mean by "bad," just as the look of the cloudless sky by daylight is what we mean by "blue.">[ To call love good is not to give an opinion, it is to describe a fact. It is a matter of direct first-hand feeling, whose reality consists in its being felt. To say that these experiences are good or bad is equivalent to saying that they FEEL good or bad; there can be no dispute about it. This is the bottom fact of ethics. Different experiences have different intrinsic worth as they pass. There is a chiaroscuro of consciousness, a light and shade of immediate goodness and badness over all our variegated moments. The good moments are their own excuse for being, a part of the brightness and worth of life. They need nothing ulterior to justify them. The bad moments feel bad, and that is the end of it; they are bad-feeling moments, and no sophistication can deny it. Conscious life looked at from this point of view, and abstracted from all its other aspects, is a flux of plus and minus values. Certain of its moments have a greater felt worth than others; some experiences are intrinsically undesirable, the shadows of life; others, intrinsically sweet, a part of its sunshine. In the last analysis, all differences in value, including all moral distinctions, rest upon this disparity in the immediate worth of conscious states. [Footnote: Cf. G. Santayana, The Sense of Beauty, p. 104: "All worth leads us back to actual feeling somewhere, or else evaporates into nothing-into a word and a superstition." I cannot but feel that contemporary definitions of value that omit reference to hedonic differences e.g. that of Professor Brown (Journal of Philosophy, Psychology, and Scientific Methods, vol. II, p. 32): "Value is degree of adequacy of a potentiality to the realization of the effect by virtue of which it is a potentiality"-miss the real meaning of "value." We do, indeed, speak occasionally of x as having value as a means to y, when y is not good or a means to a good. But that seems to me a misuse of the word.] We may say absolutely that if it were not for this fundamental difference in feeling there would be no such thing as morality. There might conceivably be a world in which consciousness should exist without any agreeable or disagreeable qualities; in such a world nothing would matter; all acts would be equally indifferent. Or there might be a world in which all experiences were equally pleasurable or painful; in such a case all acts would be equally good or equally sad; there would be no ground for choice. One might in any of these hypothetical worlds be driven by mechanical impulse or fitful whim to do this or that, but there would be no rational basis for preference. Such, however, is not the case. Comparative valuation is possible; all secondary goods and evils arise, all morality, all art and religion and science have their wellspring in this brute fact, this primordial parting of the ways between the more and the less desirable phases of possible conscious life. Morality of an elementary type would exist on this level even without the further complications of actual life. At least a very important art would arise; whether or not we should call it morality is a mere matter of definition. For a choice between alternatives immediately felt goods would arise, and the problem of how to get the better kinds of experience and avoid the worse would demand solution. Every bit of plus value added to experience would make the world so much the brighter, as would every bit of pain avoided. There are, to be sure, the mystical optimisms and pessimisms to be reckoned with, the sweeping assertions of certain schools and individuals that everything is equally good or equally bad. Such undiscriminating formulas are either the mere objectification of a mood, of some unusual period of ecstasy or sorrow, a blind outcry of thanksgiving or of bitterness, or they are the clumsy expression of some practical truth, as, the wisdom of acquiescence, and the futility of preoccupation with evil. But taken seriously and literally such statements are simply untrue to the facts and blur our fundamental perceptions. If actually accredited, either would lead to quiescence; if everything were equally good or evil all striving would be meaningless, one might as well jump from a housetop or walk into the fire. But as a matter of fact such mystical assertions are indulged in only in the inactive moments of life, and mean no more than a lyric poem or a burst of music. Every one in his practical moments acknowledges tacitly, at least, the difference between the intrinsic goodness and badness of experiences. A life of even delight or even wretchedness, or of colorless indifference, is not inconceivable, but it is not the lot of any actual human beings.
The larger quarrel between optimists and pessimists need not, for our purposes, be settled. Life may be a very good thing, on the whole, or a very bad thing. The only point we need to note is that it is at any rate a varying thing. Some experiences are more worth having than others. Moral theory needs no further admission to find its foothold. Nor do we need to discuss the problem of evil. It may be that all pain has its ultimate uses that nothing is "really" bad, if we take that to mean that all evil has a necessary existence as a means to a good otherwise unattainable and worth the cost. But however useful as a means evil may be, it is nonetheless evil and regrettable. It is not good qua pain. If the same amount of good could be obtained without the preliminary evil, it were better to skip it. In short, the existence of different values in immediate experience is indisputable; we may call them for convenience intrinsic goodness and badness.
What is extrinsic goodness?
But there is a radically different sense of the words "good" and "bad"; namely, that in which we say that a thing is good FOR this or that. This is the kind of goodness the THINGS about us have; they are good for the production of intrinsic goodness (as we are using that phrase), which is always (so far as we know) something produced in living organisms. [Footnote: We also occasionally speak of things as being "good for" something else when that something else is not a good or a means to a good (see preceding footnote); as, "sunshine is good for weeds." But as applied to evils, the phrase "good for" more often means "good to abolish"; as, "hellebore is good for weeds." These usages illustrate the ambiguity of all our common ethical terms. To consider them here would be, however, needlessly confusing. The two senses of the term "good" mentioned in the text are the only senses we need to bear in mind for the purposes of ethics.] To put the same truth in other terms, things are good or bad only with respect to their effect upon our conscious experience. [Footnote: I am fully aware of the widespread current distaste for the word "consciousness," with its idealistic associations. The term seems to me too useful to discard; but I wish to point out that, as I use it, it involves no metaphysical viewpoint, but is equally consonant with idealism or realism of any sort.] Primitive man, indeed, imagines inanimate things as having intrinsic goodness or badness, i.e., as feeling happy or unhappy, benevolent or malignant. We still speak of a serene sky, an angry storm cloud, a caressing breeze, and in a hundred ways read our affective life into material objects. But we now recognize all these ascriptions as cases of the pathetic fallacy, poetically significant but literally untrue. Animism, which looms so large in primitive religion, consists in thus objectifying into things the emotions they arouse in us. In reality all of these affective qualities exist in us, not in the outer objects; so far as our epithets have an objective truth they describe not the content of the objects, but their function in our lives. When we speak of delicious food, beautiful pictures, ugly colors, we mean strictly that these objects are such as to arouse in us certain peculiar pleasant or unpleasant feelings. So that apart from the existence of consciousness there would be no goodness or badness at all. [Footnote: The neo-realists would prefer to say, perhaps, "apart from the existence of organisms,">[ and this may be an exacter phrase; we from previous page [Footnote: pleasures and pains that remain out of connection with that interrelated stream of experience to which we usually limit the term "consciousness." On the other hand, MAY it not be that God, and angels, or other disembodied beings, have consciousness, and intrinsic goodness, without having organisms? Of course, for all we know, the world about us may be chock full of pleasures and pains. But for practical purposes, and so far as our morality is concerned, either the statement in the text or the suggested equivalent is true. The point is, that the foundation of morality is in US—whether you call US in the last analysis consciousnesses or organisms]
It is the existence of felt goodness, intrinsic goodness, and its opposite, that allows us to attribute to objects another kind of goodness or badness, according as they are calculated to produce in us the former kind. This kind of goodness and badness we may call extrinsic. It is only by thus attributing a sort of goodness and badness to senseless objects that we can aim for and avoid the good and bad phases of conscious life. In themselves these conscious moments are largely unnamable and inexpressible. There are, as it is, dumb objectless ecstasies that are of transcendent sweetness; but we do not usually know how to reproduce them, and for the most part we have to overlook these goods in our ideals and aim only for those that we can associate with recognized outer stimuli. For practical purposes we think rather in terms of outer objects than of our states of experience; nature has had need to make men but very slightly introspective. And so it is that this derived use of our eulogistic and disparaging terms plays a larger part than its primary application. But the essential point to note is that "goodness" and "badness" in the first instance refer to the fundamental cleavage between the affective qualities of experience, and only secondarily and by metonymy apply to objects in the physical world which affect our conscious states. The next point to note is that our conscious experiences and activities themselves have not only their intrinsic value, as they pass, but an extrinsic value, as means toward future intrinsic values. Each phase of experience has its own worth, while it lasts, and also has its results in determining future phases with their varying degrees of worth. Our reveries, our debauches, our sacrifices are good or bad in their effects as well as in themselves. Thus all experience has a double rating; acts are not only pleasant, agreeable, intrinsically desirable, but also wise, prudent, useful, virtuous, i.e., extrinsically desirable. These extrinsic values usually bulk much larger in the end than the first transitory intrinsic value; but our natural tendency is to forget them and guide our action by immediate values. Hence the need of a continual disparagement of the latter, and the many means men have adopted of emphasizing the importance of the former. Yet, after all, our concern for the extrinsic value of acts has to do only with means to ends; and unless acts tend to produce intrinsic goodness somewhere they are not extrinsically good. There is no sense in sacrificing an immediate good unless the alternative act will tend in its ultimate effects to produce a greater good, or unless the act sacrificed would have brought, after its present intrinsic good, some greater intrinsic evil. The sacrifice of a good for no greater good is asceticism or fanaticism. From this there is no ultimate salvation but by referring all acts to the final touchstone—asking which will produce in the end the greatest amount of intrinsic good and the least intrinsic evil. What sort of conduct, then, is good? And how shall we define virtue? We are brought thus to the conception of an art which shall not only teach us which of two immediate, intrinsic, goods is the better, but shall consider all the near and remote consequences of acts, and direct us to that conduct which will produce most good in the end. [Footnote: The impossibility of finding any other ultimate basis for our conception of moral "good" or "bad" is well expressed by Socrates in Plato's Protagoras (p. 354): "Then you think that pain is an evil and pleasure is a good, and even pleasure you deem an evil, when it robs you of greater pleasure than it gives, or causes pain greater than the pleasure. If, however, you call pleasure an evil in regard to some other end or standard, you will be able to show us that standard. BUT YOU HAVE NONE TO SHOW… And have you not a similar way of speaking about pain? You call pain a good when it takes away greater pains than those which it has, or gives pleasures greater than the pains." He then goes on to explain the need of morality,-to guide us, in the face of the foreshortening effects of our particular situation, to what will make for the greatest happiness in the long run (p. 356): "Do not the same magnitudes appear larger to your sight when near, and smaller when at a distance? Now suppose happiness to consist in doing or choosing the greater, and in not doing or avoiding the less, what would be the saving principle of human life? Would not the ACT OF MEASURING be the saving principle?">[ is best which will in the long run bring into being the greatest possible amount of intrinsic goodness and the least intrinsic evil. For goodness of conduct we commonly use the term "virtue"; and for intrinsic good the most widely accepted name-though one which is misleading to many is "happiness." So we may say, in sum, that virtue is that manner of life that tends to happiness. Objection is occasionally made that happiness is too vague a term, too elusive a concept, to be set forth as the ultimate aim of conduct. "Alas!" says Bradley, "the one question which no one can answer is, what is happiness?" But this is a palpable confusion of thought. If we mean by the question, "Wherein is happiness to be found, by doing what can we attain it?" then the answer is, indeed, uncertain in its completeness; it is precisely to answer it that we study ethics. Or if we mean, "What is the psychology of happiness?" the answer is as yet dubious; but it is irrelevant. Whatever its psychological conditions and the means to attain it, we know happiness when we have it. The puzzle is not to recognize it, but to get it. By happiness we mean the steady presence of what we have called intrinsic goodness and the absence of intrinsic badness; it is as indefinable as any ultimate element of experience, but as well known to us as blackness and whiteness or light and dark. Take, as a typical moral situation, a case in which a thirsty man drinks polluted water. In the diagram the arrow represents the direction of the flow of time, and each of the ribbons below represents the stream of consciousness of an individual concerned-the uppermost being that of the thirsty man himself, the others those of his wife, children, or friends. The plus sign early in the drinker's stream of experience stands for the plus value which drinking the water effects-the gratifying taste of the water and the allaying of the discomfort of thirst-real values, whose worth cannot be gainsaid. Following, in his own stream of experience, are a row of minus signs, indicating the undesirable penalties in his own life which follow-disease, pain, deprivation of other goods. No good accrues to others, unless the slight pleasure of seeing his thirst allayed. But evils follow in their experience: worry, sympathetic pain at his suffering, expense of doctor's bills, perhaps (which means deprivation of other possible goods), etc. It is clear at a glance that the positive good attained is not worth the lingering and widespread evils; and the act of drinking the polluted water, though to a very thirsty man a keen temptation, is immoral. Morality is thus an acting upon a right perspective of life. Personal morality considers the goods and evils in the one stream of consciousness, social morality the goods and evils in other conscious lives concerned. Between them they sum up the law and the prophets.
The best life for humanity is that which is, on the whole, felt best; not necessarily that which is judged best by this man or that, for our judgments are narrow and misrepresent actual values,-but that which has had from beginning to end the greatest total of happiness. No other ultimate criterion for conduct can ever justify itself, and most theoretical statements reduce to this. To be virtuous is to be a virtuoso in life. All sorts of objections have been raised to this simple, and apparently pagan, way of stating the case; they will be considered in due time. The reader is asked to refrain from parting company with the writer, if his prejudices are aroused, until the consonance of this sketchy account of the basis of morality with Christianity and all idealism can be demonstrated.
H. Spencer, Data of Ethics, chap. III. S. E. Mezes, Ethics, chap IX. Leslie Stephen, Science of Ethics, chaps. II, IX. F. Thilly, Introduction to Ethics, chaps. IV, V. F. Paulsen, book II, chap. I. J. S. Mill, Utilitarianism. B. P. Bowne, Principles of Ethics, chap. II. The classic accounts of a rational foundation of ethics are to be found by the discerning reader in Plato's Protagoras, Gorgias, and Republic (esp. books. I, II, IV), and Aristotle's Ethics (esp. books. I and II). For refinements in the definition of right and wrong, see G. E. Moore, Ethics, chaps. I-V; B. Russell, Philosophical Essays, I, secs. II, III. International Journal of Ethics, vol. 24, p. 293. Definitions of value without reference to pleasure or pain will be found in Journal of Philosophy, Psychology, and Scientific Methods, vol. II, pp. 29, 113, 141. An elaborate and careful discussion will be found in G. H. Palmer's Nature of Goodness.
CHAPTER VIII
THE MEANING OF DUTY
Why are there conflicts between duty and inclination?
IF virtue is simply conduct that makes most truly for happiness, why are not all but fools virtuous? The answer is, in a word, because what will bring about the greatest good in the long run, and to the most people, is not always what the individual desires at the moment. The two great temptations are the lure of the selfish and the lure of the immediate. To purchase one's own happiness at the expense of others, and to purchase present satisfaction by an act which will bring less good in the end-these are the cardinal sins, and under these two heads every specific sin can be put. The root of the trouble is that, in spite of the superposition of conscience upon their primitive impulses, human organisms have not yet motor-mechanisms fully adjusted to their individual or combined needs. Some instincts are over-strong, others under-developed, none is delicately enough attuned to the changing possibilities of the situation. Our desires tug toward all sorts of acts which would prove disastrous either to ourselves or others. Many of our faults we commit "without realizing it"; we follow our impulses blindly, unconscious of their treachery. Other sins we commit knowingly, because in spite of warning voices we cannot resist the momentary desire. Readjustment of our impulses is always painful; it is easier and pleasanter to yield than to control.
Duty is the name we give virtue when she is opposed to inclination. She is the representative at the helm of our conduct of all absent or undeveloped impulses. The saints have no need of the concept; virtue to them is easy and agreeable; they have learned the beauty of holiness and have no unruly longings. Sometimes this happy adjustment of desire to need has been won by severe struggle; the dangerous impulses have been trained to come to heel through many a painful sacrifice. In other cases an approximation to this ideal state is the result of early training; by skillful guidance the growing boy or girl has had his safe impulses fostered and his perilous desires atrophied with disuse. The proverb, "Bring up a child in the way he should go, and when he is old he will not depart there from," has much truth in it. But no parent and no man himself can ever breathe quite safe; we can never tell when some submerged animal instinct will rise up in us, stun all our laboriously acquired morality into inactivity, and bring on consequences that in any cool headed moment we should have known enough to avoid. Thus duty, although she is the truest friend and servant of happiness, figures as her foe. And some moralists, realizing vividly the frequent need of opposing inclination, have generalized the situation by saying that happiness cannot be our end. "Foolish Word-monger and Motive grinder," shouts Carlyle, "who in thy Logic-mill hast an earthly mechanism for the Godlike itself, and wouldst fain grind me out Virtuefrom the husks of Pleasure, I tell thee, Nay! Is the heroic inspiration we name Virtue but some Passion, some bubble of the blood, bubbling in the direction others PROFIT by? I know not; only this I know, If what thou namest Happiness be our true aim, then are we all astray. 'Happy,' my brother? First of all, what difference is it whether thou art happy or not! 'Happiness our being's end and aim,' all that very paltry speculation is at bottom, if we will count well, not yet two centuries old in the world" [Footnote: Sartor Resartus: "The Everlasting No" Past and Present: "Happy" Leaving aside this last statement, which is an irrelevant untruth, we probably feel an instinctive sympathy with Carlyle, and a sort of shame that we should have thought of happiness as the goal of conduct. Carlyle goes so far in his tirades as to call our happiness-morality a "pig philosophy," which makes the universe out to be a huge "swine's trough" from which mankind is trying to get the maximum "pigs" wash. Again he calls it a "Mechanical Profit-and-Loss theory" In such picturesque language he embodies a point of view which in milder terms has been expressed by many.] But to say that we must often oppose inclination in the name of duty is by no means to say that we must do what in the end will make against happiness. The trouble with inclination and passion is precisely that they are often ruiners of happiness. The very real and frequent opposition of desire and duty is no support of the view that duty is irrelevant to happiness, but quite consistent with the rational account of morality-that dates at least back to the ancient Greeks-which shows it to be the means to man's most lasting and widespread happiness.
Must we deny that duty is the servant of happiness?
We may go on to point out various flaws in the doctrine, of which Carlyle is one of the extreme representatives, that the account of morality as a means to happiness is immoral and leads to shocking results.
(1) The plausibility of the doctrine rests largely on its confusion with the very different truth that we should not make happiness our conscious aim. It is one of the surest fruits of experience that happiness is best won by forgetting it; he that loses his life shall truly find it. To think much of happiness slides inevitably over into thinking too much of present happiness, and more of one's own than others' happiness; it leads to what Spencer properly dubs "the pursuit of happiness without regard to the conditions by fulfillment of which happiness is to be achieved." Carlyle is practically on the right track in bidding us think rather of duty, of work, of accomplishment. But that is far from denying that these aims have their ultimate justification in the happiness they forward. In order that remote ends may be attained, it is often necessary to cease thinking of them and concentrate the mind upon immediate means. To acquire unconsciousness of manner, the last thing to do is to aim directly for it; to acquire happiness, the worst procedure is to make it one's conscious quest. Yet in the former case the attainment of the ease of manner sought, and in the latter case the attainment of the happiest life for one's self and those whom one's action affects is the touchstone which at bottom determines the method to be adopted. The proper method, we contend, is-morality. It is the method that Carlyle recommends. So that in practice we agree with him, while parting with him in theory.
(2) Carlyle evidently has in mind usually the thought that it is one's own happiness only that is put up as the end by the moralists he opposes. This was pure misunderstanding, however, or perversity. Other men's happiness has intrinsic worth (or IS intrinsic worth, for the word and the phrase are synonymous) as truly as mine; and morality is concerned quite as much with guiding the individual toward the general good as toward his own ultimate welfare. To this point we must return, merely mentioning here the fact that no reputable moralist now preaches the selfish theory.
(3) A part of Carlyle's ammunition consists in the slurring connotations which have grown up about the word "pleasure," and even the word "happiness." Because of the practical need of opposing immediate in the interests of remoter good, the various words that designate intrinsic and immediate value have come to have a less worthy sound in our ears than those words which indicate control for the sake of more widespread or lasting interests-such as "prudence," "duty," and "virtue." Moreover, the word "pleasures" commonly connotes the minor goods of life in contrast with the great joys, such as the accomplishment of some worthy task or the service of those we love. Again, it commonly connotes things passively enjoyed, rather than the active joys of life, which are practically more important. So that to condemn "pleasure" as an end arouses our instinctive sympathy. A "pleasure" is any bit of immediate good, however involved with pain, however transitory, and dangerous in its effects. "Happiness" generally refers to a more permanent state of satisfaction, including comparative freedom from pain; a stable and assured state of intrinsic worth, good to reflection as well as to sense. Pleasures are easy enough to get, but this safe state of happiness, full of rich positive worth, and immune from pain both in action and in moments of retrospect, is far from easy. Hence it is better to use the word "happiness" for our goal than the word "pleasure." Carlyle, however, takes "happiness" in the lower sense and rejects it in favor of what he calls "blessedness." This gives him the advantage of seeming to have a new and superior theory. But when we ask what "blessedness" is, it is apparent that it can be nothing but what we call "happiness" or the living of life in such a way as to lead to happiness.
(4) There is another important practical insight underlying the protests of Carlyle and those of his ilk, namely, that it pays to disregard the minor ills and discomforts of life and keep our thoughts fixed on the big things. These minor ills do not matter much as they pass; they are transient, and usually leave little pain for reflection. It is the fear of them, the complaining about them, the shrinking from them, the attending to them, that constitutes the greater part of their badness. Carlyle has the same practical common sense that the Christian Scientists show; but, as in their case, he lets his practical wisdom confuse his theoretical insight.
Sympathize, then, as we all must with these anti-happiness preachers, we may point out that their intuitions are quite compatible with a sane view of the ultimate meaning of morality. If morality does not exist for human welfare, what is it good for? And what else can welfare ultimately be but happiness? Other proposed ends we shall presently consider. But the happiness-account of morality leads to no dangerous laxity. If any eudemonistic moralists have lived loosely, it was because they did not realize what really makes for happiness or had not strength of will to cleave to it, not because they saw happiness as the criterion. An immature perception of this as the criterion without a full recognition of its bearings may have misled some; it is possible to see a general truth clearly and yet evaluate wrongly in concrete situations. But the converse of the truth that morality makes for happiness is the truth that the way to attain happiness is morality. No lesson could be more salutary. Correct concrete evaluations are more important than correct abstract generalizations, and Carlyle is nearly always on the right side in the former. But his influence would have been still more wholesome if he had added to his sound sermonizing a sane and clearly analyzed theory.
Does the end justify the means?
Our account of morality may be called the eudemonistic account, from the Greek eudemonia, happiness, or the teleological account, from telos, an end. It asserts, that is, that morality is to be judged by the end it subserves; that end is happiness. We have seen the sort of protest that arises with respect to the word "happiness." We may now note a danger that arises from the use of the concept "end"; it finds expression in the familiar proverb, "The end justifies the means." Conduct is to be judged by the end it subserves; therefore, if the end is good any means may be used to attain it. This has been the defense of much wrongdoing. The Jesuits who lied, slandered, cheated, and murdered, to promote the interests of the Church, the McNamara brothers, who dynamited buildings and bridges as a means toward the final end of attaining for laborers a just share of the fruits of their labor, the suffragettes who have been burning private houses, sticking up mail-boxes, and breaking windows, have justified their crimes by reference to the great ends they expected thereby to attain. What shall we say to this plea?
(1) The motto means: Conduct in itself undesirable may be justified IF the end attained is important enough to warrant it. In every case, then, the question must arise: Is the end to be attained worth the cost? To justify means that are intrinsically bad, it must be shown that the end attained is so good as to overbalance this evil. WAS the advancement of the Church worth the cost in human suffering, estrangement, and bitterness that the Jesuits exacted? IS the advancement of labor interests worth the destruction of property and life, the fostering of class-enmity and of moral anarchism that the criminal wing of the I. W. W. stands for? ARE votes for women worth the similar evils which British suffragettes are drifting into? Sometimes a cause is so important that almost any act is justified in its advancement. But such cases are rare, at least in modern life. Always there must be a balancing of good and evil. And the trouble with the attitude of mind which we have illustrated is that the end sought is usually not so all-important as to warrant the grave evils which its seekers cause. When the Titanic was sinking, the boat's officers shot several men who tried to jump into the lifeboats ahead of the women and children. It was probably the only way to stop a mad panic stricken rush, which would have endangered the lives of all as well as broken the chivalrous code which is worth so much sacrifice. The evil of shooting down unarmed and frightened men was great; but it was undoubtedly justified by the end attained. Whether any of the other instances mentioned are cases where the evil done would be similarly justified by the end, if thereby attained, we shall not here discuss. But the principle is evident. The end justifies evil means only if it is so supremely good as to overbalance that evil.
(2) It is pertinent, however, to add two considerations. First, we must feel sure that no less harmful means are available. And secondly, we must feel sure that these evil means are really adapted to attain the purpose. Is there no other way of securing votes for women than by the hysterical and criminal pranks our British sisters have been playing? And will those irritating acts actually forward their cause, or tend to bring about a revulsion of feeling? Did the crimes of the Jesuits make the Church triumphant? Not in the long run. Immediate gains may often be won by unpleasant methods, as in the case of the Titanic. But when the struggle is bound to be a long one, as in the case of woman's suffrage and industrial justice, methods which (not to beg the question) would ordinarily be criminal are seldom in the end advantageous. The McNamara case hurt the I. W. W. sorely. Suffrage legislation has possibly been retarded in Britain. And in both cases there are probably more efficacious, as well as less harmful, ways of attaining the desired end.
(3) It is strictly true that THE end, human welfare, justifies any means necessary to attain it. Whatever pain must be caused to bring about the greatest possible human happiness is thereby exempt from reprobation. Whatever conduct is necessary for that supreme end BECOMES morality, or virtue; for that is precisely what morality IS. For example, it is undoubtedly necessary at times to murder, to steal, and to lie for the sake of human welfare; in such cases these acts are universally approved. Only, we give the acts in such cases new names, that the words "murder," etc, may retain their air of reprobation. We call murder of which we approve "capital punishment" or "justifiable homicide" or "patriotic courage." If taking a man's property without his consent is stealing, then the State steals; but, approving the act, we call it "eminent domain."
(4) The motto has its chief danger, perhaps, in the tendency it encourages to ignore remoter consequences for the sake of immediate gain. This point we will consider under the following topic.
What is the justification of justice and chivalry?
If the greatest total of human happiness is the supreme end of conduct, was not Caiaphas right in deeming it expedient that one man should die for the people, even though he were innocent of all sin? Were not the French army officers sane in preferring to make Dreyfus their scapegoat rather than bring dishonor and shame upon their army? For that matter, does not the aggregate of enjoyment of a score of cannibals outweigh the suffering of the one man whom they have sacrificed to their appetite, or the delirious excitement with which a brutal crowd witnesses a lynching overbalance the pain of their solitary victim? Yet our souls revolt against such things. We cry, ruat caelum, fiat justitia! Justice is prior to all expediency! Is this irrational, or can it be shown to be teleologically justifiable?
Justice is undoubtedly justifiable; and the only reason that we ever hesitate to acknowledge it in any concrete case is that we tend to overlook indirect and remote results and see only the immediate effect of action. The harm done by injustice consists not merely in the pain inflicted upon the victim. There is the sympathetic pain caused in all those who are at all tender hearted. There is the sense of insecurity caused in each by the realization that he too might some day be a victim; when justice is not enforced no man is safe. There is the stimulation given to human passions by one indulgence which will breed a whole crop of pain. There is the danger that if injustice is allowed in one case where a great good seems to warrant it, it will be practiced in other cases where no such necessity exists. Men are not to be trusted to judge clearly of relative advantages where their passions are concerned; they must bind themselves by an inflexible code. The cases cited are comparatively clear. No one would seriously contend that cannibalism or lynching, the execution of Christ, or the banishment of Dreyfus, made in the direction of the greatest happiness of mankind. But it has been seriously urged that the insane and the feeble and the morally worthless should be killed off, as they were in some sterner ancient states. Why should we guarantee life and liberty to such as are a useless drag upon the community, spend upon them millions which might be spent for bringing joy and recreation to the rest of us? Or again, if medical men need a living human victim to experiment upon, in order to conquer some devastating disease, why not pounce upon some good-for-nothing member of the community and force him to undergo the pain? The considerations enumerated in the preceding paragraph, however, bid us halt. Imagine the anxiety and the anguish that would be caused if some commission were free to determine who were insane or feeble or worthless enough to be put out of the way! Or free to select a human victim for vivisection whenever experts deemed it wise! The widespread horror and uneasiness of such a regime, the callousness to suffering it would engender, the private revenges and crimes that might insidiously creep in under the guise of public good, are alone enough to render vicious such a procedure.
It is true that one person's suffering is less of an evil than the suffering of many. The State, by universal consent, inflicts undeserved suffering upon individuals when the social welfare seems to require it; as when it takes away a man's beloved acre to built a railroad or highway, or when it compels vaccination, or when it drafts soldiers for the national defense and sends them to their death. When a man volunteers to risk his life or to endure pain for his fellows we rightly applaud his act. In such a case the ill effects above-mentioned do not follow, and the gain is clear; in addition, the stimulating value of the voluntary self-sacrifice is great. The American soldiers, who risked their lives to rid Cuba and the world of yellow fever, by offering themselves for inoculation with the disease, stand among the world's heroes.
It is also true that "rights" are not primitive and transcendent; their existence rests upon purely utilitarian grounds. The right to liberty and life is limited by the community's welfare. So is the right to property. But in estimating advantage we must beware of a superficial calculation. The concept of justice, and the enthusiasm for it, have been of enormous value to man's happiness. It is of extreme importance, from a eudaemonistic standpoint, to cherish that ideal. Even if in some individual case a greater general happiness would result from infringing upon it, we cannot afford to do so; we should find ourselves lapsing into less advantageous habits and incurring unforeseen penalties.
Chivalry is in like case with justice. It might have seemed better for the world that the able and distinguished men should have been saved from the Titanic-some of them were men of considerable importance in various lines of work-rather than less-needed women. But the effect of the noble example in strengthening the will to sacrifice self for others, and in maintaining our beautiful devotion to woman, was worth the cost. Fox was right when he said, "Example avails ten times more than precept." Even if the loss had been greater than it was, it would have been better to incur it than to allow an exception to the code of chivalry. Such codes are formed with infinite pains and are very easily shattered; a little laxity here, a tolerated exception there, and the selfishness and passions of men rise to the surface and undo the work of years. AT ALL COSTS WE MUST MAINTAIN THE CODE. In the end it pays. The greatest genius must run the risk of drowning in the endeavor to save the life of some unknown person who may be a worthless scamp. He may die and the scamp live, a great loss to the world. But only so can the code of honor be maintained which in the long run adds so much positive joy to man and saves him from so much pain.
In most instances, though not in some of those cited, the reward of justice and chivalry is sufficient for the individual himself. As Socrates said to Theodoras, [Footnote: Plato, Theoetetus, 176.] "The penalty of injustice cannot be escaped. They do not see, in their infatuation, that they are growing like the one and unlike the other, by reason of their evil deeds; and the penalty is, that they lead a life answering to the pattern which they resemble." "On the other hand,"-to supplement Plato with Emerson, [Footnote: Essays, First Series: "Spiritual Laws." Cf. George Eliot, in Romola: "The contaminating effect of deeds often lies less in the commission than the hero the avowal of a just and brave act, it will go unwitnessed and unloved. One knows it himself and is pledged by it to sweetness of peace and to nobleness of aim, which will prove in the end a better proclamation of it than the relating of the incident." And, we may add, a greater joy.]
But even in view of the cases where no apparent compensation comes to the individual, the ideals of justice and chivalry, like the more general concept of duty, are among the most valuable possessions of man's fashioning. Cross our inclinations as they often do, cost dearly as they sometimes will, the habit of unquestioning allegiance to them is one of the greatest of all gains as means to the attainment by mankind of a stable and assured happiness.
A brief discussion of the conflict of duty and inclination will be found in Dewey and Tufts, Ethics, chap. XVII, first few pages. Carlyle's declamations against happiness are too scattered and unsystematic to make reference to specific chapters useful. The general point of view may be found, more temperately stated, in F. H. Bradley's Ethical Studies, the chapter entitled "Why Should I be Moral?" Contemporary accounts of the nature of obligation will be found in the International Journal of Ethics, vol. 22, p. 282; vol. 23, pp. 143, 323.
A discussion of the motto, "The end justifies the means" will be found in F. Paulsen's System of Ethics, book II, and chap. I, sec. 4. The justification of justice is treated in J. S. Mill's Utilitarianism, chap. V. [in the consequent adjustment of our desires, the enlistment of our self-interest on the side of falsity. The purifying influence of public confession springs from the fact that by it the hope in lies is forever swept away, and the soul recovers the noble attitude of simplicity.]
CHAPTER IX
THE JUDGMENT OF CHARACTER
Wherein consists goodness of character?
Character is the sum of a man's tendencies to conduct. Our estimate of a man's character is a sort of weather forecast of what he will do in various situations. Goodness of character consists, then, of such an organization of impulses as will lead to good acts-to acts productive ultimately of a preponderance of intrinsic good, or happiness. The blame and approval that attaches in our minds to certain acts becomes attached also to the disposition that is fruitful of such acts. A good man is he whose mind is so set and adjusted that it will turn away from evil deeds and espouse the right. We can say, then, with Dewey and Tufts, "Goodness consists in active interest in those things which really bring happiness." [Footnote: Ethics, p. 396.] Similarly, Paulsen writes, "Virtues may be defined as habits of the will and modes of conduct which tend to promote the welfare of individual and collective life." [Footnote: System of Ethics, Eng. p. 475.] And Santayana puts it more tersely in the statement, "Goodness is that disposition that is fruitful in happiness." [Footnote: Reason in Common Sense, p. 144.] It is easy, then, to understand the enthusiasm that men feel for goodness; it is the resultant of the passionate longing to be delivered from the domination of evil impulses, the instinctive joy in splendid and unselfish acts, the sense of relief and gratitude felt toward those from whom one has nothing to fear. Contrariwise, the shrinking from a bad man springs primarily from the dread of what he may do, from the disgust which the sight of his foolish and ruinous acts inspires and from various other reactions of the spectator which we need not enumerate. If character were a sort of merely inward possession, unconnected with conduct, we should not Jeel thus toward it. Merely to FEEL virtuous is pleasant, but it is not important. Imputed goodness must be judged by the kind of conduct it yields, and that conduct in turn by its consequences. "By their fruits ye shall know them." But this inward disposition, though important chiefly for its effects, is more important therefore than we are apt to realize. "As a man thinketh in his heart, so he is." The scientific study of psychology has emphasized the fact, which is open to everyday observation, that even secret thoughts and moods influence inevitably a man's outward acts. What we do depends upon what we have been thinking and imagining and feeling. The Great Teacher was right when he bade men refrain not merely from murder, but from angry thoughts; not merely from adultery, but from lustful glances; not merely from perjury, but from the desire to deceive. Epictetus puts it, "What we ought not to do we should not even think of doing." And Marcus Aurelius writes, "We should accustom ourselves to think upon othing that we should hesitate to reveal to others if they asked to know it." This is sound advice. Without attempting to settle the problem of determinism or indeterminism, which falls properly within the sphere of natural rather than of moral philosophy, it is evident that our conduct is largely the result of that set of potentialities which we call character, that our happiness is in great degree shaped by our inward mental states.
Hence the large role of "motive" and "intent" in ethical theory. High motives and good intentions lead-sometimes to disastrous, acts we know what place is paved therewith. We need the wisdom of the serpent as well as the innocence of the dove. But other things being equal, pure desires tend to right conduct. A man whose mind dwells upon the good side of his neighbors, who loves and sympathizes, and enjoys their friendship, will be far less likely to give vent to acts of cruelty or malice than one who indulges in spiteful feelings, fault finding, and resentment. Our habitual thoughts and desires make us responsive to certain stimuli and indifferent to others. The words of our mouth and the meditations of our heart, as well as the trifling acts that we perform, in themselves however unimportant, have their subtle and accumulative influence in determining our momentous acts. The familiar case of the drinker who says, "This glass doesn't count" can be paralleled in every field of life. It pays to keep in moral training, to cultivate kindly and disciplined thoughts, to forbid ill natured and unworthy feelings, and self-indulgent dreams. Otherwise before we know it the barriers of resistance will crumble and we shall do what we had never supposed we should do, some act that is the fruit of our unregulated inner life. [Footnote: Cf. George Eliot in Romola: "Tito" (who, having posed as a rich and noble gentleman, being unexpectedly confronted with his plebeian father, on the spur of the moment disowned him with the merciless words, "Some madman, surely!") "Was experiencing that inexorable law of human souls, that we prepare ourselves for sudden deeds by the reiterated choice of good or evil that gradually determines character.">[ Can we say, with Kant, that the only good is the Good Will? It is not uncommon for instrumental goods to come to receive a homage greater than that which is paid to the ends they serve. It is notably and necessarily so with the various aspects of the concept of morality; virtue, conscience, goodness of character are actually more important for us to think about and aim for than the happiness to which they ultimately minister. But this apotheosis denial of its fundamentally instrumental value. As with the miser who rates his bank notes more highly than the goods he could purchase with them, an abstract moralist occasionally exalts the means at the expense of the end. We are told that only goodness counts; that its worth has nothing to do with its relation to happiness; that goodness would command our allegiance even if it brought nothing but misery in its train.
The best-known exponent of this blind worship of goodness is Kant. He writes, "A Good Will is good, not because of what it performs or effects, not by its aptness for the attainment of some proposed end, but simply by virtue of the volition; that is, it is good in itself Its fruitfulness or fruitlessness can neither add nor take away anything from this value … Moral worth … cannot lie anywhere but in the principle of the Will, without regard to the ends which can be attained by the action." [Footnote: The Metaphysic of Morality. To be found in Kant's Theory of Ethics, trans. by Abbott, pp. 10, 16.]
So far does Kant carry this worship of the idea of goodness that he separates it from the several virtues that make up goodness in the concrete and bows down before the resulting bare abstraction Good Will, the will to do good. This leads him to a curiously dehumanized position. Prudential acts, he declares, are obviously good in their consequences; they therefore deserve no praise; whatever one does calculatingly, with view to future results, has no moral worth. And on the other hand, whatever good acts one does instinctively, pushed on by animal impulses, including love and sympathy, deserve no praise and have no moral worth. It is only what one does from the single motive of desiring to do the right that awakens Kant's enthusiasm. "The preservation of one's own life, for instance, is a duty; but, as every one has a natural inclination to which most men usually devote to this object has no intrinsic value, nor the maxim from which they act any moral import." [Footnote: The Metaphysic of Morality, sec. I.] What shall we say to this?
(1) Kant's statements are a mere crystallization of an unanalyzed feeling; their plausibility rests upon our ingrained enthusiasm for goodness. But if that enthusiasm be challenged, how shall we justify it? How do we know that good will is good, unless we can see WHY it is good? Many other things appeal to our instincts as good; may not this particular judgment be mistaken, or may not all these other things be equally good with good will? Kant's Hebraic training is clearly revealed in his exaltation of good will; it reflects the practical Lebensweisheit we have learned from the Bible. To the Greek it would have been foolishness, fanaticism. We want not only good will, but wisdom, sympathy, skill, common sense. Also we want health, love, wives and children, friends, and congenial work. All of these things are part of the worth of life. What would it profit us if we lost all these and had only our good will! [Footnote: A reduction ad absurdum of the Kantian view may be found in Cardinal Newman's statement of the Catholic Christian view. "The Church holds that it were better for sun and moon to drop from heaven, for the earth to fall, and for all the many millions who are upon it to die of starvation in extremist agony, so far as temporal affliction goes, than that one soul, I will not say should be lost, but should commit one single venial sin, should tell one willful untruth, though it harmed no one, or steal one poor farthing without excuse." (Anglican Difficulties, p. 190.)] The valuation that ignores all natural goods but one is unreal, inhuman, fanatical; it leads when unchecked to the emasculated life of the anaemic mediaeval saint or anchorite. Kant's eloquent eulogy of good will appeals to one of our noblest impulses; but that impulse is as much in need of justification to the reason as any other, and it is only one of a number of equally healthy and justifiable natural preferences. Good will, the desire to do right, is perhaps, on the whole, IN THE EMERGENCY, a safer guide to trust than warm-blooded impulse or reasoned calculation. Moreover, it has a thin, precarious existence in most of us at best, and needs all the encouragement it can get. Practically, we need Kant's kind of sermonizing; we need to exalt abstract goodness and resist the appeal of immediate and sensuous goods. So Kant has been popular with earnest men more interested in right living than in theory. But as a theorist he is hopelessly inadequate.
(2) It is true that we admire good will without consideration of the effects it produces, and even when it leads to disaster. But if good will USUALLY led to disaster we should never have come to admire it. Chance enters into this world's happenings and often upsets the normal tendencies of acts. But we have to act in ways that may normally be expected to produce good results. And we have to admire and cherish that sort of action, in spite of the margin of loss. The admiration that we have come to feel for goodness is partly the result of social tradition, buttressing the code that in the long run works out to best advantage; and partly, of course, the spontaneous emotion that rises in us at the sight of courage, heroism, self-sacrifice, and the other spectacular virtues. But however naive or sophisticated a reaction it may be, its psychogenesis is perfectly intelligible, U and its existence is no proof of the supernal nature of the goodness of "good will."
(3) Kant argues as follows: "Nothing can possibly be conceived, in the world or out of it, which can be called good WITHOUT QUALIFICATION, except a good will." [Footnote: Op. cit, sec. I.] He goes on to show that wit, courage, perseverance, etc, are all bad if the will that makes use of them is bad as in the case of a criminal; while health, riches, honor, etc, may inspire pride or presumption, and so not be unmitigated thing that can in every case be called good.
But is this so? May not a man have good will and yet do much mischief? If courage, wit, etc, need to be employed by good will, so does good will need to be joined with common sense, knowledge, tact, and many other helpers. Good will is good only if it is sanely and wisely directed; else it may go with all sorts of fanaticism. If one says, "It is still good qua good will," we may reply, "Yes, but so are all goods; courage is always good qua courage, knowledge qua knowledge," etc. All harmless joys are good without qualification, and all goods whatever are good except as they get in the way of some greater good or lead to trouble.
(4) Kant's formula "good will" is ambiguous. OF COURSE a GOOD act of will is good; that is a mere tautology, and gives us no guidance whatever. Which acts of will ARE good is our problem. Kant, however, worked out his empty formula into a concrete maxim, "Act as if the maxim of thy action were to become by thy will a universal law of nature." But how should we WISH others to act in the given situation? It would be quite possible for a lustful man to be willing that unrestrained lust should be the general rule; he would be much more comfortable and freer if it were. There is nothing in the law of consistency to direct him; men might be consistently bad as well as consistently good. We have still no criterion, only an appeal to coolness, to detachment from hot impulses and selfishness.
Practically, what the Kantian viewpoint amounts to is an exaltation of conscience-a much more concrete (and variable) thing than this abstract formula. Do your duty, at any cost! Our hearts respond to such preaching, but our intellects remain perplexed, if the practical apotheosis of goodness is not supplemented by an adequate theoretic justification thereof.
What evils may go with conscientiousness?
At this point it may repay us to note more carefully the inadequacy of that mere blind conscientiousness which is the practical burden of the Kantian teaching. One would think that the only source of our troubles lay in our lack of desire to do right! As a matter of fact, there is a vast amount of good will in the world which effects no good, or does serious harm, for want of wise direction. Much of the tragedy of life consists of the clashes between wills equally consecrated and pure. Conscientious cranks and blunderers are perhaps even more of a nuisance than out-and-out villains; they hurt every good cause they espouse and bring noble ideals into ridicule; they provoke discouragement and cynicism. There is hardly a folly or a crime that has not been committed prayerfully and with a clear conscience; the saint and the criminal are sometimes psychologically indistinguishable indeed, by which name we call a fanatic may depend upon which side we are on. We may discriminate among the types of perverted conscience:
(1) The fanatical conscience, the meddling conscience, that feels a mission to stir up trouble. Under this head come the parents who interfere needlessly with their children's ways when different from their own, the breakers-up of love-affairs, the fault-finders, the militantly religious, all that great multitude of men who with prayer and tears have felt it their duty to override others' wills and impose their codes upon the world.
(2) The obstructive conscience, that has become set and will not suffer change. Here we can put all the earnest "stand-patters," who resist innovation of every sort. Slaves of the particular standards that they happen to have grown up in, unable to conceive that their individual brand of religion may not be the ultimate truth, horror-struck at the suggestion that we should forsake the ways of our fathers, their conscientious conservatism stands like a rock in the way of progress.
(3) The ascetic conscience, that overemphasizes the need of sacrifice, and deletes all the positive joy of life for the sake of freedom from possible pain. This particular misdirection of conscience is not prominent in contemporary life; but at certain periods, as among some of the mediaeval saints, or the early Puritans, this hypertrophy of conscience has been a serious blight.
(4) The anxious conscience, that magnifies trifles and gives us no rest with its incessant suggestions, lest we forget, lest we forget. This type of over conscientiousness is a form of unhealthy self consciousness, a bane to its possessor and a nuisance to every one within range.
These familiar evils that may go with the utmost good will show us that good will or conscientiousness is not enough. The conscientious man may not only leave undone important duties; his good will may lead him to push in exactly the wrong direction and do great harm. There are thus two ways of judging a man. First, did he do the best he knew? Did he live up to his conscience? Secondly, did he do what was really best? Was his conscience properly developed and directed? Our approval must often be divided; we may rate him high by the standard of conscientiousness, but low in his standard of morality. This is the familiar distinction between what is objectively right and what is subjectively right. An objectively right action is "one such that, if it be done, the total value of the universe will be at least as great as if any other possible alternative had been done by the agent"; whereas "it is subjectively right for the agent to do what he judges to be most probably objectively right on his information"-whether he judges correctly or not. [Footnote: C. D. Broad in International Journal of Ethics, vol. 24, pp. 316, 320.] It may then be right (in one sense) for a man to do an act which is wrong (in the other sense) [Footnote: Strictly speaking, there are four possible usages of the word "right": An act is right which (a) is actually going to have the best consequences; which (b) might be expected, on our best human knowledge, to have the best consequences; which (c) the actor, on his partial information, and with his partial powers of judgment, expects to have the best consequences; or which (d) his conscience approves, without reference to consequences.] What is the justification of praise and blame? Kant was expressing a familiar thought when he wrote that a man deserved no praise for either instinctive or calculating acts. Why should we praise a man for doing what he wants to do, what is the most natural and easy thing for him to do, or what he can foresee will bring about desirable consequences? Should we not praise only the man who fights his inclinations, does right when he does not want to, and without foresight of ultimate gain?
As a matter of fact, however, we do praise and admire and love the saints who do right easily and graciously. We do not refuse our admiration to Christ because it was his meat and drink, his deepest joy, to do his Father's work; nor do we imagine him as having to wrestle with inner devils of spitefulness and ill-temper. The type of character we rate highest is that from which all these lower impulses have been finally banished, the character that inevitably seeks the pure and the good. And on the other hand, as we have just seen, we often blame the man who, with the noblest intentions, and at great cost to himself, does what we consider wrong.
It is thus true that our reactions of praise and blame are complicated and inconsistent. We often praise a man and blame him at the same time; praise him for following his conscience, and blame him for having a narrow and distorted conscience to follow. Different people in a community will praise or blame him according as they consider this or that aspect of his conduct. What, then, is the rationale of these emotion-reactions?
Obviously, the same natural forces which have produced morality have, pari passu, produced these emotions; they are one of the great means by which men have been pushed into being moral. We praise people, ultimately, because it is socially useful to praise them; the approbation of one's fellows is one of the greatest possible incentives to right conduct. We blame people that they and others may be thereby deterred from wrongdoing. For ages these emotions have been arising in men's hearts, veering their fellows toward moral action. Neither blamer nor blamed has realized the purpose nature may be said to have had in view; the emotional reaction has been instinctive, like sneezing. But if it had not been for its eminent usefulness it would never have developed and become so deep-rooted in us. If blame did no good, if it did not tend to correct evildoing, it would be an unhappy and undesirable state of mind, to be weeded out, like malice or discouragement. Praise might be kept for its intrinsic worth, its agreeableness, like sweet odors and pleasant colors. But actually we need to conserve these reactions for their extrinsic value, as spurs and correctives.
The man who acts upon a calculated expectation of consequences is, indeed, to be praised, if the ends he has sought are good and his calculation correct. Prudence, foresight, thoughtfulness are among the most important virtues. On the other hand, the man who does right instinctively is to be most admired; for to reach that goal is the aim of much of our inner struggle. The approbation we heap upon him, if not needed to keep him up to his best, at least is beneficial to others, who thereby may be stimulated to imitate his goodness. Any sort of conduct that is in line with human welfare is to be praised and loved and sung, and kept before the minds of the young and plastic.
More deeply rooted, perhaps, than the disparagement of praise, is the compassionate revulsion from blame. "He meant well"; "His conscience is clear"; "How could he help sinning with such a bringing-up!" such pleas pull us up in the midst of our condemnation. And they must have their weight. Conscientiousness must be praised, while in the same breath we blame the folly or fanaticism it led to. And the visibly degrading effects of environment should make us tender toward the erring, even while, for their own sakes and the sake of others, we continue to blame the sin. Society cannot afford to overlook sin because it sees provocation for it. There is always provocation, there are always causes outside the sinner's heart. But there is also always a cause within the heart, an openness to temptation, and acquiescence in the evil impulse, which we must try to reach and influence by our blame and condemnation. No doubt in like circumstances we should do as badly, or worse. But to blame does not mean that we set ourselves up as of finer clay; it means only that we continue to use a weapon of great value for the advancement of human welfare. A man always "could have helped it" he could have if his inward aversion to the sin had been strong enough; and it is precisely because blame tends to make that aversion stronger in the sinner and in all who are aware of it, that we must employ it. Reward and punishment are the materialization of praise and blame and have the same uses. We reward and punish men not because in some unanalyzable sense they "deserve" it, but ultimately in order to foster noble and heroic acts and deter men from crime. The giving of rewards for good conduct has never been systematized (except for Carnegie medals, school prizes, and a few other cases), and the practical difficulties in the way are probably insuperable. Indeed, the natural outward rewards of fame, position, increased salary, etc, would be spur enough, if they could be made less capricious and more certain. But to restrain its members from injury to one another is so necessary to society, and so difficult, that elaborate systems of punishment have been used since prehistoric times. To a consideration of the contemporary problems concerning punishment we shall return at a later stage in our study.
What is responsibility?
There is one plea which exempts a person from blame- when we say he was not responsible. Responsibility means accountability, liability to blame and punishment. We do not hold accountable those classes whom it would do no good to blame or punish. Babies, the feeble minded, the insane, are not deterred by blame; hence we do not hold them responsible. Beyond these obvious exemptions there are all sorts of degrees of responsibility, carefully worked out in that branch of the law known as "torts." The principle upon which man has instinctively gone, and which the law now recognizes, in holding men accountable or, in other words, imputing responsibility-is the degree in which they might have been expected to foresee the consequences of their acts. The following set of cases will illustrate the principle:
(1) We do not hold a man responsible at all for unforeseeable results of his action. If because of turning his cows into pasture a passing dog gets excited and tramples a neighbor's flower-bed, the owner of the cows is not responsible for the damage; it would do no good to exact punishment for what was so indirectly and unexpectedly due to his action.
(2) But if his cows got over the wall and trampled the beds, he would be held responsible, in different degrees, according to the circumstances. If he had inspected the wall with eyes of experience and honestly thought it would keep the cows in, we deem him only slightly responsible. He could have done nothing more; yet he must learn more accurately to distinguish safe walls from unsafe. It is fairer for him to pay for the damage than for the owner of the flower- bed to suffer the loss; such risks must be assumed as a part of the business of keeping cows.
(3) If he was ignorant of the necessary height or strength of wall, we blame him more. He has no business-keeping cows until he knows all aspects of the business.
(4) If there was a gap in the wall which he would have noticed if he had taken ordinary care, we hold him still further to blame, and his punishment must be severer.
(5) If he remembered the gap in the wall and did not take the trouble to repair it, thereby consenting to the damage his cows might do, his case is still worse.
(6) Finally, if he deliberately turned the cows into his field with the hope that they would go through the gap and damage his neighbor's flower-beds, he is the most dangerous type of criminal, of "malice aforethought," and his punishment must be severest of all.
In such ways do we distinguish between traits of character more and more dangerous to society, and adjust our blame and punishment to their different degrees of danger, and the differing degrees of efficacy that the blame and punishment may have. But throughout these are purely utilitarian, an unhappy necessity for the preservation of human welfare.
On goodness of character: Dewey and Tufts, Ethics, chap. XII. F.
Paulsen, System of Ethics, book II, chap, I, secs. 3, 5. Leslie
Stephen, Science of Ethics, chap. VII.
The Kantian theory: Kant's Metaphysic of Morality. A good edition in English is Abbott's Kant's Theory of Ethics. There are many discussions of his theory. An interesting recent one is Felix Adler's, in Essays Philosophical and Psychological in Honor of William James; see also the chapter of Dewey and Tufts, Ethics, above mentioned; Paulsen, System of Ethics, book II, chap. V, secs. 3, 4; American Journal of Psychology, vol. 8, p. 528. On responsibility: Mezes, op. cit, pp. 29-35. Sutherland, op. cit, vol. II, chap. XVIII. Alexander, Moral Order and Progress, book III, chap, III, sec.
CHAPTER X
THE SOLUTION OF PERSONAL PROBLEMS
PERSONAL morality is the way to live the most desirable, the most intrinsically valuable, life-in the long run, and in view of the inescapable needs and conditions of human welfare; the way to avoid the snares and pitfalls of impulse and attain those sweetest goods that come only through effort and sacrifice of lesser goods. That is what morality is, with reference to the single individual alone, and that is ample justification for it. A recent writer phrases it as follows: "I would define goodness as doing what one would wish one had done in twenty years-twenty years, twenty days, twenty minutes, twenty seconds, according to the time the action takes to get ripe Perhaps when we stop teasing people and take goodness seriously. and calmly, and see that goodness is essentially imagination that it is brains, that it is thinking down through to what one really wants goodness will begin to be more coveted. Except among people with almost no brains or imagination at all, it will be popular." [Footnote: Gerald Stanley Lee. Cf. also G. Lowes Dickinson, The Meaning of Good, p. 141. Of morality he says: "Its specific quality consists in the refusal to seize some immediate and inferior good with a view to the attainment of one that is remoter but higher".] The difference between the moral and the immoral man is not that the latter allows himself to enjoy pleasant and exciting phases of experience which the former denies himself for the sake of some good lying outside of experience, but that the latter indulges himself in any agreeable sensation that he chances to desire, while the former conflict with greater, being content not with any goods that may come to hand, but only with the attainable best. [Footnote: Cf. G. Santayana, Reason in Science, pp. 252-53: "Happiness is hidden from a free and casual will; it belongs rather to one chastened by a long education and unfolded in an atmosphere of sacred and perfected institutions. It is discipline that renders men rational and capable of happiness, by suppressing without hatred what needs to be suppressed to attain a beautiful naturalness.">[ What are the inadequacies of instinct and impulse that necessitate morality? It would seem as if the best way to live should be obvious and irresistible in its appeal. But in truth we are commonly very blind and foolish about this business of living; we lack wisdom, and we lack motive-power at the right place. Instinct is altogether too clumsy and impulse too uncertain. We need a more delicate adjustment; for this, intelligence and conscience have been developed. Morality is the way of life that intelligence and conscience oppose to instinct and impulse. Not to be guided by their wisdom is to forfeit our birthright, like Esau, for a mere mess of pottage. Some of the main types of difficulty that necessitate their overruling guidance we may now note.
(1) Our impulses are often deceptive. What promises keen pleasure turns flat in the tasting; what threatens pain may prove our greatest joy. Most men are led astray at one time or other by some delusory good, some ignis fatuus-whoring, money-making, fame are among the commonest which has fascinated them, from the thought of which they cannot tear themselves away, but which brings no proportionate pleasure in realization, or an evanescent pleasure followed by lasting regret. "Pleasures are like poppies spread, You seize the flow'r, its bloom is shed".
All sorts of insidious consequences follow secretly in the train of innocent-seeming acts; the value of following a given impulse is complicated in many ways of which the impulse itself does not inform us. We are the frequent victims of a sort of inward mirage, and have to learn to discount our hopes and fears. Morality is the corrector of these false valuatiens; it discriminates for us between real and counterfeit goods, teaches us to discount the pictures of our imagination and see the gnawed bones on the beach where the sirens sing.
(2) Our impulses often clash. And since, as we have just said, the relative worth to us of the acts is not always accurately represented by the impulses, we need to stand off and compare them impartially. No single passion must be allowed to run amuck; the opposing voices, however feeble, must be heard. When desires are at loggerheads, when a deadlock of interests arises-an almost daily occurrence when life' is kept at a white heat-there must be some moderator, some governing power. Morality is the principle of coordination, the harmonizer, the arbitrator of conflicting claims.
(3) We often lack impulses which would add much to the worth of our lives; we are blind to all sorts of opportunities for rich and joyous living. We need to develop our latent needs, to expand our natures to their full potentiality, to learn to love many things we have not cared for. In general we ignore the joys that we have not ourselves experienced or imagined, and those which belong to a different realm from that of our temporary enthusiasms. A lovesick swain, an opium fiend, are utterly unable to respond to the lure of outdoor sport or the joy of the well-doing of work; these joys, though perhaps acknowledged as real possibilities for them, fail to attract their wills, touch no chord in them, have no influence on their choices. Morality is the great eye-opener and insistent reminder of ignored goods.
(4) We often have perverted impulses. We inherit disharmonies from other conditions of life, like the vermiform appendix and the many other vestigial organs which have come down to us only for harm. In general we inherit bodies and brains fairly well organized for our welfare; but there are still atavisms to be ruthlessly stamped out. The craving for stimulants or drugs, sexual perversions, kleptomania, pyromania, and the other manias, bad temper, jealousy- there is a good deal of the old Adam in us which is just wholly bad and to be utterly done away with; rebellious impulses that are hopelessly at war with our own good and must go the way of cannibalism and polygamy. Morality is the stern exterminator of all such enemies of human welfare.
What factors are to be considered in estimating the worth of personal moral ideals?
This summary consideration of the obstacles that block the path to happiness through the heedless following of impulse, shows the necessity of moral ideals; that is to say, of directive codes which shall steer the will through the tumultuous seas of haphazard desire into the harbor of its true welfare. How, then, can we decide between conflicting ideals and estimate their relative value? It can only be by judging through experience the degree of happiness which they severally effect in the situations to which they are to be applied. But there are many factors which contribute to or detract from that happiness in its totality; and a proper estimation of ideals must note the degree in which they provide for each possible element of satisfaction.
(1) In the first place, the mere fact of yielding to an impulse, of whatever sort, brings a relief from craving, and a momentary satisfaction. Just to do what we wish to do is, negatively at least, a good; and in so far every act desired is really desirable. An ideal which crosses inclination must have this initial price debited against it. At times the restlessness of pent-up longing is so great that it pays to gratify it even at some cost of pain or loss. But in general, desire can be modified to fit need; and rational ideals rather than silly wishes must guide us. It is dangerous to lay much stress on the urgency of desire, and almost always possible with a little firmness to hush the blind yearning and replace it with more ultimately satisfying desires.
(2) Normally, however, our desires represent real goods, which must bulk much larger in our calculation than the mere relief of yielding to the impulse. Not only is it ipso facto good to have what we want, but what we want is usually something that can directly or indirectly give us pleasure. The pleasure, then, to be attained through following this or that impulse is to be estimated, both in its intensity and its duration. The certainty or uncertainty of its attainment may also legitimately be considered. And this pleasure, though it is but one phase of the total situation, must be taken seriously into account in our appraisal of ideals which permit or forbid it.
(3) A further question is as to the purity of this pleasure, i.e, its freedom from mixture with pain. Most selfish and sensual pleasures, however keen, are so interwoven with restlessness, shame, or dissatisfaction, or so inevitably accompanied by a revulsion of feeling, disgust or loathing, that they must be sharply discounted in our calculus. Whereas intellectual, aesthetic, religious pleasures are generally free from such intermixture of pain, and so, though milder, on the whole preferable even in their immediacy and apart from ultimate consequences.
(4) But the most imperious need of life lies in the tracing-out and paying heed to these extrinsic values, these after effects of conduct. The drinking of alcoholic liquors, for example, not only stills a craving that arises in a man's mind, not only brings pleasure of taste and comfort of oblivion, not only brings the quick revulsion of emotional staleness and headache, but has its gradual and inevitable effects in undermining the constitution, lessening the power of resistance to disease, and decreasing the vitality of offspring. Quite commonly these ultimate consequences are the most important, and so the determining, factors in deciding our ideals. Among them may be included the influence of single acts in increasing or decreasing the power to resist future temptations, and the gradual paralysis of the will through unchecked self-indulgence.
(5) Another important aspect of any moral situation lies in the rejection which every choice involves. Not only must we ask what a given impulse has to offer us, in immediate and remote satisfaction; we must consider what alternative goods its adoption precludes. What might we have been doing with our time and strength or money? Is this act not only a good one, is it the best one for that moment of our lives? An important function of ideals is to point us to realms of happiness into which our preexisting impulses might never have led us, and whose existence we might scarcely have suspected.
(6) Finally, we may ask of every proposed line of conduct, what will be its worth to us in memory? Not only in our leisure hours, but in a current of subconscious reflection that accompanies our active life, we constantly live in the presence of our past. And the nature of memory is such that it cannot well retain the traces of certain of our keenest pleasures, but can continually feed us upon other joys of our past. It is imperative, then, for a happy life, so to live that the years are pleasant to look back upon. Vicious self-indulgence and selfishness are rarely satisfying in retrospection, whereas all courage and heroism and tenderness are a source of unending comfort. For better or worse, we are, and cannot shirk being, judges of our own conduct. We may be prejudiced, and may properly try to correct our prejudices; we may discount our own disapprovals, and seek to escape from our own self- condemnation. But after all, we must live with ourselves; and it pays to aim to please not only the evanescent impulses whose disapproval will soon be forgotten, but that more deeply rooted and insistent judgment that cannot wholly be stilled. Regret and remorse are among the greatest poisoners of happiness, and prospective ideals must bear that truth in mind. "No matter what other elements in any moment of consciousness may tend to give it agreeable tone, if there is not the element of approval, there is not yet any deep, wide, and lasting pleasantness for consciousness. A flash of light here, a casual word there, and it is gone. "Just when we are safest, there's a sunset- touch; A fancy from a flower-bell, some one's death, A chorus ending from Euripides, And that's enough" to bring the shock of disapproval, and with it disagreeable feeling- tone continues till disapproval is removed or approval is won. If there be won this approval, other elements of disagreeableness, however great, can be endured. The massive movement of the complex unified consciousness of a Socrates drinking hemlock, of a Jesus dying on the cross, whatever strong eddies of pain there be in it, is still toned agreeably, as it makes head conqueringly toward that end which each has ideally constructed as fit." [Footnote: H. G. Lord, in Essays Philosophical and Psychological in Honor of William James, p. 388-89.] No reference has been made, in this summary of the factors which determine our estimate of the worth of personal ideals, to the bearing of these ideals upon other people's lives. Actually, of course, the social values of even primarily personal ideals are impossible to overlook, and often bulk larger than the merely personal values. This whole side of the matter will be left for convenience, however, to the following chapter.
Epicureanism vs. Puritanism.
Personal ideals have swung historically between two magnets, richness and purity, self-expression and self-repression, indulgence and asceticism. The crux of the individual's problem is the question how much repression is necessary; and man's answer has wavered somewhere between these extremes, which we may designate by the names of their best-known exemplars, Epicureanism and Puritanism. Many differences in degree or detail there have been, of course, in the various historic embodiments of these ideals; but for the sake of making clear the fundamental contrast we may neglect these individual divergences and group together those on the one hand who have called men to a fuller, completer life and those who have summoned them to an austerer and purer life, free from taint of sin and regret. We shall then put in the first group such well-known seers and poets as Epicurus, Lucretius, Horace, Goethe, Shelley, Byron, Walter Pater, Walt Whitman; we shall think of the Greek gods, of the Renaissance artists, the English cavaliers. We shall think of the motto, "Carpe diem," and "Gather ye rosebuds while ye may"; and perhaps of Stevenson's
"The world is so full of a number of things, I'm sure we should all be as happy as kings." [Footnote: An excellent brief plea for this ideal of the life that shall be rich in experience can be found in Walter Pater's Renaissance, the "Conclusion.">[ In contrast to these followers are afraid of impulse, those who warn and rebuke and seek to save life from its pitfalls. We shall think of Buddha, the Stoics, the Hebrew prophets, the mediaeval saints, Dante and Savonarola, the English and American Puritans, or, in modern times, of Tolstoy. The ideal of such men is expressed not by the wholesomely happy and carefree Greek gods, but by haloed saint, by the calm-eyed Buddha of Eastern lands, by the figure of Christ on the cross. The answer to the Epicurean's heedlessness is expressed in such lines as "What is this world's delight? Lightning that mocks the night, Brief even as bright."
It is condensed in the familiar "Respice finem"; the peace of its self- denial shines out in Christ's "Not my will but thine," and in Dante's "In His will is our peace." Meager and cold and repellent as this ideal in its extreme expressions often seems, it appeals to us as the softer and irresponsible ideal of the Epicureans cannot. But obviously our way lies between the extremes. And after all that has now been said, our summary of the dangers inherent in each ideal may be very brief.
What are the evils in undue self-indulgence?
Apart from the selfishness of self-indulgence, which is obvious upon the surface, but with which we are not now concerned,
(1) Self-indulgence, if unbridled, leads almost inevitably to pain, disease, and premature death. For in the majority of men there are certain instincts so strong and so dangerous -as, the sex-instinct, the craving for stimulants and excitement-that where no repressive principle exists they tend to override the grumblings of prudence and drag their possessor to disaster. It is impossible for most men, if they give themselves over to the pursuit of personal pleasure, to keep to the quiet, refined, healthful pleasures which Epicurus advocated. Their feet go down to death.
(2) But even if the worst penalties are escaped, indulgence brings at least satiety, the "heart high cloyed," a blunted capacity for enjoyment, ennui, restlessness, and depression of spirit. Keen as its zest may be at the outset, it is short-lived at best; and with the ensuing emotional fatigue, pleasures pall, life seems empty, robbed of its meaning and glory.
(3) Moreover, pleasure-seeking is cursed with the specter of aimlessness; it entirely misses the deepest and most satisfying joys of life, the joy of healthy, unspent forces and desires, the joy of purpose and achievement, the joy of the pure, disciplined, loyal life. It renders these joys unattainable; we cannot serve God and sense, ideals and lusts of the flesh. The parting of the ways lies before every man; and it is the perennial tragedy of life that so many, misled by impulse and blinded by desire, fail to see the beauty of holiness and choose the lesser good.
(4) Especially as we grow older does it matter less and less what evanescent enjoyments we have had, and more and more what we have accomplished. Our happiness lies increasingly with the years in the memory, subconscious most of the time but constantly potent in its influence, of our past. To have gratified the senses, to have tasted the superficial delights of life, to have yielded to the tug of desire, leaves little in the way of satisfaction behind; but to have done something worthy, to have lived nobly, even to have fought and failed, is a lasting honor and joy.
What are the evils in undue self-repression?
Asceticism, like self-indulgence, is selfish. It asks, "What shall I do to be saved?" rather than "What shall I do to serve?" Endlessly preoccupied with the endeavor not to do wrong, the ascetics have failed to do the positive good they ought. The grime that comes through loving service is better than the stainlessness of inactivity; as the poet Spenser puts it, "Entire affection hateth nicer hands." And the emphasis upon freedom from taint of sin tends to produce a scorn of others who do not thus deny themselves, a self-righteousness and Pharisaism, a callousness to others, which distorts the judgment as well as dries up the sympathies.
But apart from these dangers, and from a purely personal point of view, asceticism has its evil side.
(1) An overemphasis upon self-denial sacrifices unnecessarily the sweetness and richness of life, stunts it, distorts it, robs it of its natural fruition. The denial of any satisfaction is cruel except as it is necessary. Purity, carried to a needless extreme, became celibacy; the virtue of frugality became the vice of a starvation diet, producing the emaciated and weakened saints; the unworldliness which can be in the world but not of it was transformed into the morbidly lonely and futile isolation of the hermits. These are abnormal and undesirable perversions of human nature.
(2) A reaction from needless repression is almost inevitable. The attempt radically to alter and repress human nature is nearly always disastrous. Most of the ascetics had to pass their days in constant struggles against their temptations, and many of them recurrently lapsed into wild orgies of sin, the result of pent-up impulses denied their natural channels. Morality should be rather directive than repressive, using all of our energies for wise and noble ends, and overcoming evil with good. A merely negative morality implies the continual dwelling of attention upon sin and the continual rebellion of desire. It keeps the soul in a state of unstable equilibrium, and defeats its own ends.
R. B. Perry, Moral Economy, chap, II, secs, II, III; chap, III, secs, II, III, IV. F. Paulsen, System of Ethics, book III, chap. II. S. E. Mezes, Ethics, chap, X, XI, Dewey and Tufts, Ethics, chap, XVIII, secs. 1, 2, 4; chap, XIX, sees. 1, 2, 4. Matthew Arnold, Culture and Anarchy, chap. IV. H. C. King, Rational Living, pp. 93-102. W. dew. Hyde, The Five Great Philosophies of Life, chaps, I-IV. H. Bashdall, Theory of Good and Evil, book II, chap. III.
CHAPTER XI
THE SOLUTION OP SOCIAL PROBLEMS
DUTY, like charity, begins at home; and we need to take the motes out of our own eyes before we can see clearly how to help our fellows. To keep physically well, pure, and prudent, following worthy purposes and smothering unruly desires, is our first business; and there would be much less to do for one another if every one did his duty by himself.
But even with our best endeavors we need a helping hand now and then, and, indeed, are continuously dependent upon the work and kindness of others for all that makes life tolerable, or even possible. And the other side to this truth is that we are never free from the obligation of doing our duty squarely by those whose welfare is in some degree dependent upon us. No man can, if he would, live to himself alone; life is necessarily and essentially social. Personal and social duties are so inextricably interwoven that it is impossible except by an artificial abstraction to separate them. The cultivation of one's own health, for example, is a boon to the community; and to care for the community's health is to safeguard one's own. Every advance in personal purity, culture, or self-control increases the individual's value and diminishes his menace to his fellows; while every step in social amelioration makes life freer and more comfortable for him. So close- knit is society today that an indifference to sanitation in Asia or a religious persecution in Russia may produce disastrous results to some innocent and utterly indifferent individual in Massachusetts or California. On the other hand, there is no vice so solitary and so can widespread social results. [Footnote: Cf. George Eliot in Adam Bede: "There is no sort of wrong deed of which a man can bear the punishment alone. Men's lives are as thoroughly blended as the air they breathe; evil spreads as necessarily as disease.">[ Society has a vital interest in the personal life of its members, and every member, however self- contained he may be, has a vital interest in the general standards of morality. For purposes of analysis, however, it is convenient to make the distinction between the two aspects of morality, the governance of intra-human and of inter-human relations; the ordering of the single life and the ordering of the community life. Of the two the latter is even more imperative than the former, the arbitration of clashes between individuals even more difficult than the governing of the impulses within a single heart. We turn, therefore, to consider the problems involved in the general conception of social morality, which we may define as the direction of the action of each toward the greatest attainable welfare of all. Why should we be altruistic? That altruism (action directed toward others' welfare) is best for the community as a whole is obvious. In order to maintain his life in the face of the many obstacles that thwart and dangers that threaten him, man must present a solid front to the universe. All clashes of interest, friction, and civil strife, all withholding of help, means a weakening of his united forces, an invitation to disaster. And even where life becomes relatively secure and individualism possible, the greatest good for the greatest number is attainable only by continual cooperation and mutual sacrifice. So vital is it to each member of the community that selfishness and cruelty in others be repressed, that society cannot afford to leave at least the grosser forms of egoism unpunished. Men must enforce upon one another that mutual regard which individuals are constantly tempted to ignore, but without which no man's life can find its adequate fulfillment or security. No man, then, can be called moral, can be said to have found a comprehensive solution of life, however self-controlled and pure he may be, if he is cruel, or even lacking in consideration for others. This is the most glaring defect in both Epicureanism and asceticism; both are fundamentally selfish. For the proper adjustment of life to its needs we must turn rather to Christianity, or to Buddhism, with their ideals of service; to the patriotic ideals of the noblest Greeks; to Kant, with his "So act as to treat humanity, whether in their own person or in that of any other, as an end, never as a means only"; or to the British utilitarians with their "Every one to count for one, and only one." The question, however, persistently recurs, Why should the INDIVIDUAL be altruistic? What does HE get out of it? To this we may reply:
(1) The life of service is, in normal cases, a happier life in itself than the life that is preoccupied with self. It is richer, fuller in potentialities of joy; it is freer from regrets and the eventual emptiness of the self-centered life. [Footnote: Cf. Mill, Utilitarianism, chap. 2: "When people who are tolerably fortunate in their outward lot do not find in life sufficient enjoyment to make it valuable to them, the cause generally is, caring for nobody but themselves.">[ It is saner, less likely to be veered off on some tangent of morbid and ultimately disastrous indulgence
(2) The altruistic life earns the gratitude and love of others, while the selfish life remains isolated, unloved, without their stimulus and help. Ingratitude there is, of course, and the returning of evil for good; on the other hand, the selfish man may hope for undeserved forgiveness and even love from his fellows. But in the long run it pays to be good to others; bread cast upon the waters does return after many days; normally unkindness provokes dislike, contempt, open hostility, retaliation, while kindness finds a natural and proper reward in return favors, esteem, and affection. No man can tell when he will be in need of sympathy or of aid; it is folly so to live as to forfeit our fellows' good will. And finally, selfishness carried beyond a certain point brings the penalty not only of the unfavorable opinion and private retaliations of others, but of the publicly enforced law. "In normal cases," we have said. And we must add that there are cases though they are less common than we are apt to suppose in which the good of the individual is hopelessly at variance with that of the community. If our fellows could be counted on for a fair reciprocity of self-denial and service, we should not begrudge these necessary sacrifices. The sting lies not so much in the loss of personal pleasures as in the lack of appreciation and return; to do our part when others are not doing theirs takes, indeed, a touch of saintliness. Socrates drinking the hemlock, Jesus dying in agony on the cross, Regulus returning to be tortured at Carthage, were deliberately sacrificing their personal welfare for the good of other men. And in numberless ways a host of heroic men and women have practiced and are daily practicing unrewarded self-denial in the name of love and service, self-denial which by no means always brings a joy commensurate with the pain. These are the abnormal cases; but the abnormal is, after all, not so very uncommon. And for these men and women we must grieve, while we honor and admire them and hold them up for imitation. Society must insist on just such sacrifices when they are necessary for the good of the whole, and must so train its youth that they will be willing to make them when needful.
What is the exact meaning of selfishness and unselfishness?
Selfishness is the pursuance of one's own good at the expense of others. A mistaken idea, which it is necessary to guard against, is that selfishness must be conscious, deliberate. It is not uncommon for a person accused of selfishness to say, or think, "This is an unjust accusation; I have not had a selfish thought!" But unconscious selfishness is by far the commoner sort; millions of essentially good- hearted people are guilty of selfish acts through thoughtlessness and stagnant sympathy. Conscious cruelty is rare compared with moral insensibility. It cannot be too often repeated that selfishness is not a way of feeling about people, it is a way of acting toward them. To be wholly free from selfish conduct necessitates insight into the needs and feelings of others as well as a vague good will toward them. The girl who allows her mother to drudge that she may have immaculate clothes, the mother who keeps her son at home when he ought to be given the opportunity of a wider life, is conscious only of love; but she is really putting her own happiness before that of the loved one. The owner of the vilest tenement houses is sometimes a generous and benevolent-minded man, the luxuriously rich are often honest and glad to confer favors, the political boss is full of the milk of human kindness; but the superficial or adventitious altruism of such men should not blind us to their fundamental, though often entirely unrealized, selfishness. A complementary fallacy is that which denies the epithet "unselfish" to a man who enjoys helping others. Who has not heard the cynical remark, "There's nothing unselfish about So-and-So's benevolence that is his enjoyment in life!" Such a comment ignores the fact that the goal of moral progress lies precisely at the point where we shall all enjoy doing what it is our duty to do. Altruistic impulses are our own impulses, as well as egoistic ones; the distinction between them lies not in the pleasure they may give to their possessor, or the sacrifice they may demand, but in the objective results they tend to attain. Happy is the man whose DELIGHT is in the law of the Lord! Unselfish action is, in the broader sense, all action that is not selfish; in the narrower and positive sense, it is all action that tends to the welfare of others at the expense of the narrower interests of the individual.
Are altruistic impulses always right?
It would be an easy solution for our problems if we could say, "In every case follow the altruistic impulse." But this simplification is impossible; the ideal of service is not such an Open Sesame to our duty. And this for several reasons:
(1) There are frequently clashes between altruistic impulses. In fact, almost all moral errors have some unselfish impulse on their side which helps to justify them in the eyes of the sinner and his friends. The politician who gets the best jobs for his supporters, the legislator who puts through a special statute to favor his constituents, the jingo who helps push his country into war for its "honor" or "glory"-these and a host of other wrongdoers are conscious of a genuine altruistic glow. They ignore the fact that they are doing, on the whole, more harm than good to others, because the smaller group that is apparently benefited looms larger to the eye than the more widely distributed and less directly affected sufferers.