Handbook of Ethical Theory - George Stuart Fullerton (chrome ebook reader txt) 📗
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Kant’s maxim needs a vast amount of interpretation. As it stands, it is little more than an empty formula. What I can wish to be the law of the universe must depend very much upon what I am. The lion and the lamb do not thirst for the same law. To the quarrelsome heroes of Walhalla a world of perpetual fighting and feasting must seem a very good world, in spite of knocks received as well as given. Kant’s fundamental maxim scarcely appears to be a moral rule at all, unless we make it read: “Act on a maxim which a wise and good man can will to be a universal law.” But how decide who is the wise and good man?
The philosophical intuitionist who accepts more than one ultimate moral rule must face the possibility that he will meet with a conflict of the higher intuitions to which he has had recourse. Shall his intuitions be those recommending a rational self-interest and a rational benevolence? Can he be sure that the two are necessarily in accord? Can there be a rational adjustment of the claims of each? Not if there be no court of appeal to which both intuitions are subject. [Footnote: With his usual candor, SIDGWICK admits this difficulty. He leaves it unresolved. See, The Methods of Ethics, in the concluding chapter.]
Furthermore, between the philosophical and the dogmatic intuitionist serious differences of opinion may be expected to arise. He who makes, let us say, benevolence the supreme law naturally allows to other intuitions, such as justice and veracity, but a derivative authority. It appears, then, that there may be occasions on which they are not valid. To some famous intuitionists this has seemed to be a pernicious doctrine.
“We are,” writes Bishop Butler, “constituted so as to condemn falsehood, unprovoked violence, injustice, and to approve of benevolence to some preferably to others, abstracted from all consideration, which conduct is likeliest to produce an overbalance of happiness or misery.” [Footnote: Dissertations appended to the “Analogy,” II, Of the Nature of Virtue. Cf. DUGALD STEWART, Outlines of Moral Philosophy, Part 2, Sec 348.]
Butler thought that justice should be done though the heavens fall; the philosophical intuitionist must maintain that the danger of bringing down the heavens is never to be lost sight of. But this doctrine that there are intuitions and intuitions, some ultimately authoritative and others not so, raises the whole question of the validity of intuitions. How are we to distinguish those that are always valid from others? By intuition? Intuition appears to be discredited. And if it is proper to demand proof that justice should be done and the truth spoken, why may one not demand proof that men should be prudent and benevolent? One may talk of “an immediate discernment of the nature of things by the understanding” in the one case as in the other. If error is possible there, why not here?
94. THE VALUE OF MORAL INTUITIONS.—It would not be fair to close this chapter on intuitionism, an ethical theory competing with others for our approval, without emphasizing the value of the role played by the moral intuitions.
They are the very guide of life, and without them our reasonings would be of little service. They should be treated gently, gratefully, with reverence. To them human societies owe their stability, their capacity for an orderly development, the smooth working of the machinery of daily life. Their presence does not exclude the employment of reasoning, but they furnish a basis upon which the reason can occupy itself with profit. They are a safeguard against those utopian schemes which would shatter our world and try experiments in creation out of nothing.
Nevertheless, he who busies himself with ethics as science must study them critically and strive to estimate justly their true significance. He may come to regard them, not as something fixed and changeless, but as living and developing, coming into being, and modifying themselves, in the service of life. Does he dishonor them who so views them?
95. WHAT IS EGOISM?—Egoism has been defined as “any ethical system in which the happiness or good of the individual is made the main criterion of moral action,” [Footnote: Encyclopedia Britannica, 11th edition.] or as “the doing or seeking of that which affords pleasure or advantage to oneself, in distinction to that which affords pleasure or advantage to others.” [Footnote: Century Dictionary.]
It may strike the average reader as odd to be told that such definitions bristle with ambiguities, and that it is by no means easy to draw a sharp line between doctrines which everyone would admit to be egoistic, and others which seem more doubtfully to fall under that head. “Happiness,” “good,” “advantage,” “self,” all are terms which call for scrutiny, and which set pitfalls for the unwary.
96. CRASS EGOISMS.—We may best approach the subject of what may properly be regarded as constituting egoism, by turning first to one or two “terrible examples.”
No one would hesitate to call egoistic the doctrine of Aristippus, the Cyrenaic, the errant disciple of Socrates. He made pleasure the end of life, and taught that it might be sought without a greater regard to customary morality than was made prudent by the penalties to be feared as a consequence of its violation. Where the centre of gravity of the system of the Cyrenaics falls is evident from their holding that “corporeal pleasures are superior to mental ones,” and that “a friend is desirable for the use which we can make of him.” [Footnote: Diogenes Laertius, Lives of the Philosophers, “Aristippus,” viii.]
The doctrine of the English philosopher, Thomas Hobbes, is as unequivocally egoistic.
“Of the voluntary acts of every man,” he writes, [Footnote: Leviathan, Part I, xiv.] “the object is some good to himself;” and again, [Footnote Ibid. xv.] “no man giveth, but with intention of good to himself; because gift is voluntary; and of all voluntary acts the object is to every man his own good.”
He leaves us in no doubt as to the sort of good which he conceives men to seek when they practice what has the appearance of generosity. Contract he calls a mutual transference of rights, and he distinguishes gift from contract as follows:
“When the transferring of right is not mutual, but one of the parties transferreth, in hope to gain thereby friendship, or service from another, or from his friends, or in hope to gain the reputation of charity or magnanimity, or to deliver his mind from the pain of compassion, or in hope of reward in heaven, this is not contract but gift, free gift, grace, which words signify the same thing.” [Footnote: Ibid. I, xiv. The italics are mine. It was thus that Hobbes accounted for his giving a sixpence to a beggar: “I was in pain to consider the miserable condition of the old man; and now my alms, giving him some relief, doth also ease me.” Hobbes, by G. C. ROBERTSON, Edinburgh, 1886, p. 206.]
There is a passage from the pen of the British divine, Paley, which appears to merit a place alongside of the citations from Hobbes, widely as the men differ in many of their views. It reads:
“We can be obliged to nothing but what we ourselves are to gain or lose something by; for nothing else can be a ‘violent motion’ to us. As we should not be obliged to obey the laws, or the magistrate, unless rewards or punishments, pleasure or pain, somehow or other, depended upon our obedience; so neither should we, without the same reason, be obliged to do what is right, to practice virtue, or to obey the commandments of God.” [Footnote: Moral Philosophy, Book II, chapter ii.]
97. EQUIVOCAL EGOISM?—The above is unquestionably egoism. The man who accepts such a doctrine and consistently walks in the light must be set down as self-seeking. But self-seeking, as understood by different men, appears to take on different aspects. Shall we class all those who frankly accept it as man’s only ultimate motive with Aristippus and Epicurus and Hobbes?
Thomas Hill Green writes: “Anything conceived as good in such a way that the agent acts for the sake of it, must be conceived as his own good.” [Footnote: Prolegomena to Ethics, Sec 92.] The motive to action is, he maintains, always “some idea of the man’s personal good.” [Footnote: Sec Sec 95, 97.] He does not hesitate to say that a man necessarily lives for himself; [Footnote: Sec 138.] and he calls “the human self or the man” [Footnote: Sec 99.] a self-seeking ego, a self-seeking subject, and a self-seeking person. [Footnote: Sec Sec 98, 100, 145.]
Were Green’s book a lost work, only preserved to the memories of men by such citations as the above, the author would certainly be relegated to a class of moralists with which he had, in fact, little sympathy.
But the book is not lost, and by turning to it we find Green continuing the first of the above citations with the words: “Though he may conceive it as his own good only on account of his interest in others, and in spite of any amount of suffering on his own part incidental to its attainment.” He is willing to grant the self-seeking ego an eye single to its own interests, but he is careful to explain that: “These are not merely interests dependent on other persons for the means to their gratification, but interests in the good of those other persons, interests which cannot be satisfied without the consciousness that those other persons are satisfied.” [Footnote: Sec 199.]
When Hobbes gave an account of “the passions that incline men to peace,” [Footnote: Leviathan, I, xiii.] he made no mention of the social nature of man. That nature Green conceives to be so essentially social that the individual cannot disentangle his own good from the good of his fellows. To live “for himself,” since that self is a social self, means to live for others. May this fairly be called egoistic doctrine?
98. WHAT IS MEANT BY THE SELF?—It is sufficiently clear that the happiness, or good, or advantage, or interests of the individual or self may mean many things. It is equally clear that in our interpretation of all such terms our notions of the nature of the self will play no inconsiderable role. What is the self?
In his famous chapter on the Consciousness of Self, [Footnote: Psychology, New York, 1890, I, chapter x.] William James enumerates four senses of the word. With three of these we may profitably occupy ourselves here. He calls them the Material Self, the Social Self and the Spiritual Self.
The innermost part of the material self he makes our body, and next to it, in their order, he places our clothes, our family, our home, and our property. They contribute to our being what we are in our own eyes, we identify ourselves with them, and we experience “a sense of the shrinkage of our personality” when even the more outlying elements, such as our possessions, are lost. “Our immediate family,” he writes, “is a part of ourselves. Our father and mother, our wife and babes, are bone of our bone and flesh of our flesh. When they die, a part of our very selves is gone. If they do anything wrong, it is our shame. If they are insulted, our anger flashes forth as readily as if we stood in their place.”
It is obvious that the limits of the material self, as above understood, may be indefinitely extended. There are men who feel about their country as the average normal man feels about his home; and doubtless the suffering of a stray beggar tugged at the heart of St. Francis
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