Handbook of Ethical Theory - George Stuart Fullerton (chrome ebook reader txt) 📗

form of the fundamental rule is developed: “Treat humanity, in yourself or any other, as an end always, and never as a means.” [Footnote: Fundamental Principles of the Metaphysic of Morals, Sec 2.]

Now Kant, although he maintains that it is not a man’s duty to seek his own happiness—a thing which natural inclination would prompt him to do— by no means overlooks happiness altogether. He thinks that virtue and happiness together constitute the whole and perfect good desired by rational beings. The attainment of this good must be the supreme end of a will morally determined. [Footnote: Dialectic of the Pure Practical Reason, chapter ii.] We are morally bound to strive to be virtuous ourselves and to make others happy.

Still, each man’s happiness means much to him; and Kant, convinced that virtue ought to be rewarded with happiness, holds that our world is a moral world, where God will reward the virtuous. If we do not assume such a world, he claims, moral laws are reduced to idle dreams. [Footnote: Ibid.]

Such utterances as the last may well lead the utilitarian to question whether Kant was quite whole-hearted in his doctrine of the unconditional commands of the practical reason of man. They appear to be not independent of all consideration of human happiness.

I shall not ask whether Kant was consistent. Great men, like lesser men, seldom are. But, in order that the contrast between his doctrine and those of the two writers whom I shall next discuss may be brought out clearly, I shall ask that the following points be kept well in mind:

(1) Kant was an out-and-out intuitionist. He goes directly to the practical reason of man for an enunciation of the moral law.

(2) Moral rules of lesser generality, such as those touching benevolence, justice and veracity, he traces to the practical reason, making them independent of all considerations of expediency. Thus he defends the body of moral truth accepted by so many of his fellow-moralists.

(3) His “practical reason” speaks directly to the individual. Kant looked within, not without. We may call him an ethical individualist. Socrates, when on trial for his life, listened for the voice of the divinity within him. He needed no other.

137. HEGEL.—In strongest contrast to the individualism of Kant stands the doctrine of Hegel. To the latter, duty consists in the realization of the free reasonable will—but this will is identical in all individuals, [Footnote: The Philosophy of Right, Sec 209] and its realization reveals itself in the customs, laws and institutions of the state. From this point of view the individual is an accidental thing; the ethical order revealed in society is permanent, and has absolute authority. It is true, however, that it is not something foreign to the individual; he is conscious of it as his own being. In duty he finds his liberation. [Footnote: Ibid., Sec Sec 145-149]

But what is a man’s duty? “What a man ought to do,” says Hegel, [Footnote: Ibid., Sec 150] “what duties he should fulfill in order to be virtuous, is in an ethical community easy to say—the man has only to do what is presented, expressed and recognized in the established relations in which he finds himself.”

In other words, he ought to do just what his community prescribes! This seems, taken quite literally, a startling doctrine.

It would be a wrong to Hegel to take him quite literally, for he elsewhere [Footnote: Ibid., Introduction.] makes it plain that he by no means approves of all the laws and customs that have obtained in various societies. Still, he exalts the law of the state and regards any opposition to it on the authority of private conviction as “stupendous presumption.” [Footnote: Op. cit., Sec 138.] This is a serious rebuke to the reformer. The individual must, according to Hegel, look for the moral law outside of himself—of himself as an individual, at least. He must find it in the State.

138. NIETZSCHE.—Again a startling contrast: after Hegel, Nietzsche—the voice of one crying in the wilderness, exquisitely, passionately, but scarcely with articulate scientific utterance. A prophet of revolt and emancipation; a cave-dweller, who would flee organized society and the refinements of civilization; the rabid individualist, to whom the community is the “herd,” and common notions of right and wrong are absurdities to be visited with scorn and denunciation. He makes a strong appeal to young men, even after the years during which the carrying of one’s own latch-key is a source of elation. He appeals also to those perennially young persons who never attain to the stature which befits those who are to take a responsible share in the organized efforts of communities of men.

With Nietzsche the man, his suffering life, and the melancholy eclipse of his brilliant intellect, ethics as science is little concerned. In Nietzsche the marvellous literary artist it can have no interest. These things are the affair of literature and biography.

Here we are concerned only with his contribution to ethics. Just what that has been it is more difficult to determine than would be the case in a writer more systematic and scientific. But he makes it very clear that he repudiates the morals which have been accepted heretofore by moralists and communities of men generally.

He confesses himself an “immoralist.” He despises man as he is, and hails the “Superman,” a creature inspired by the “will to have power” and free from all moral prejudices, including that of sympathy with the weak and the helpless.

“Full is the world of the superfluous,” he sings in his famous dithyramb, [Footnote: Thus Spake Zarathustra, I, xi. It is a pity to read NIETZSCHE in any translation. His diction is exquisite. But those who can only read him in English may be referred to the translations of his works edited by LEVY. New York, 1911.] “marred is life by the many-too- many.”… “Many too many are born; for the superfluous ones was the State devised.”…“There, where the State ceaseth—there only commenceth the man who is not superfluous.”

Man, says Nietzsche, should regard himself as a “bridge” over which he can pass to something higher. [Footnote: Ibid., Prologue, and I, IV, XI, et passim.] Upon the fact that the Superman may have the same reason for regarding himself as a “bridge” as the most commonplace of mortals, and may begin anew with loathing and self-contempt, he does not dwell. Yet, as long as progress is possible, man may always be regarded as a “bridge.” The reader of Nietzsche is tempted to believe that hatred and contempt must always be the predominant emotions in the mind of the “superior” man. Darwin, who knew much more about man and nature than did our passionate poet, was still able to regard man as “the crown and glory of the universe.” Not so, Nietzsche.

Those who have read little in ethics are inclined to attribute to Nietzsche a greater measure of originality than he can reasonably claim. More than two milleniums before him, Plato conceived an ideal Republic in which moral laws, as commonly accepted, were to be set aside. Marriage was to be done away with; births were to be scientifically regulated; children were to be taken from their mothers; sickly infants were to be destroyed. In Sparta the committee of the elders did not permit the promptings of sympathy and the cries of wounded maternal love to influence the decision touching the life or death of the new-born.

Here was an attempt at bridge-building, but it was conceived as a scientific matter, to be taken in hand by the State, and for the good of the State. But Nietzsche would destroy the State. His Superman appears as individualistic as a “rogue” elephant, a few passages to the contrary notwithstanding. Are we to regard him as a mere lawless egoist, or as something more? We are left in the dark. [Footnote: See the volume, Beyond Good and Evil, “What is Noble?” Sec 265.] But we note that Nietzsche disagrees with most moralists, in that he refuses to regard Caesar Borgia as a morbid growth. [Footnote: Ibid., The Natural History of Morals, Sec 197. DOSTOIEVSKY’S genius has portrayed for us an admirable Superman in the person of the Russian convict Orloff. See his House of the Dead, chapter v.]

The Superman has always been with us, in somewhat varying types. From Alexander the Great to Napoleon, and before and after, he adorns the pages of history. Attila, among others, may enter his claim to consideration. It remains for the serious student of ethics to estimate scientifically his value as an ethical ideal, and to judge how far this type of character may profitably be taken as a pattern. Nietzsche stands at the farthest possible remove from Hegel. Does he, as an individualist, stand within hail of Kant? It scarcely seems so. When we examine Kant’s “practical reason,” in other words, the moral law as it revealed itself to Kant, we find that it had taken up into itself the moral development of the ages preceding. Kant’s practical reason, his conscience, to speak plain English, was not the practical reason of, for example, Aristotle. The latter could speak of a slave as an “animated tool,” and could believe there were men intended by nature for slavery. Kant could not. In theory an individualist, the Sage of Konigsberg stands, in reality, not far from Hegel. He does not break with the past. But Nietzsche is revolt incarnate.