Recent Tendencies in Ethics by William Ritchie Sorley
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6 RECENT TENDENCIES IN ETHICS
Three Lectures to Clergy Given at Cambridge
BY
W. R. SORLEY, M.A. HON. LL.D. EDIN.
Knightbridge Professor of Moral Philosophy
MCMIV
PREFACE
These lectures were given to a summer meeting of clergy, held at
Cambridge in the month of July last. Some passages have been added as
they were written out for the press, and the crudities of the spoken
word have, I hope, been pruned away; but, in other respects, the
original plan of the lectures has been retained. They are now
published in the hope that they may prove of interest to those who
heard them, and to others who may desire an account, in short compass
and in popular form, of some leading features of the ethical thought
of the present day.
It is inevitable for such an account to be controversial: otherwise it
could not give a true picture of contemporary opinion. Intellectual
and social causes have conspired to accentuate traditional differences
in ethics, and to make the questions in dispute penetrate to the very
heart of morality. It has been my aim to trace the new influences
which are at work, and to estimate the value of the ethical doctrines
to which they have seemed to lead. The estimate has taken the form of
a criticism, but the criticism is in the interests of construction.
W.R. SORLEY.
CAMBRIDGE, 7th March, 1904.
CONTENTS.
I. CHARACTERISTICS
II. ETHICS AND EVOLUTION
III. ETHICS AND IDEALISM
INDEX
I.
CHARACTERISTICS.
A survey of ethical thought, especially English ethical thought,
during the last century would have to lay stress upon one
characteristic feature. It was limited in range,--limited, one may
say, by its regard for the importance of the facts with which it
had to deal. The thought of the period was certainly not without
controversy; it was indeed controversial almost to a fault. But
the controversies of the time centred almost exclusively round two
questions: the question of the origin of moral ideas, and the question
of the criterion of moral value. These questions were of course
traditional in the schools of philosophy; and for more than a century
English moralists were mainly occupied with inherited topics of
debate. They gave precision to the questions under discussion; and
their controversies defined the traditional opposition of ethical
opinion, and separated moralists into two hostile schools known as
Utilitarian and Intuitionist.
As regards the former question--that of the origin of moral ideas--the
Utilitarian School held that they could be traced to experience; and
by 'experience' they meant in the last resort sense-perceptions
and the feelings of pleasure and of pain which accompany or follow
sense-perception. All the facts of our moral consciousness,
therefore,--the knowledge of right and wrong, the judgments of
conscience, the recognition of duty and responsibility, the feelings
of reverence, remorse, and moral indignation,--all these could be
traced, they thought, to an origin in experience, to an origin which
in the last resort was sensuous, that is, due to the perceptions of
the senses and the feelings of pleasure and pain which accompany or
follow them.
With regard to the criterion or standard of morality,--the second
question to which I have to call attention,--they held that the
distinction between right and wrong depended upon the consequences of
an action in the way of pleasure and pain. That action was right which
on the whole and in the long run would bring pleasure or happiness to
those whom it affected: that action was wrong which on the whole and
in the long run would bring pain rather than pleasure to those whom it
affected.
From their view as to the origin of moral ideas, the school might more
properly be called the Empirical School. It is from their views on the
question of the standard of value, or the criterion of morality, that
it claimed, and that it received, the name Utilitarian[1]. On both
these points the Utilitarian School was opposed by an energetic but
less compact body of writers, known as Intuitionists.
[Footnote 1: It seems to have been through J.S. Mill's influence
that the term obtained currency. It was used by him as the name of a
"little society to be composed of young men agreeing in fundamental
principles" which he formed in the winter of 1822-23. He "did not
invent the word, but found in one of Galt's novels, the 'Annals of the
Parish.'" "With a boy's fondness for a name and a banner I seized
on the word, and for some years called myself and others by it as
a sectarian appellation" ('Autobiography,' pp. 79, 80; cf.
'Utilitarianism,' p. 9 n.) A couple of sentences from Galt may be
quoted: "As there was at the time a bruit and a sound about universal
benevolence, philanthropy, utility, and all the other disguises with
which an infidel philosophy appropriated to itself the charity,
brotherly love, and well-doing inculcated by our holy religion, I set
myself to task upon these heads.... With well-doing, however, I went
more roundly to work. I told my people that I thought they had more
sense than to secede from Christianity to become Utilitarians, for
that it would be a confession of ignorance of the faith they deserted,
seeing that it was the main duty inculcated by our religion to do all
in morals and manners to which the new-fangled doctrine of utility
pretended." Mill is wrong in supposing that his use of the term "was
the first time that any one had taken the title of Utilitarian"; and
Galt, who represents his annalist as writing of the year 1794,
is historically justified. Writing in 1781 Bentham uses the word
'utilitarian,' and again in 1802 he definitely asserts that it is the
only name of his creed ('Works,' x. 92, 392). M. Halevy ('L'evolution
de la doctrine utilitaire,' p. 300) draws attention to the presence of
the word in Jane Austen's 'Sense and Sensibility,' published in 1811.]
The Intuitionists maintained--to put the matter briefly--that the
moral consciousness of man could not be entirely accounted for by
experiences of the kind laid stress on by the Utilitarians. They
maintained that moral ideas were in their origin spiritual, although
they might be called into definite consciousness by the experience of
the facts to which they could be applied. Experience might call them
forth into the light of day; but it was held that they belonged, in
nature and origin, to the constitution of man's mind. On this ground,
therefore, the school was properly called Intuitional: they held that
moral ideas were received by direct vision or intuition, as it were,
not by a process of induction from particular facts.
And, in the second place, with regard to the criterion of morality,
that also (they held) was not dependent on the consequences in the
way of happiness and misery which the Utilitarians emphasised. On the
contrary, moral ideas themselves had an independent validity; they had
a worth and authority for conduct which could not be accounted for by
any consequences in which action resulted: belonging as they did to
the essence of the human spirit, they also had authority over the
conduct of man's life.
Now the ethical controversies of last century were almost entirely
about these two points and between these two opposed schools. No doubt
the two questions thus discussed did go very near to the root of the
whole matter. They pointed to the consideration of the question of
man's place in the universe and his spiritual nature as determining
the part which it was his to play in the world. They suggested, if
they did not always raise, the question whether man is entirely a
product of nature or whether he has a spiritual essence to which
nature may be subdued. But the larger issues suggested were not
followed out. Common consent seemed to limit the discussion to the two
questions described; and this limitation of the controversy tended to
a precision and clearness in method, which is often wanting in the
ethical thought of the present day, disturbed as it is by new and more
far-reaching problems.
This limitation of scope, which I venture to select as the leading
characteristic of last century's ethical enquiries, may be further
seen in the large amount of agreement between the two schools
regarding the content of morality. The Utilitarians no more than
the Intuitionists were opponents of the traditional--as we may call
it--the Christian morality of modern civilisation. They both adopted
and defended the well-recognised virtues of truth and justice, of
temperance and benevolence, which have been accepted by the common
tradition of ages as the expression of man's moral consciousness. The
Intuitionists no doubt were sometimes regarded--they may indeed have
sometimes regarded themselves--as in a peculiar way the guardians of
the traditional morality, and as interested more than their opponents
in defending a view in harmony with man's spiritual essence and
inheritance. But we do not find any attack upon the main content
of morality by the Utilitarian writers. On the contrary, they were
interested in vindicating their own full acceptance of the traditional
morality. This is, in particular, the case with John Stuart Mill, the
high-minded representative of the Utilitarian philosophy in the middle
of last century. "In the golden rule of Jesus of Nazareth," he says,
"we read the complete spirit of the ethics of utility. To do as one
would be done by, and to love one's neighbour as oneself, constitute
the ideal perfection of utilitarian morality."[1]
[Footnote 1: Utilitarianism, 9th ed., pp. 24, 25.]
No doubt Mill was a practical reformer as well as a philosophical
thinker, and he wished on certain special points to revise the
accepted code. He says that "the received code of ethics is by no
means of divine right, that mankind has still much to learn as to the
effects of actions on the general happiness."[1] He would even take
this point--the modifiability of the ordinary moral code--as a sort
of test question distinguishing his own system from that of the
intuitional moralists; and in one place he says that "the contest
between the morality which appeals to an external standard, and
that which grounds itself on internal conviction, is the contest
of progressive morality against stationary--of reason and argument
against the deification of mere opinion and habit. The doctrine that
the existing order of things is the natural order, and that, being
natural, all innovation upon it is criminal, is as vicious in morals
as it is now at last admitted to be in physics and in society and
government."[2]
[Footnote 1: Ibid., p. 35.]
[Footnote 2: Dissertations, ii. 472.]
A passage such as this leads us to ask, What exactly is the extent of
the modifications which Mill seeks to make in the ordinary scale of
values? Does he, for instance, wish to invert any ordinary moral
rules? Would he do away with, or in any important respect modify, the
duties of truth or justice, temperance or benevolence? Far from it He
only suggests, as many moralists of both parties have suggested, that
in the application of moral law to the details of experience certain
modifications are required. How far he goes in this direction may be
seen from his own instance, that of truth. He would admit certain
exceptions to the law of truth; he would give the less rigorous
answers to the time-honoured questions as to whether one should tell
the truth to an invalid in a dangerous illness or to a would-be
criminal. But Mill always asserts the sanctity of the general
principle; and, on this account, he holds that "in order that the
exception may not extend itself beyond the need, and may have the
least possible effect in weakening reliance on veracity, it ought
to be recognised and, if possible, its limits defined; and if the
principle of utility is good for anything, it must be good for
weighing these conflicting utilities against one another, and marking
out the region within which one or the other preponderates[1]." He
holds that there are such limits to veracity. He even thinks--though
here he is not quite correct--that such limits have been acknowledged
by all moralists[2]. He would have been correct if he had said that
they had been acknowledged by moralists of all schools: the admission
of these limits is not peculiar to Utilitarians. But he vigorously
defends the validity of the general rule, and maintains that, in
considering any possible exception, we have to take account not merely
of the present utility of the falsehood, but of its effect upon the
sanctity of the general principle in the minds of men. The Utilitarian
doctrine is expressly used by him to confirm the ordinary general laws
of the moral consciousness. Nay, these rules--such as the duties of
being temperate and just and benevolent--were, according to Mill,
themselves the result of experiences of utility on the part of our
predecessors, and from them handed down to us by the tradition of the
race. No doubt in this Mill is applying a theoretical view too easily
to a question of history. It is one thing to maintain, as he does,
that utility is the correct test of morality; it is another thing
altogether to say that our ordinary moral rules are the records or
expressions of earlier judgments of utility. The former statement
is made as a controversial statement which is admitted to be so
far doubtful that most men need to be convinced of it. The latter
statement could only be true if nobody had ever doubted the former--if
everybody in past ages had accepted utility as the standard of
morality. But, for our present purpose, his attitude to this question
is of interest only as bringing out the point that the different
schools of ethical thought during last century had a large basis of
common agreement, and that this basis of common agreement was their
acknowledgment of the validity of the moral rules recognised by the
ordinary conscience.
[Footnote 1: Utilitarianism, p. 34.]
[Footnote 2: Ibid., p. 33.]
The Utilitarians no more than the Intuitionists sought to make
any fundamental change in the content of right and of wrong as
acknowledged by modern society. Their controversies were almost
entirely of what may be called an academic kind, and, however decided,
would have little effect upon a man's practical attitude. But it would
not be possible to make any such confident assertion regarding the
ethical controversies of the present day. We have no longer the same
common basis of agreement to rely upon that our predecessors had a
generation ago. There are many indications in recent literature that
the suggestion is now made more readily than it was twenty or thirty
years ago that the scale of moral values may have to be revised; and
it seems to me that the ethical controversies of the coming generation
will not be restricted to academic opponents whose disputes concern
nothing more than the origin of moral ideas and their ultimate
criterion. Modern controversy will involve these questions, but it
will go deeper and it will spread its results wider: it appears as
if it would not hesitate to call in question the received code of
morality, and to revise our standard of right and wrong. One school at
any rate has already made a claim of this sort, and the extravagance
of its teaching has not prevented it from attracting adherents.
It is on this ground, therefore,--because I believe that the ethical
question is no longer so purely an academic question as it was some
years ago, because it affects not only the philosophic thinker but the
practical man who is concerned with the problems of his day,--that I
have selected the topic for these lectures. It is not merely that many
modern writers assert some general doctrine as to the relativity of
right and wrong. So much was implied, though it was not much laid
stress upon, in the utilitarian doctrine. For the utilitarian conduct
is right according to the amount of happiness it produces: goodness
is relative to its tendency to produce happiness. But a much greater
importance may attach to the assertion of the relativity of morals
when one couples that doctrine with the idea now prevalent of the
indefinitely great changes which the progress of the race brings
about, not only in the social order but also in the structure and
faculties of man himself.
Hence it is not surprising to find that there are at the present day
some writers who ask for nothing less than a revision of the whole
traditional morality, and in whose minds that demand is connected with
the dominant doctrine of progress as it is expressed in the theory of
evolution.
Perhaps we might trace the beginnings of this controversy as to the
content of what is right and what is wrong to an older opposition
in ethical thought, an opposition which especially affects the
utilitarian doctrine--the controversy of Egoism and Altruism. If
we look at these two conceptions of egoism and altruism as the
Utilitarians did, if we regard the conception of egoism as having
to do with one's own personal happiness, and that of altruism as
describing the general happiness, the happiness of others rather than
of oneself, then obviously the questions arise whether the conduct
which produces the greatest happiness of others will or will not also
produce the greatest happiness of the individual agent, and which
should be chosen in the event of their disagreement. Is my happiness
and that which will tend to it always to be got on the same lines of
conduct as those which will bring about the greatest happiness of the
greatest number?
The Utilitarian writers of last century were of course conscious of
this problem, conscious that there was a possible discrepancy between
egoistic conduct and altruistic conduct; but they agreed to lay stress
upon altruistic results as determining moral quality. Their tendency
was to minimise the difference between the egoistic and the altruistic
effects of action, and in so far as a difference had to be allowed to
emphasise the importance of the claims of the community at large, that
is, roughly speaking, to take the altruistic standpoint. Recent and
more careful investigators have brought out more exactly the extent
and significance of the divergence. In particular this was done with
perfect clearness and precision by the late Professor Sidgwick.
He showed that the difference--although it might be easily
exaggerated--was yet real and important, that the two systems did not
mean the same thing, that we could not rely upon altruistic conduct
always being for individual benefit, that there was no 'natural
identity' between egoism and altruism. He held that morality, to
save it from an unsolved dualism, required a principle capable of
reconciling the discrepancy between the conduct in accordance with the
axiom of Benevolence and the conduct in accordance with the equally
rational axiom of Self-love.[1]
[Footnote 1: Professor Sidgwick's last words on the question are as
follows: "If then the reconciliation of duty and self-interest is to
be regarded as a hypothesis logically necessary to avoid a fundamental
contradiction in one chief department of our thought, it remains
to ask how far this necessity constitutes a sufficient reason for
accepting this hypothesis.... Those who hold that the edifice of
physical science is really constructed of conclusions logically
inferred from self-evident premises, may reasonably demand that any
practical judgments claiming philosophic certainty should be based on
an equally firm foundation. If, on the other hand, we find that in our
supposed knowledge of the world of nature propositions are commonly
taken to be universally true, which yet seem to rest on no other
grounds than that we have a strong disposition to accept them, and
that they are indispensable to the systematic coherence of our
beliefs,--it will be more difficult to reject a similarly supported
assumption in ethics, without opening the door to universal
scepticism" ('Methods of Ethics,' 6th ed., pp. 506, 507).]
But while this question of egoism and altruism has thus been
recognised as a possible source of perplexity, affecting the ethical
standard itself, both egoists and orthodox utilitarians have commonly
agreed--though for different reasons--to insist that morality means
the same for them both, and to hold with Epicurus that "we cannot lead
a life of pleasure which is not also a life of prudence, honour, and
justice." It is only in quite recent days that a thoroughgoing attempt
has been made to revalue all the old standards of morality. And
the attempt is made from a point of view which is certainly not
altruistic. The Utilitarian writers of last generation, if they
admitted the conflict of egoism and altruism, weighted every
consideration on the side of altruism. They emphasised therefore the
agreement between their own utilitarian doctrine and the Christian
morality in which altruism is fundamental. On the other hand, the more
recent tendency to which I refer emphasises and exalts the egoistic
side, and thus accentuates the difference between the new moral
code--if we may call it moral--and the Christian morality.
The boldest and most brilliant exponent of this tendency is Friedrich
Nietzsche[1], already the object of a cult in Germany, and an author
to be reckoned with as one of the new forces in European thought. It
is true that some of the most characteristic products of his genius
are closely akin to the insanity which clouded his later years. Yet it
is impossible to read his writings without recognising his penetrating
insight as well as his abundance of virile passion. Besides, in
spite of all his extravagances--or, perhaps, because of them--he is
symptomatic of certain tendencies of the age. Nietzsche's demand
is for nothing less than a revision of the whole moral code and a
reversal of its most characteristic provisions. And he has the rare
distinction of being a writer on morality who disclaims the title of
'moralist.'
[Footnote 1: Friedrich Nietzsche, the son of a clergyman, was born in
Saxony in 1844. In 1869 he became Professor of Classical Philology
in Basel, and held this post for ten years, though his work was
interrupted by ill-health for a long period. His first book was
published in 1871; the preface to the last was dated "on the 30th of
September 1888, the day on which the first book of the Transvaluation
of all Values was completed." He became hopelessly insane in 1889, and
died in 1900. The reader will find a luminous estimate of his work
in the essay on "The Life and Opinions of Friedrich Nietzsche" in
Pringle-Pattison's 'Man's Place in the Cosmos,' 2nd ed., 1902.]
The ideas which Nietzsche expresses go to the root of the matter. In
the first place, he drew a distinction between what he regarded as two
different types of morality. One of these he called the morality of
masters or nobles, and he called the other the morality of slaves.
Self-reliance and courage may be cited as the qualities typical of the
noble morality, for they are the qualities which tend to make the man
who possesses them a master over others, to give him a prominent and
powerful place in the world, and to help him to subjugate to his will
both nature and his fellow-men. On the other hand, there are the
qualities which form the characteristic features of Christian
morality--such as benevolence or love of one's neighbour, the
fundamental precept of the Gospels, and the humility and obedience
which have been perhaps unduly emphasised in ecclesiastical ethics.
These are the qualities which he means when he speaks of the morality
of the slave.
In the second place, therefore, what is distinctive of Nietzsche is
this: that he explicitly rejects the Christian morality, in particular
the virtues of benevolence, of obedience, of humility: these are
regarded by him as belonging to a type of morality which is to be
overcome and which he calls the servile morality. He deliberately sets
in antithesis to one another what he calls Christian and what he calls
noble virtues: meaning by the latter the qualities allied to courage,
force of will, and strength of arm, such as were manifested in certain
Pagan races, but above all in the heroes of the Roman Republic. He
would, therefore, deliberately prefer the older Pagan valuation of
conduct to the Christian valuation.
In the third place, he attempts what he calls a transvaluation of
all values. Every moral idea needs revision, every moral idea, every
suggestion of value or worth in conduct, must be tried and tested
afresh, and a new morality substituted for the old. And with this
claim for revision is connected his idea that the egoistic principle
which underlies the Pagan virtues preferred to the Christian, and the
higher development of the self-capacities to which it will lead, will
evolve a superior kind of men--"Over-men" or "Uebermenschen"--to whom,
therefore, we may look as setting the tone and giving the rule for
subsequent conduct.
Nietzsche is an unsystematic writer, though none the less powerful on
that account. He is apt to be perplexing to the reader who looks for
system or a definite and reasoned statement of doctrine; but his
aphorisms are all the more fitted to impress readers who are not
inclined to criticism, and might shirk an elaborate argument. It is
difficult, accordingly, to select from him a series of propositions
that would give a general idea of the complete transmutation of
morality which he demands. So far as I can make out, there is only one
point in which he still agrees with the old traditional morality, and
that point seems to cause him no little difficulty. No thinker can
afford to question the binding nature of the law of Truth, least of
all a thinker so obviously in earnest about his own prophetic message
as Nietzsche was. All his investigations presuppose the validity of
this law for his own thought; all his utterances imply an appeal to
it; and his influence depends on the confidence which others have in
his veracity. And on this one point only Nietzsche has to confess
himself a child of the older morality. "This book," he says in the
preface to one of the least paradoxical of his works, 'Dawn of Day,'
"This book ... implies a contradiction and is not afraid of it: in it
we break with the faith in morals--why? In obedience to morality! Or
what name shall we give to that which passes therein? We should prefer
more modest names. But it is past all doubt that even to us a 'thou
shalt' is still speaking, even we still obey a stern law above us--and
this is the last moral precept which impresses itself even upon
us, which even we obey: in this respect, if in any, we are still
conscientious people--viz., we do not wish to return to that which we
consider outlived and decayed, to something 'not worthy of belief,' be
it called God, virtue, truth, justice, charity; we do not approve of
any deceptive bridges to old ideals, we are radically hostile to all
that wants to mediate and to amalgamate with us; hostile to any actual
religion and Christianity; hostile to all the vague, romantic, and
patriotic feelings; hostile also to the love of pleasure and want of
principle of the artists who would fain persuade us to worship when we
no longer believe--for we are artists; hostile, in short, to the whole
European Femininism (or Idealism, if you prefer this name), which
is ever 'elevating' and consequently 'degrading.' Yet, as such
conscientious people, we immoralists and atheists of this day still
feel subject to the German honesty and piety of thousands of years'
standing, though as their most doubtful and last descendants; nay, in
a certain sense, as their heirs, as executors of their inmost will, a
pessimist will, as aforesaid, which is not afraid of denying itself,
because it delights in taking a negative position. We ourselves
are--suppose you want a formula--the consummate self-dissolution of
morals." [1]
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