Moral Philosophy: Ethics, Deontology and Natural Law Part 10

My contention is, not with the Principle of General Consequences, which has a certain value in Ethics, and is used by many writers other than Utilitarian, but with the two stated above, n. 2, which are called the Greatest Happiness Principle and the Principle of Utility.

4. Against the Greatest Happiness Principle I have these complaints:

(1) Utilitarians from Paley to John Stuart Mill aver that their teaching is no bar to any man hoping for and striving after the happiness of the world to come. They say that such happiness cannot be better attained than by making it your princ.i.p.al aim to improve all temporal goods and dissipate all temporal evil. Their maxim in fact is: "Take care of the things of earth, and the things of heaven will take care of themselves." Whereas it was the very contrary teaching of Him, whom moderns, who see in Him no higher character, still love to call the greatest of moral teachers: "That which fell among thorns are they who have heard, and going their way, are choked with the cares and riches and pleasures of this life, and yield no fruit." (St. Luke viii. 14.)

(2) It will be said that these thorns grow of selfishness, and that these cares are the cares of individual interest, whereas the Utilitarian's delight and glory is to live, not for himself, but for the commonwealth. But how can a man, who takes pleasure to be his highest good and happiness, live otherwise than for himself? Here we come upon the un.o.bserved fault and flaw, which entirely vitiates the Utilitarian structure. It is an union of two opposite and incompatible elements. An old poet has said:

Vinegar and oil in one same vessel pour, They stand apart, unfriendly, all the more.

(Aeschylus, _Agam_., 330, 331.)

Utilitarianism consists of a still more unfriendly and unwholesome mixture of two elements, both of them bad, and unable to stand together, Hedonism and Altruism. Hedonism is the doctrine that the main object and end of life is pleasure: which is the position laid down in so many words by Mill (1. c.), that "actions are right in proportion as they tend to promote happiness;" and "by happiness is intended pleasure and the absence of pain." If Hedonism were sound doctrine, the Pleasant and the Good would be identical, and the most pleasant pleasure would ever be the best pleasure. That would take away all distinction of _kind_ or _quality_ among pleasures, and differentiate them only by intensity and duration. This was Paley's doctrine, a fundamental point of Hedonism, and therefore also of the Utilitarian philosophy. John Mill, very honourably to himself, but very fatally to the system that he was writing to defend, parted company with Paley. We have argued against Paley (c. iv., s. iii., nn.

3-5, p. 55), that there is a _better_ and a _worse_ in pleasures, quite distinct from the _more_ or _less_ pleasurable, even if that _more_ be taken _in the long run_ in this world.

Again it may be considered that pleasure, even the best and highest, is a sort of efflorescence from activity, and is for activity, not activity for it; and better is the activity, whatever it be, than the pleasure which comes thereof; wherefore no pleasure, as pleasure, can be the highest good and happiness of man.

Hedonism then is an error. But errors may be opposed to one another as well as to the truth. Hedonism is opposed to Altruism in this way. A man may take pleasure in seeing other people enjoy themselves. Nothing is more common, except the pleasure taken in enjoying one's own self.

But if a man only feeds the hungry that he may have the satisfaction of seeing them eat, is it the hungry or himself that he finally seeks to gratify? Clearly, himself. That is the behaviour of the Hedonist, he acts for his own pleasure even in his benevolence. The Altruist, on the contrary, professes never to act for self, but for society. So that society flourish, he is ready to be crushed and ruined, not in the matter of his pleasure only, but even in that of his own good.

Selfishness, by which he means all manner of regard to self, is, upon his conscience, the unforgiven sin. But Hedonism is selfishness in the grossest form, being the mere pursuit in all things of pleasurable feeling--feeling being always particular and limited to self, in contradistinction to good, which is universal and diffuses itself all round. The Hedonist seeks his own pleasure, where the Altruist forbids him to take thought, let alone for his gratification, but even for his good. Thus an Hedonist cannot be Altruist to boot; and, trying to combine the two characters, the Utilitarian is committed to a self-contradiction.

If he relinquishes Hedonism, and holds to Altruism, pure and simple, his position is not much improved. Altruism overlooks the fact, that man, as compared with other men, is a _person_, the centre of his own acts, not a _thing_, to be entirely referred to others. He is in relation with others, as child, father, husband, master, citizen; but these relations do not take up the whole man. There is a residue within,--an inner being and life, which is not referable to any creature outside himself, but only to the Creator. For this inner being, man is responsible to G.o.d alone. The good of this, the "inner man of the heart," is each individual's proper and primary care.

Altruism, and Utilitarianism with it, ignore the interior life of the soul, and subst.i.tute human society, that is, ultimately, the democratic State, in place of G.o.d.

(3) Another confusion that the Greatest Happiness Principle involves, is the mistaking the political for the ethical end of life. The political end, which it is the statesman's business to aim at, and the citizen's duty to subserve, is "the natural happiness of the commonwealth, and of individuals as members of the commonwealth, that they may live in it in peace and justice, and with a sufficiency of goods for the preservation and comfort of bodily life, and with that amount of moral rect.i.tude which is necessary for this outward peace and preservation of the commonwealth, and the perpetuity of the human race." (Suarez, _De Legibus_, III., xi., 7.) This is all the good that the Utilitarian contemplates. He is satisfied to make a good _citizen_, a good _husband_, a good _father_, for the transactions of this life. He has no concern to make a good _man_ up to the ethical standard, which supposes the observance of the whole natural law, duties to G.o.d, and duties within himself, as well as duties to human society, and by this observance the compa.s.sing of the everlasting happiness of the man's own individual soul.

Against the Principle of Utility I find these charges:

(1) It takes the sign and indication of moral evil for the evil itself, as if the physician should take the symptom for the disease.

It places the wickedness of an act in the physical misery and suffering that are its consequences. This is, I say, a taking of the indication for the thing indicated. An act is bad in itself and by itself, as being a violation of the rational nature of the doer (c.

vi., s. i.), and being bad, it breeds bad consequences. But the badness of the act is moral; the badness of the consequences, physical. There is an evident intrinsic irrationality, and thereby moral evil, in such sins as intemperance, peevishness, and vanity. But let us take an instance of an act, apparently harmless in itself, and evil solely because of the consequences. Supposing one insists upon playing the piano for his own amus.e.m.e.nt, to the disturbance of an invalid who is lying in a critical state in the next room. Do the mere consequences make this otherwise innocent amus.e.m.e.nt evil? Yes, if you consider the amus.e.m.e.nt in the abstract: but if you take it as _this human act_, the act is inordinate and evil in itself, or as it is elicited in the mind of the agent. The volition amounts to this: "I prefer my amus.e.m.e.nt to my neighbour's recovery," which is an act unseemly and unreasonable in the mind of a social being. Utilitarians fall into the capital error of ignoring the intrinsic value of an act, and estimating it wholly by extrinsic results, because they commonly follow the phenomenalist philosophy, which breaks away from all such ideas as _substance_ and _nature_, and regards nothing but sequences and coexistences of phenomena. To a phenomenalist the precept, _Live up to thy nature_, can have no meaning.

(2) Aristotle (_Ethics_, II., iv., 3) draws this distinction between virtue and art, that "the products of art have their excellence in themselves: it suffices therefore that they are of this or that quality: but acts of virtue are not done virtuously according to the quality of the thing done, but according to the state of mind of the doer; first, according to his knowledge of what he was about; then, according to his volition, as that was guided or not guided by the proper motives of the virtue; thirdly, according to the steadiness and fixedness of his will; whereas all these considerations are of no account in a work of art, except the single one of the artist being aware of what he was about." Elsewhere (_Ethics_, VI., iv., 2), he says that virtue is distinguished from art as being _action_, not _production_. The Principle of Utility confounds virtue with art, or perhaps I should say, with manufactures. It judges conduct, as one would shoemaking, by trial of the product, or net result. So far from being solicitous, with Aristotle, that volition should be "guided by the proper motives of the virtue" which there is question of practising (c. v., s. viii., n. 4, p. 96: Ar. _Eth_., III., viii.), Mill (_Utilitarianism_, p. 26) tells us that "utilitarian moralists have gone beyond almost all others in affirming that the motive has nothing to do with the morality of the action." By _motive_ he understands what we have called _the end in view_. (c. iii., s. ii., n. 2, p. 31.) So that, if one man waits on the sick for the love of G.o.d, and another in hope of a legacy, the morality of these two acts is the same, just as it makes no difference to the usefulness of a pair of boots, what motive it was that set the shoemaker to work.

True, Mill admits that the motive has "much to do with the worth of the agent:" but that, he hastens to explain, is inasmuch as "it indicates ... a bent of character from which useful, or from which hurtful actions are likely to arise." Even so,--the shoemaker who works to earn money for a carousal, is not likely to go on producing useful articles so long as another, who labours to support his family.

Such is the moral difference that Mill places between the two men; one instrument of production is longer available than the other.

(3) Another well established distinction is that between _harm_ and _injury_, injury being wilful and unjust harm. The housemaid, who in arranging the room has burned your ma.n.u.script of "sugared sonnets,"

has done you no injury, for she meant none, but how vast the _harm_ to the author and to mankind! Harm is visible in the effects: but injury only upon examination of the mind of the agent. Not so, however, the Utilitarian thinks: harm being equal, he can make no difference between a tyrant and a man-eating tiger. Thus George Grote says of a certain murderous usurper of the kingdom of Macedon: "You discover nothing while your eye is fixed on Archelaus himself.... But when you turn to the persons whom he has killed, banished, or ruined--to the ma.s.s of suffering that he has inflicted--and to the widespread insecurity which such acts of iniquity spread through all societies where they become known--there is no lack of argument which prompts a reflecting spectator to brand him as [a most dangerous and destructive animal, no] a disgraceful man." (Grote's _Plato_, ii., p. 108.) Why Archelaus is described in terms of the tiger, and then branded as a disgraceful man, we are at a loss to conceive, except in this way, that the writer's philosophy forsook him at the end of the sentence, and he reverted to the common sense of mankind. But he should have either ended the sentence as suggested in the parenthesis, or have been willing to call the man-eater of the Indian jungle, who has "learned to make widows, and to lay waste their cities," _a disgraceful tiger_; or lastly, he should have looked back, where he declared it was vain to look, upon Archelaus himself, and discerned in him that moral deformity, and contradiction of reason, whereof a brute beast is incapable, but which is a disgrace and a stain upon humanity.

A later writer, who presses Utilitarianism into the service of Socialism, is plainer-spoken than Grote, and says bluntly: "To be honestly mistaken avails nothing. Thus Herbert Spencer--who is under the delusion that we have come into this world each for the sake of himself, and who opposes, as far as he can, the evolution of society--is verily an immoral man.... Right is every conduct which tends to the welfare of society; wrong, what obstructs that welfare."

(Gronlund, _Co-operative Commonwealth_, pp. 226, 227.) Thus is overlaid the difference between harm and injury, between physical and moral evil: thus is the meaning of a _human act_ ignored: in this abyss of chaos and confusion, which Utilitarianism has opened out, Moral Philosophy finds her grave.

(4) The Principle of Utility sees in virtue a habit of self-sacrifice, useful to the community, but not naturally pleasant, and therefore not naturally good and desirable, to him that practises it, but made pleasurable and good and desirable to him by practice. (Mill, pp.

53-57.) In this way virtue becomes naturally a very good thing for every one else but its possessor, but to him it is a natural evil, inasmuch as it deprives him of pleasure, which natural evil by habit is gradually converted into a fact.i.tious and artificial good, the man becoming accustomed to it, as the proverb says, "like eels to skinning." This theory is the resuscitation of one current among the Sophists at Athens, and described by Plato thus.--The natural good of man is to afford himself every indulgence, even at the expense of his neighbours. He follows his natural good accordingly: so do his neighbours follow theirs, and try to gratify themselves at his expense. Fights ensue, till mankind, worried and wearied with fighting, make a compact, each to give up so much of his natural good as interferes with that of his neighbour. Human society, formed on this understanding, enforces the compact in the interest of society.

Thus the interest of society is opposed to the interest of the individual, in this that it keeps him out of his best natural good, which is to do as his appet.i.te of pleasure bids him in all things, though it compensates him with a second-cla.s.s good, by preventing his neighbours from pleasure-hunting at his expense. If then his neighbours could be restrained, and he left free to gratify himself, that would be perfect bliss. But only a despot here or there has attained to it. The ordinary man must pay his tax of virtue to the community, a loss to him, but a gain to all the rest: while he is compensated by the losses which their virtue entails upon them.

Such was the old Athenian theory, which John Mill, the Principle of Utility in his hand, completes by saying that by-and-bye, and little by little (as the prisoner of Chillon came to love his dungeon), the hampered individual comes to love, and to find an artificial happiness in, those restrictions of his liberty, which are called Virtue.

It was against this theory that Plato wrote his _Republic_, and, to compare a little thing to a great, the whole account of moral good being in consonance with nature, and of moral obligation rising out of the nature of the individual man, as has been set forth in this brief Text-book, may serve for a refutation of the perverse doctrine of Utilitarianism.

_Readings_.--Plato, _Republic_, pp. 338 E, 339 A, 343 C, D, E, 344 A, B, C, 358 E, 359 A, B, 580 B, C.

PART III. NATURAL LAW.

We a.s.sume in Natural Law the preceding treatise on Ethics, and also the princ.i.p.al truths of Natural Theology.

CHAPTER I.

OF DUTIES OF G.o.d.

SECTION I.--_Of the Wors.h.i.+p of G.o.d_.

1. _Wors.h.i.+p_ is divided into _prayer_ and _praise_. To pray, and present our pet.i.tions to the Most High, is a privilege; a privilege, however, which we are bound to use at times, as the necessary means for overcoming temptations and inclinations to evil. We praise and adore G.o.d for His sovereign excellence, which excellence, nevertheless, would found in us no positive duty if we stood free of all dependence upon G.o.d. In such an hypothesis we should lie simply under the negative duty of not thinking of G.o.d, speaking of Him, or acting towards Him otherwise than with all reverence. So we should behave to the Great Stranger, with civility, with admiration even and awe, but not with cordiality, not with loyalty, not with homage, not with love. Very different are our relations and our duties to G.o.d our Lord, "in whom we live, move, and have our being." There is nothing in us or about us, no positive perfection of ours whatsoever, that is not His gift, and a gift that He is not giving continually, else it would be lost to us. We are therefore bound in His regard, not merely to abstention but to act. And first, for inward acts, we must habitually feel, and at notable intervals we must actually elicit, sentiments of adoration and praise, of thanksgiving, of submission, of loyalty and love, as creatures to their Creator, and as va.s.sals to their very good Lord, for He is our Creator and Lord in the natural order, not to say anything here of the supernatural filiation, by which, as the Church says, "we dare" to call G.o.d "Our Father."

2. We must also express these sentiments by outward act. All the signs of reverence, which man pays to his human superior, must be paid to G.o.d "with advantages": bowing pa.s.ses into prostration, uncovering the head into kneeling, kissing the hand into offering of incense: not that these particular developments are necessary, but some such development must take place. We shall not be content to think reverential thoughts, but we shall say, or even sing, great things of G.o.d's greatness and our indebtedness and duty: such a vocal exercise is psalmody. We shall represent in symbolic action our dependence on the Lord of life and death, and also our sinfulness, for which He might justly strike us dead: such a representation is sacrifice.

3. All this we must do, first, for the sake of our own souls, minds and hearts, to quicken the inward sentiment of adoration and praise.

"Wors.h.i.+p, mostly of the silent sort," wors.h.i.+p, that finds no expression in word or gesture,--wors.h.i.+p away from pealing organs and chants of praise, or the simpler music of the human voice, where no hands are uplifted, nor tongues loosened, nor posture of reverence a.s.sumed, becomes with most mortals a vague, aimless reverie, a course of distraction, dreaminess, and vacancy of mind, no more worth than the meditations of the Lancas.h.i.+re stone-breaker, who was asked what he thought of during his work,--"Mostly nowt."

4. Again, what the body is to the soul, that is exterior devotion to interior. From the soul interior devotion springs, and through the body it manifests itself. Exterior devotion, without the inward spirit that quickens it, is wors.h.i.+p unprofitable and dead: it tends at once to corruption, like the body when the soul has left it. Interior devotion, on the other hand, can exist, though not with its full complement, without the exterior. So that it is only in the union of the two together that perfect wors.h.i.+p is given to G.o.d by men as men.

Upon which St. Thomas has this nave remark, that "they who blame bodily observances being paid to G.o.d, evidently fail to remember that they themselves are men."

Thus we pay t.i.the to G.o.d for soul and body, by acts of religion interior and exterior. But man is, under G.o.d, the lord of this earth and of the fulness thereof. He must pay t.i.the for that too by devoting some portion of it to the direct service of G.o.d, to whom it all primarily belongs. For "mine is the gold and mine the silver." (Aggeus ii. 9.) Such are the words that G.o.d spoke through His prophet to incite His people to restore his sanctuary.

6. It is therefore not true to say that the sole reason of outward wors.h.i.+p is to move the wors.h.i.+pper to interior devotion. It is not true that St. Peter's at Rome, and Cologne Cathedral, and the Duomo of Milan, with all their wealth and elaborate ceremonial, exist and are kept up solely because, things of earth as we are, we cannot be depended upon to praise G.o.d lovingly within the white-washed walls of a conventicle, or according to the simple ritual of the Society of Friends. We would not, even if we could, pray habitually among such surroundings, where we could afford to better them. We have before us the principle of St. Thomas (1a 2ae, q. 24, art. 3, in corp.):

"Since man's good consists in reason as in its root, the more actions proper to man are performed under the direction of reason, the more perfect will man's good be. Hence no one doubts that it belongs to the perfection of moral good, that the actions of our bodily members should be directed by the law of reason, ... as also that the pa.s.sions of the soul should be regulated by reason."

This means, not merely that if the bodily members or the pa.s.sions stir at all, it is a good and desirable thing for them to be ruled by reason; but further that it is a positive addition to human perfection that they should stir and be active, provided reason guide them.

(_Ethics_, c. iv., s. i., n. 6, p. 45.)

It certainly is an action proper to man to express in gesture, in voice, in concert and company with his fellow-men, and by employment of whatever is best and fairest and brightest under his command in the material creation, his inward affections of loyalty, of homage and devotion, of awe and reverence, of grat.i.tude and love to his Creator.

Good as these affections are in the heart of the wors.h.i.+pper, they receive an external complement of goodness and perfection by being blazoned forth in vocal utterance, singing, bending of knees,--by the erection and embellishment of temples, and offerings of gold, silver, precious stones, and incense,--and by men thronging those temples in mult.i.tudes for social wors.h.i.+p,--provided always that the inward devotion of the heart be there, to put a soul into these outward demonstrations and offerings.

7. Concerning these religious observances interior and exterior, it is as idle to pretend that they are _useful_ to Almighty G.o.d as it is irrelevant to object that they are _useless_ to Him. Of course they are useless to Him. All creation is useless to G.o.d. A Being who can never receive any profit, increment, or gain, dwells not within the region of utilities. Theologians indeed distinguish between intrinsic and extrinsic glory, that is, between the glory which G.o.d gives Himself by His own contemplation of His own essence, and the glory which His creatures give Him. They say that G.o.d is thus capable of extrinsic increment, to which increment the praise and wors.h.i.+p of His creatures is useful. But, after all, they are fain to avow that the whole of this extrinsic increment and glory is no real gain to G.o.d, giving Him nothing but what He had before in an infinitely more excellent mode and manner from and of Himself. Thus it appears that the extrinsic glory of G.o.d, to which the wors.h.i.+p paid Him by man contributes, is valued, not because it is properly _useful to Him_, but because He is most properly and highly _worthy of it_. "Thou art worthy, O Lord our G.o.d, to receive glory and honour and power: because thou hast created all things, and for thy will they were, and have been created." (Apoc. iv. II.) And being worthy of this glory, He wills to have it, and does most strictly exact it, for which reason He is called in the Scripture _a jealous G.o.d_. So those who reflect some sparkle of G.o.d's Majesty, and under some aspect represent His person upon the earth, as do princes, lay and ecclesiastical, have many observances of honour and respect paid to them, which are not _useful_ as supplying a _need_--for who needs a salute of twenty-one guns?

nevertheless their dignity is _worthy_ of them, and they require them accordingly.

8. What man feels strongly, he expresses in word and action. What all men feel strongly, they express by meeting together for the purpose.

So that, if strong religious feeling is an element in every good and reasonable man's character, it is bound to find expression, and that a social expression. Men must wors.h.i.+p together according to some external form and ritual. G.o.d may reveal what He wills that ritual to be. In fact He did give such a revelation and prescription to the Jews. To Christians He has spoken in His Son, and still speaks in His Church. Any other than the one sacrifice that He has inst.i.tuted, or any other public religious ritual than is approved by the religious authority which He has established, is to Him of itself, and apart from the invincibly erroneous devotion of them that pay it, an abomination: for He has "not chosen it." Still we cannot say that, in every possible state of things, G.o.d is bound to reveal the ritual that He desires, or is bound Himself to designate the authority that shall fix the ritual which alone He will accept and allow of. If the will of G.o.d is not thus expressed, a ritual must still be drawn up. In a matter that excites the mind, as religion does, and where a large field is open for hallucination and eccentricity, it will not do to have individuals parading methods of wors.h.i.+p of their own invention.

Here the Greek maxim comes in, [Greek: tima tho daimonion katha tha patria], "honour the Deity after the fas.h.i.+on of thy country."

Religious authorities must be set up, in the same way that the civil power is set up. These authorities will determine, not the object, but the outward manner of wors.h.i.+p. Every great nation, or important member of the human family, would come probably to have its own characteristic rite; and within each rite there would be local varieties.