A Handbook of Ethical Theory Part 8

The reason, in this case, resembles the presiding officer of a deliberative a.s.sembly, who insists that all the members shall be heard from, all proposals seriously considered, and that the ultimate decision shall justly represent the true will of the deliberative body as a whole.

The specious but fallacious argument is, in the debate, revealed in its true nature; the obstinate insistence of the individual is not allowed to prevail; the loud voice is recognized to be a loud voice and nothing more; fugitive gusts of pa.s.sion exhaust themselves; the permanent and fundamental will of the a.s.sembly is revealed in the final vote. It is claimed that, in such a mind, the result is a harmonization and unification of the multiplicity of the desires and purposes which, in a mind less rational, jostle one another without control, and refuse to fall into an ordered system. That the decisions of a rational mind reveal both a unity and a harmony not evinced by a mind short-sighted and impulsive cannot be denied. But it is well to understand clearly what is meant by such unity and harmony.

55. DOMINANT AND SUBORDINATE DESIRES.--Wherever a group of desires fall into a system and work together toward a common end, we have unity. Such a system may be short-lived, comparatively poor in content, and of no great significance for a man's life as a whole. It may come into compet.i.tion with another similar system, and be displaced by it. An interest that has dominated our minds for a time, and controlled our desires and volitions, may readily give place to different choices. I may successively bend all my energies upon the winning of a game, the doing of a successful stroke of business, the defeat of a social rival, the success of a philanthropic undertaking. There is no normal human being who does not exhibit such limited volitional units. The most idle and purposeless of vagrants, the most scatter-brained school-boy, the most volatile coquette, may, for a time, be dominated by some desire which calls into its service other desires and thus realizes some chosen end.

Such volitional units do not, however, go far toward unifying the efforts of a life. It is only when some dominant and deep-seated desire, oft recurring, not easily displaced by others, sweeps into its train the other desires of a man, establis.h.i.+ng a sovereignty and exacting subservience, that such an effect is accomplished. Then the lesser units fall into a significant relation to each other as const.i.tuent elements in the greater unit. The life, as such, may be said to have a purpose; it strives toward a single goal.

Whatever bears upon the attainment of such a dominant purpose may, however trivial in itself, acquire a vital importance and be eagerly desired. To a man of mature mind there can be little interest in hitting a small ball with a stick, abstractly considered. Nor is the dropping of a bit of paper into a box with a slit in it an action in itself calculated to stir profound emotion. But if the hitting of the ball in the right way marks the critical point in winning an eagerly contested game of golf, the interest in it may be absorbing. And if the bit of paper is an offer of marriage committed to the post, the hand may tremble and the heart leap in the breast. A dominant desire may create or reinforce other desires to a degree to which it is not easy to set limits.

56. THE HARMONIZATION OF DESIRES.--And it may actively repress other desires or cause them to dwindle and disappear. A man possessed by a devouring ambition may resolutely scorn delights to which he would otherwise be keenly susceptible, or he may simply ignore them without effort. The attention, fixed upon some chosen end, and busied with the means to its attainment, may leave them unheeded. Finding no place in the volitional pattern that occupies the mind, they are cast aside and soon forgotten.

In so far, hence, as the desires of a man tend to fall thus into groups converging upon a single end, we find not merely unity but harmony. The volitional pattern is of a given kind, and the colors which enter into it are selected.

When, however, we speak of the desires of a rational mind as harmonized, we do not mean that incompatible desires are reconciled. One cannot laugh and drink at the same time, nor can the desire for luxurious ease be made to fall upon the neck of the desire for attainment through strenuous effort. The final harmony attained resembles in some respects the peace enforced by the violent character depicted by Mark Twain, who would have peace at any price, and was willing to sacrifice to it the life and limb of the opposing party. The cessation of strife does not imply the satisfaction of all parties to a contest; nor does the fact that a life is controlled by a ruling motive, which reinforces or calls into being certain desires and robs others of their insistence, imply that by any device all the desires which man has, still less all that he, as a human being, might have, can find their satisfaction. Harmony is obtained at the price of the suppression of many desires; but, where a mind is strongly dominated by a comprehensive volitional unit, the price may be paid without much regret.

57. VARIETIES OF DOMINANT ENDS.--Obviously, the comprehensive and harmonious volitional complexes which may come to characterize different minds may be of very different complexion. Peace of mind, the bubble reputation, the ama.s.sing of a fortune, a happy domestic life, humanitarian effort, the perfecting of one's character--each may become the controlling end which furthers or inhibits individual desires and emotions. Or the ends may be such as to appear to most men far more insignificant. To the collection of first editions or the heaping together of bric-a-brac a man may sacrifice his financial security and the welfare of his family. Naturally, the moralist cannot put all such ends upon the same level; but, from the point of view of the psychologist, the processes which take place in the minds thus unified and harmonized are essentially the same.

58. AN OBJECTION ANSWERED.--To the position that it is reason or intelligence that brings about this unity and harmony an objection may be brought. It may be claimed that breadth of information and clarity of vision are quite compatible with highly inconsistent action revealing the temporary dominance of a succession of incongruous desires.

_Video meliora proboque, deteriora sequor_, confessed the Latin poet. Have we not seen men of the highest intelligence, gifted with foresight, quite capable of grasping the relation of means to ends, nevertheless subject to the baleful influence of momentary desires which drive them hither and thither like a rudderless bark at the mercy of the wind and tide? How does it happen that their intelligence does not help them?

To this we may answer that it is not the same thing to possess intelligence and to use it. One may be supplied with information and quite capable of taking long views and embracing inclusive ends--and the attention may be so preoccupied with the desire of the moment, that the voices of others are stifled. In so far as this is the case, the man can not, at the time, be said to be reasonable or intelligent. He has information, and acts as if he were ignorant; his choices do not issue as a resultant of his desires as a whole; there is no resultant; the single desires make their influence felt separately.

To be sure, an insistent and oft-recurring desire may introduce a good deal of unity and harmony into life, even where long views are not taken and there is little intelligence. The stupid egoist may become rather a consistent egoist, and increasingly so as he grows older. His desires and volitions may converge upon an end of which he is very imperfectly conscious; incompatible desires may come to be repressed. But this does not refute the position that, when reason or intelligence is supreme, the attention is directed upon a wide range of desires, they are weighed in the light of each other, and the ultimate decision is no longer blind, but fairly expresses the permanent push of the man's nature. Even where a desire or group of desires, unilluminated by intelligence, seems so insistent as to take on something of this character, complete unity and harmony of action may be lacking, due to the short-sightedness of the methods employed to attain to the chosen goal. Blind desires may easily defeat their own ends; wealth does not necessarily acc.u.mulate in proportion to a man's miserliness; the ardent but unenlightened philanthropist may do his fellow-man more harm than good. Long views are of no little service in weeding out inconsistent actions and introducing order and unity into life.

59. THIS VIEW OF REASON MISCONCEIVED.--In the above view of the function of reason or intelligence it has not been represented as issuing commands to perform certain actions rather than others, nor as furnis.h.i.+ng motives not in some way related to the impulses and desires of man. It has been treated, literally, as the presiding officer of a public a.s.sembly, who insists that every voice shall be heard; that all proposals shall be weighed and compared with one another; that the consequences of all shall be clearly foreseen. Its function is enlightenment; the driving force which impels to action of any sort has been found in the impulses and the desires.

It is possible to set this view forth in terms which make it highly unpalatable.

Thus Hume, who has a weakness for shocking the susceptibilities of the conservative and the sober-minded, startles us with the remark that "Reason is, and ought only to be, the slave of the pa.s.sions." [Footnote: A Treatise of Human Nature, iv, Sec 3.] This doctrine, taken as the average reader is almost inevitably impelled to take it, seems worthy of instant reprobation. It appears to degrade the rational in man and to exalt the blind and irrational.

But it is not fair to the doctrine to set it forth in such terms. There is no small difference between random and fugitive desires and those more fundamental desires that express truly the nature of a man. Desires organized and harmonized gain great strength, and are enabled to overcome and expel from the mind erratic impulses, the obedience to which may easily be followed by regret. Action taken without a clear foresight of consequences, with an imperfect conception of the relation of means to ends, is blind and irrational action. Reason, as bringing enlightenment, as making possible deliberation, as turning the incoherent clamors of a mob of inconsistent desires into the authoritative voice of an orderly deliberative a.s.sembly, is not a faculty to be lightly regarded.

Nor should it be forgotten that, neither to the plain man, nor to the moralist, do desires all stand upon the same level. He who bends his intellectual energies to the satisfaction of his greed, his avarice, his longing for revenge, may fairly be said to be prost.i.tuting his mind to the service of pa.s.sion. But is it a proper use of language to describe as the slave of his pa.s.sions the man whose thought is set upon the enlightenment of mankind, the alleviation of suffering, the service of a state, the attainment of a n.o.ble character? Were Socrates, St. Francis, Abraham Lincoln, Wilberforce, Thomas Hill Green, the slaves of their pa.s.sions? Yet these men were moved by certain dominant desires, and their unswerving pursuit of their goal was made possible only by the reason that harmonized their lives and subst.i.tuted deliberate purpose for random impulse.

The doctrine, then, that the reason is to be likened rather to the presiding officer of a deliberative a.s.sembly, concerned only to give every voice a fair hearing, than to a legislator issuing commands independently, may be so stated as not to shock the sober-minded.

And the doctrine recommends itself in showing that reason and inclination or desire are not enemies. The possession of reason must lead to the suppression of some desires--those incompatible with a comprehensive purpose deliberately embraced; but the desires and the reason or intelligence work together to a common end. On this view, it is not the rational man who is divided against himself; it is the short-sighted, the impulsive, the inconsistent, the irrational man. He is the prey of warring desires whose strife leads to no permanent peace under the guidance of reason.

60. ANOTHER VIEW OF REASON.--To certain minds this view of reason as the arbiter and reconciler of man's impulses and desires does not appeal.

Thus, Kant, whose doctrine will be more fully considered later, [Footnote: Chapter xxix.] holds that man's reason promulgates a law which takes no account of the impulses and desires of man. Thus, also, Henry Sidgwick, who differs from Kant in making the attainment of happiness the goal of human endeavor, and who, consequently, is not tempted to disregard the desires of man, yet refers to the reason independently certain maxims, which he regards as self-evident, touching our own good and the good of our neighbor. [Footnote: _The Methods of Ethics_, chapter iii.]

There are certain considerations which appear to favor the view that the reason is a faculty which may be regarded as an independent law-giver. A man may be possessed of great intelligence; he may be well-informed, acute in his reasonings, and consistent in his strivings to attain some comprehensive end, which, on the whole, appears congruous to his nature, such as it is. Yet we may regard him as highly unreasonable. Judged by some higher standard which we look upon as approved by reason, he is found to fall short. Is reason, then, synonymous with intelligence? Or is it something more--the source of an ultimate standard of action, intuitively known, and by which all man's actions must be judged? Upon this question light will be thrown in the pages following.

PART V

THE SOCIAL WILL

CHAPTER XVII

CHARACTERISTICS OF THE SOCIAL WILL

61. WHAT IS THE SOCIAL WILL?--The social will is not a mysterious ent.i.ty, separate and distinct from all individual wills. It is their resultant.

The resultant of two or more physical forces is a force; it has a character and may be described. The resultant of individual wills in interaction is a will with a given character which it is of no small importance for the moralist to comprehend. This will presents aspects closely a.n.a.logous to those presented by the will of the individual.

Thus, to begin with, a community of men may be said to will a vast number of things which have never been made by the members of the community the object of conscious reflection. It may unthinkingly move along the groove made for it by tradition. It may be intellectually upon so low a plane that even the possibility of acting in other ways does not occur to it.

Nevertheless, ways of action thus unthinkingly pursued cannot properly be said to be beyond the voluntary control of the community. A new situation may draw attention to the fact that they are unsatisfactory, lead to critical examination, to inhibition, to deliberate change. Between the pa.s.sive acceptance of actions prescribed by tradition and deliberate conscious choice in the presence of recognized alternatives there is no clear line of demarcation.

Under the pressure of circ.u.mstances or with the gradual increase of information and intelligence the traditional may undergo slight modifications which scarcely rank as conscious departures from what has been pa.s.sively accepted. The algebraic sum of such departures may, with the lapse of time, come to be by no means insignificant, yet no individual may have exercised in any considerable degree conscious reflection or shown in any large measure freedom of choice.

On the other hand, the social will may, at times, reveal itself in deliberate decisions, preceded by much conscious deliberation, and initiating wide departures from established usage. The presence of new enemies or a diminution of the food-supply may awake a primitive community from its lethargy, leading it to modify its habits and adjust itself to new conditions. A barbarous horde may set out upon a career of conquest, and may introduce revolutionary changes into its manner of life. A civilized nation may come to the conclusion that, in the course of human events, it has become necessary for it to dissolve the bands which have held it to another nation; it may frame for itself an independent const.i.tution, embodying new ideals and prescribing a new form of corporate life.

But, as in the case of the individual, so in that of the community, the tendency to fall again into a rut is always apparent. Laws, once enacted, lend a pa.s.sive resistance to change, even when they no longer serve well the ends they were intended to serve. The independence of thought and action revealed in the adoption of new const.i.tutions are not conspicuous in their maintenance. Man collective, as well as man individual, falls into habits, and he commits to his unthinking self what was wrought out by himself as thinking and consciously choosing. Pa.s.sive acceptance of the traditional again wins the day and becomes a ruling factor in action.

[Footnote: "It is indisputable that much the greatest part of mankind has never shown a particle of desire that its civil inst.i.tutions should be improved since the moment when external completeness was first given to them by their embodiment in some permanent record." MAINE, _Ancient Law_, chapter ii.]

This tendency to mechanization should not surprise us, for we meet with the phenomenon everywhere. The man who says, "Good-by" today does not mean "G.o.d be with thee," and the "Gruss Dich Gott" of the Bavarian peasant is very properly translated by the American child as "Hallo." The traditional tends to lose or to alter its meaning, but it continues to serve a purpose. A community without traditions, without settled ways of acting, followed, for the most part, without much reflection, would be in the position of a man without habits either good or bad. Human life as we know it could not go on upon such a basis. The rule has, at times, its inconveniences; but it leads somewhere, at least; whereas he who plunges into the unexplored forest may find every step a problem, and may come even to doubt whether any step is a step in advance.

62. SOCIAL WILL AND SOCIAL HABITS.--Within the province of the social will fall what may not inaptly be called the habits of a community--ways of acting acquired largely without premeditation and followed to a great extent through mere inertia. The province of the social will is a broad one. Deliberate choices; those half-conscious choices a.n.a.logous to the unheeded expressions of preference which fill the days of the individual; impulses and tendencies which scarcely emerge into the light--all are expressions of the social will.

In the next chapter I shall distinguish between customs proper and social habits in a broader sense. But, in discussing the general problem of the relation of habit to will, it is not necessary to mark the distinction.

Some habits rest upon us lightly; some are inveterate. Of some we are well aware; others have to be pointed out to us before we recognize that we have them. Some we approve, some we disapprove, to some we are indulgent or indifferent. All these peculiarities are found in the relation of the social will to social habits. It may recognize them, approve of them, encourage them. It may pay them little attention. It may disapprove them and strive to repress them. Will has brought them into being; it is will that maintains them; it is will that must modify or suppress them.

As a matter of fact, all communities do tend to change their habits, some more slowly, some more rapidly. And for its habits we hold a community responsible. Common sense refers them to its will, and exercises approval or disapproval. This it would not do were the practices upon which judgment is pa.s.sed recognized as beyond the control of will altogether.

63. SOCIAL WILL AND SOCIAL ORGANIZATION.--Under the general heading of the habits of a society it is not out of place to discuss its social and political organization.

The fact that there never was an original social contract, made with each other by men solitary and unrelated, with the deliberate intent of putting an end to the war of all against all, does not signify that the social state in which men find themselves is a something with which the human will has had, and has, nothing to do.

Social and political organization are the result of a secular process, but behind that process, as moving and directing forces, stand the will and the intelligence of man. The social and political organization of a community is not the creation of any single generation of men. Each generation is born into a given social setting, as the individual is born into the setting furnished by the community. This social setting, the heritage of the community from the past, may be compared to a great estate brought together by the efforts of a man's ancestors, and transmitted to him to hold intact, to add to, to squander, as he may be inclined. It is a product attained by man's nature in its struggle with environment, and that product may be modified by the same forces that made it what it is.

Into this heritage the generation of men who compose a community at any given time may enter with little thought of its significance, with no information, or with false information, touching the manner of its coming into being, and with small inclination to do anything save to leave unchanged the inst.i.tutions of which it finds itself possessed.

Nevertheless, the forms under which societies are organized are subject to the social will, and, if disapproved, are modified or abolished. Some change is taking place even where there is apparent immobility, as becomes evident when the history of inst.i.tutions is followed through long periods of time. The utmost that can be said is that, where intelligence is little developed and energy at a low ebb, the social will may bear the stamp of pa.s.sive acceptance of the inherited, rather than exhibit a tendency to innovation. _Will_ it remains, but we may hesitate to describe it as a _free will_.

It is at times forced upon our attention with unmistakable emphasis that the forms of social and political organization are under voluntary control. Momentous changes may be made deliberately, and with full consciousness of their significance. Among the more progressive nations in our day the duty of introducing innovations appears to be generally recognized: const.i.tutions are amended; the status of social cla.s.ses is made the object of legislation; even the domain of the family is invaded, as in legislation touching marriage and divorce. Men appear to feel themselves free to will deliberately the end that shall be served by the mechanism of the state, and to adapt that mechanism to the attainment of the end chosen.

64. THE SOCIAL WILL AND IDEAL ENDS.--The social will, like the wall of the individual, may manifest itself in decisions which it is obviously impossible to carry out to a completely successful issue. A community has a power of control over its members, but that control has its limits.

Even a man's actions cannot be completely controlled by the community of which he is a part. There are always individuals who violate rules, and to whom, as it would seem, no motive can be presented which is adequate to keep them in the rut prescribed by society.

Still less can the social will exercise full control over men's thoughts and feelings. Influenced to some degree they may be. A man may be kept in ignorance, or furnished with information calculated to determine his thought in a given direction. His emotions may be played upon; he may be exhorted, rewarded, punished. But thoughts and feelings are not open to direct inspection; they may be concealed or simulated. Much more readily than actions can they withdraw themselves from control.

Nevertheless, the social will may, and does, ignore all such limitations to its powers. Laws are not pa.s.sed to regulate the changes of the weather, which palpably fall outside the province of the law; but they are pa.s.sed to regulate the actions of men, which normally fall within it; that is, which can, to a very significant degree, be influenced by the att.i.tude of the social will. For the same reason laws may even take cognizance of men's thoughts. Of the accidental limitations of its power of control within the general sphere in which it has a meaning to speak of control, the social will is not compelled to take cognizance. It may set itself to encourage or repress certain types of character and conduct, and take measures to attain the end it has selected. That the measures taken should sometimes prove inadequate does not alter the fact of the choice of an end, nor does it obscure the revelation of the trend of the social will.

Thus, a community may be said to will that its members shall not be guilty of violence; it may will to live at peace with other communities; it may will to conquer and subjugate. Whether, in each case, the will shall be completely realized or not, may not be determined by the mere fact of its willing. Nevertheless, the permanent volitional att.i.tude may be unmistakably present, and may reveal itself in strivings toward the chosen goal. To describe this att.i.tude as no more than wis.h.i.+ng is manifestly to do it an injustice.