The two qualities which seem to be most required in first principles of ethics are, (1) that they should afford a real explanation of the facts, (2) that they should inspire the mind, – should harmonize, strengthen, settle us. We can hardly estimate the influence which a simple principle such as 'Act so as to promote the happiness of mankind,' or 'Act so that the rule on which thou actest may be adopted as a law by all rational beings,' may exercise on the mind of an individual. They will often seem to open a new world to him, like the religious conceptions of faith or the spirit of God. The difficulties of ethics disappear when we do not suffer ourselves to be distracted between different points of view. But to maintain their hold on us, the general principles must also be psychologically true – they must agree with our experience, they must accord with the habits of our minds.
When we are told that actions are right or wrong only in so far as they tend towards happiness, we naturally ask what is meant by 'happiness.' For the term in the common use of language is only to a certain extent commensurate with moral good and evil. We should hardly say that a good man could be utterly miserable (Arist. Ethics), or place a bad man in the first rank of happiness. But yet, from various circumstances, the measure of a man's happiness may be out of all proportion to his desert. And if we insist on calling the good man alone happy, we shall be using the term in some new and transcendental sense, as synonymous with well-being. We have already seen that happiness includes the happiness of others as well as our own; we must now comprehend unconscious as well as conscious happiness under the same word. There is no harm in this extension of the meaning, but a word which admits of such an extension can hardly be made the basis of a philosophical system. The exactness which is required in philosophy will not allow us to comprehend under the same term two ideas so different as the subjective feeling of pleasure or happiness and the objective reality of a state which receives our moral approval.
Like Protarchus in the Philebus, we can give no answer to the question, 'What is that common quality which in all states of human life we call happiness? which includes the lower and the higher kind of happiness, and is the aim of the noblest, as well as of the meanest of mankind?' If we say 'Not pleasure, not virtue, not wisdom, nor yet any quality which we can abstract from these' – what then? After seeming to hover for a time on the verge of a great truth, we have gained only a truism.
Let us ask the question in another form. What is that which constitutes happiness, over and above the several ingredients of health, wealth, pleasure, virtue, knowledge, which are included under it? Perhaps we answer, 'The subjective feeling of them.' But this is very far from being coextensive with right. Or we may reply that happiness is the whole of which the above-mentioned are the parts. Still the question recurs, 'In what does the whole differ from all the parts?' And if we are unable to distinguish them, happiness will be the mere aggregate of the goods of life.
Again, while admitting that in all right action there is an element of happiness, we cannot help seeing that the utilitarian theory supplies a much easier explanation of some virtues than of others. Of many patriotic or benevolent actions we can give a straightforward account by their tendency to promote happiness. For the explanation of justice, on the other hand, we have to go a long way round. No man is indignant with a thief because he has not promoted the greatest happiness of the greatest number, but because he has done him a wrong. There is an immeasurable interval between a crime against property or life, and the omission of an act of charity or benevolence. Yet of this interval the utilitarian theory takes no cognizance. The greatest happiness principle strengthens our sense of positive duties towards others, but weakens our recognition of their rights. To promote in every way possible the happiness of others may be a counsel of perfection, but hardly seems to offer any ground for a theory of obligation. For admitting that our ideas of obligation are partly derived from religion and custom, yet they seem also to contain other essential elements which cannot be explained by the tendency of actions to promote happiness. Whence comes the necessity of them? Why are some actions rather than others which equally tend to the happiness of mankind imposed upon us with the authority of law? 'You ought' and 'you had better' are fundamental distinctions in human thought; and having such distinctions, why should we seek to efface and unsettle them?
Bentham and Mr. Mill are earnest in maintaining that happiness includes the happiness of others as well as of ourselves. But what two notions can be more opposed in many cases than these? Granting that in a perfect state of the world my own happiness and that of all other men would coincide, in the imperfect state they often diverge, and I cannot truly bridge over the difficulty by saying that men will always find pleasure in sacrificing themselves or in suffering for others. Upon the greatest happiness principle it is admitted that I am to have a share, and in consistency I should pursue my own happiness as impartially as that of my neighbour. But who can decide what proportion should be mine and what his, except on the principle that I am most likely to be deceived in my own favour, and had therefore better give the larger share, if not all, to him?
Further, it is admitted that utility and right coincide, not in particular instances, but in classes of actions. But is it not distracting to the conscience of a man to be told that in the particular case they are opposed? Happiness is said to be the ground of moral obligation, yet he must not do what clearly conduces to his own happiness if it is at variance with the good of the whole. Nay, further, he will be taught that when utility and right are in apparent conflict any amount of utility does not alter by a hair's-breadth the morality of actions, which cannot be allowed to deviate from established law or usage; and that the non-detection of an immoral act, say of telling a lie, which may often make the greatest difference in the consequences, not only to himself, but to all the world, makes none whatever in the act itself.
Again, if we are concerned not with particular actions but with classes of actions, is the tendency of actions to happiness a principle upon which we can classify them? There is a universal law which imperatively declares certain acts to be right or wrong: – can there be any universality in the law which measures actions by their tendencies towards happiness? For an act which is the cause of happiness to one person may be the cause of unhappiness to another; or an act which if performed by one person may increase the happiness of mankind may have the opposite effect if performed by another. Right can never be wrong, or wrong right, that there are no actions which tend to the happiness of mankind which may not under other circumstances tend to their unhappiness. Unless we say not only that all right actions tend to happiness, but that they tend to happiness in the same degree in which they are right (and in that case the word 'right' is plainer), we weaken the absoluteness of our moral standard; we reduce differences in kind to differences in degree; we obliterate the stamp which the authority of ages has set upon vice and crime.
Once more: turning from theory to practice we feel the importance of retaining the received distinctions of morality. Words such as truth, justice, honesty, virtue, love, have a simple meaning; they have become sacred to us, – 'the word of God' written on the human heart: to no other words can the same associations be attached. We cannot explain them adequately on principles of utility; in attempting to do so we rob them of their true character. We give them a meaning often paradoxical and distorted, and generally weaker than their signification in common language. And as words influence men's thoughts, we fear that the hold of morality may also be weakened, and the sense of duty impaired, if virtue and vice are explained only as the qualities which do or do not contribute to the pleasure of the world. In that very expression we seem to detect a false ring, for pleasure is individual not universal; we speak of eternal and immutable justice, but not of eternal and immutable pleasure; nor by any refinement can we avoid some taint of bodily sense adhering to the meaning of the word.
Again: the higher the view which men take of life, the more they lose sight of their own pleasure or interest. True religion is not working for a reward only, but is ready to work equally without a reward. It is not 'doing the will of God for the sake of eternal happiness,' but doing the will of God because it is best, whether rewarded or unrewarded. And this applies to others as well as to ourselves. For he who sacrifices himself for the good of others, does not sacrifice himself that they may be saved from the persecution which he endures for their sakes, but rather that they in their turn may be able to undergo similar sufferings, and like him stand fast in the truth. To promote their happiness is not his first object, but to elevate their moral nature. Both in his own case and that of others there may be happiness in the distance, but if there were no happiness he would equally act as he does. We are speaking of the highest and noblest natures; and a passing thought naturally arises in our minds, 'Whether that can be the first principle of morals which is hardly regarded in their own case by the greatest benefactors of mankind?'
The admissions that pleasures differ in kind, and that actions are already classified; the acknowledgment that happiness includes the happiness of others, as well as of ourselves; the confusion (not made by Aristotle) between conscious and unconscious happiness, or between happiness the energy and happiness the result of the energy, introduce uncertainty and inconsistency into the whole enquiry. We reason readily and cheerfully from a greatest happiness principle. But we find that utilitarians do not agree among themselves about the meaning of the word. Still less can they impart to others a common conception or conviction of the nature of happiness. The meaning of the word is always insensibly slipping away from us, into pleasure, out of pleasure, now appearing as the motive, now as the test of actions, and sometimes varying in successive sentences. And as in a mathematical demonstration an error in the original number disturbs the whole calculation which follows, this fundamental uncertainty about the word vitiates all the applications of it. Must we not admit that a notion so uncertain in meaning, so void of content, so at variance with common language and opinion, does not comply adequately with either of our two requirements? It can neither strike the imaginative faculty, nor give an explanation of phenomena which is in accordance with our individual experience. It is indefinite; it supplies only a partial account of human actions: it is one among many theories of philosophers. It may be compared with other notions, such as the chief good of Plato, which may be best expressed to us under the form of a harmony, or with Kant's obedience to law, which may be summed up under the word 'duty,' or with the Stoical 'Follow nature,' and seems to have no advantage over them. All of these present a certain aspect of moral truth. None of them are, or indeed profess to be, the only principle of morals.
And this brings us to speak of the most serious objection to the utilitarian system – its exclusiveness. There is no place for Kant or Hegel, for Plato and Aristotle alongside of it. They do not reject the greatest happiness principle, but it rejects them. Now the phenomena of moral action differ, and some are best explained upon one principle and some upon another: the virtue of justice seems to be naturally connected with one theory of morals, the virtues of temperance and benevolence with another. The characters of men also differ; and some are more attracted by one aspect of the truth, some by another. The firm stoical nature will conceive virtue under the conception of law, the philanthropist under that of doing good, the quietist under that of resignation, the enthusiast under that of faith or love. The upright man of the world will desire above all things that morality should be plain and fixed, and should use language in its ordinary sense. Persons of an imaginative temperament will generally be dissatisfied with the words 'utility' or 'pleasure': their principle of right is of a far higher character – what or where to be found they cannot always distinctly tell; – deduced from the laws of human nature, says one; resting on the will of God, says another; based upon some transcendental idea which animates more worlds than one, says a third:
on nomoi prokeintai upsipodes, ouranian di aithera teknothentes.
To satisfy an imaginative nature in any degree, the doctrine of utility must be so transfigured that it becomes altogether different and loses all simplicity.
But why, since there are different characters among men, should we not allow them to envisage morality accordingly, and be thankful to the great men who have provided for all of us modes and instruments of thought? Would the world have been better if there had been no Stoics or Kantists, no Platonists or Cartesians? No more than if the other pole of moral philosophy had been excluded. All men have principles which are above their practice; they admit premises which, if carried to their conclusions, are a sufficient basis of morals. In asserting liberty of speculation we are not encouraging individuals to make right or wrong for themselves, but only conceding that they may choose the form under which they prefer to contemplate them. Nor do we say that one of these aspects is as true and good as another; but that they all of them, if they are not mere sophisms and illusions, define and bring into relief some part of the truth which would have been obscure without their light. Why should we endeavour to bind all men within the limits of a single metaphysical conception? The necessary imperfection of language seems to require that we should view the same truth under more than one aspect.
We are living in the second age of utilitarianism, when the charm of novelty and the fervour of the first disciples has passed away. The doctrine is no longer stated in the forcible paradoxical manner of Bentham, but has to be adapted to meet objections; its corners are rubbed off, and the meaning of its most characteristic expressions is softened. The array of the enemy melts away when we approach him. The greatest happiness of the greatest number was a great original idea when enunciated by Bentham, which leavened a generation and has left its mark on thought and civilization in all succeeding times. His grasp of it had the intensity of genius. In the spirit of an ancient philosopher he would have denied that pleasures differed in kind, or that by happiness he meant anything but pleasure. He would perhaps have revolted us by his thoroughness. The 'guardianship of his doctrine' has passed into other hands; and now we seem to see its weak points, its ambiguities, its want of exactness while assuming the highest exactness, its one-sidedness, its paradoxical explanation of several of the virtues. No philosophy has ever stood this criticism of the next generation, though the founders of all of them have imagined that they were built upon a rock. And the utilitarian system, like others, has yielded to the inevitable analysis. Even in the opinion of 'her admirers she has been terribly damaged' (Phil.), and is no longer the only moral philosophy, but one among many which have contributed in various degrees to the intellectual progress of mankind.
But because the utilitarian philosophy can no longer claim 'the prize,' we must not refuse to acknowledge the great benefits conferred by it on the world. All philosophies are refuted in their turn, says the sceptic, and he looks forward to all future systems sharing the fate of the past. All philosophies remain, says the thinker; they have done a great work in their own day, and they supply posterity with aspects of the truth and with instruments of thought. Though they may be shorn of their glory, they retain their place in the organism of knowledge.
And still there remain many rules of morals which are better explained and more forcibly inculcated on the principle of utility than on any other. The question Will such and such an action promote the happiness of myself, my family, my country, the world? may check the rising feeling of pride or honour which would cause a quarrel, an estrangement, a war. 'How can I contribute to the greatest happiness of others?' is another form of the question which will be more attractive to the minds of many than a deduction of the duty of benevolence from a priori principles. In politics especially hardly any other argument can be allowed to have weight except the happiness of a people. All parties alike profess to aim at this, which though often used only as the disguise of self-interest has a great and real influence on the minds of statesmen. In religion, again, nothing can more tend to mitigate superstition than the belief that the good of man is also the will of God. This is an easy test to which the prejudices and superstitions of men may be brought: – whatever does not tend to the good of men is not of God. And the ideal of the greatest happiness of mankind, especially if believed to be the will of God, when compared with the actual fact, will be one of the strongest motives to do good to others.
On the other hand, when the temptation is to speak falsely, to be dishonest or unjust, or in any way to interfere with the rights of others, the argument that these actions regarded as a class will not conduce to the happiness of mankind, though true enough, seems to have less force than the feeling which is already implanted in the mind by conscience and authority. To resolve this feeling into the greatest happiness principle takes away from its sacred and authoritative character. The martyr will not go to the stake in order that he may promote the happiness of mankind, but for the sake of the truth: neither will the soldier advance to the cannon's mouth merely because he believes military discipline to be for the good of mankind. It is better for him to know that he will be shot, that he will be disgraced, if he runs away – he has no need to look beyond military honour, patriotism, 'England expects every man to do his duty.' These are stronger motives than the greatest happiness of the greatest number, which is the thesis of a philosopher, not the watchword of an army. For in human actions men do not always require broad principles; duties often come home to us more when they are limited and defined, and sanctioned by custom and public opinion.
Lastly, if we turn to the history of ethics, we shall find that our moral ideas have originated not in utility but in religion, in law, in conceptions of nature, of an ideal good, and the like. And many may be inclined to think that this conclusively disproves the claim of utility to be the basis of morals. But the utilitarian will fairly reply (see above) that we must distinguish the origin of ethics from the principles of them – the historical germ from the later growth of reflection. And he may also truly add that for two thousand years and more, utility, if not the originating, has been the great corrective principle in law, in politics, in religion, leading men to ask how evil may be diminished and good increased – by what course of policy the public interest may be promoted, and to understand that God wills the happiness, not of some of his creatures and in this world only, but of all of them and in every stage of their existence.
'What is the place of happiness or utility in a system of moral philosophy?' is analogous to the question asked in the Philebus, 'What rank does pleasure hold in the scale of goods?' Admitting the greatest happiness principle to be true and valuable, and the necessary foundation of that part of morals which relates to the consequences of actions, we still have to consider whether this or some other general notion is the highest principle of human life. We may try them in this comparison by three tests – definiteness, comprehensiveness, and motive power.
There are three subjective principles of morals, – sympathy, benevolence, self-love. But sympathy seems to rest morality on feelings which differ widely even in good men; benevolence and self-love torture one half of our virtuous actions into the likeness of the other. The greatest happiness principle, which includes both, has the advantage over all these in comprehensiveness, but the advantage is purchased at the expense of definiteness.
Again, there are the legal and political principles of morals – freedom, equality, rights of persons; 'Every man to count for one and no man for more than one,' 'Every man equal in the eye of the law and of the legislator.' There is also the other sort of political morality, which if not beginning with 'Might is right,' at any rate seeks to deduce our ideas of justice from the necessities of the state and of society. According to this view the greatest good of men is obedience to law: the best human government is a rational despotism, and the best idea which we can form of a divine being is that of a despot acting not wholly without regard to law and order. To such a view the present mixed state of the world, not wholly evil or wholly good, is supposed to be a witness. More we might desire to have, but are not permitted. Though a human tyrant would be intolerable, a divine tyrant is a very tolerable governor of the universe. This is the doctrine of Thrasymachus adapted to the public opinion of modern times.
There is yet a third view which combines the two: – freedom is obedience to the law, and the greatest order is also the greatest freedom; 'Act so that thy action may be the law of every intelligent being.' This view is noble and elevating; but it seems to err, like other transcendental principles of ethics, in being too abstract. For there is the same difficulty in connecting the idea of duty with particular duties as in bridging the gulf between phainomena and onta; and when, as in the system of Kant, this universal idea or law is held to be independent of space and time, such a mataion eidos becomes almost unmeaning.
Once more there are the religious principles of morals: – the will of God revealed in Scripture and in nature. No philosophy has supplied a sanction equal in authority to this, or a motive equal in strength to the belief in another life. Yet about these too we must ask What will of God? how revealed to us, and by what proofs? Religion, like happiness, is a word which has great influence apart from any consideration of its content: it may be for great good or for great evil. But true religion is the synthesis of religion and morality, beginning with divine perfection in which all human perfection is embodied. It moves among ideas of holiness, justice, love, wisdom, truth; these are to God, in whom they are personified, what the Platonic ideas are to the idea of good. It is the consciousness of the will of God that all men should be as he is. It lives in this world and is known to us only through the phenomena of this world, but it extends to worlds beyond. Ordinary religion which is alloyed with motives of this world may easily be in excess, may be fanatical, may be interested, may be the mask of ambition, may be perverted in a thousand ways. But of that religion which combines the will of God with our highest ideas of truth and right there can never be too much. This impossibility of excess is the note of divine moderation.
So then, having briefly passed in review the various principles of moral philosophy, we may now arrange our goods in order, though, like the reader of the Philebus, we have a difficulty in distinguishing the different aspects of them from one another, or defining the point at which the human passes into the divine.
First, the eternal will of God in this world and in another, – justice, holiness, wisdom, love, without succession of acts (ouch e genesis prosestin), which is known to us in part only, and reverenced by us as divine perfection.
Secondly, human perfection, or the fulfilment of the will of God in this world, and co-operation with his laws revealed to us by reason and experience, in nature, history, and in our own minds.
Thirdly, the elements of human perfection, – virtue, knowledge, and right opinion.
Fourthly, the external conditions of perfection, – health and the goods of life.
Fifthly, beauty and happiness, – the inward enjoyment of that which is best and fairest in this world and in the human soul.
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The Philebus is probably the latest in time of the writings of Plato with the exception of the Laws. We have in it therefore the last development of his philosophy. The extreme and one-sided doctrines of the Cynics and Cyrenaics are included in a larger whole; the relations of pleasure and knowledge to each other and to the good are authoritatively determined; the Eleatic Being and the Heraclitean Flux no longer divide the empire of thought; the Mind of Anaxagoras has become the Mind of God and of the World. The great distinction between pure and applied science for the first time has a place in philosophy; the natural claim of dialectic to be the Queen of the Sciences is once more affirmed. This latter is the bond of union which pervades the whole or nearly the whole of the Platonic writings. And here as in several other dialogues (Phaedrus, Republic, etc.) it is presented to us in a manner playful yet also serious, and sometimes as if the thought of it were too great for human utterance and came down from heaven direct. It is the organization of knowledge wonderful to think of at a time when knowledge itself could hardly be said to exist. It is this more than any other element which distinguishes Plato, not only from the presocratic philosophers, but from Socrates himself.
We have not yet reached the confines of Aristotle, but we make a somewhat nearer approach to him in the Philebus than in the earlier Platonic writings. The germs of logic are beginning to appear, but they are not collected into a whole, or made a separate science or system. Many thinkers of many different schools have to be interposed between the Parmenides or Philebus of Plato, and the Physics or Metaphysics of Aristotle. It is this interval upon which we have to fix our minds if we would rightly understand the character of the transition from one to the other. Plato and Aristotle do not dovetail into one another; nor does the one begin where the other ends; there is a gulf between them not to be measured by time, which in the fragmentary state of our knowledge it is impossible to bridge over. It follows that the one cannot be interpreted by the other. At any rate, it is not Plato who is to be interpreted by Aristotle, but Aristotle by Plato. Of all philosophy and of all art the true understanding is to be sought not in the afterthoughts of posterity, but in the elements out of which they have arisen. For the previous stage is a tendency towards the ideal at which they are aiming; the later is a declination or deviation from them, or even a perversion of them. No man's thoughts were ever so well expressed by his disciples as by himself.
But although Plato in the Philebus does not come into any close connexion with Aristotle, he is now a long way from himself and from the beginnings of his own philosophy. At the time of his death he left his system still incomplete; or he may be more truly said to have had no system, but to have lived in the successive stages or moments of metaphysical thought which presented themselves from time to time. The earlier discussions about universal ideas and definitions seem to have died away; the correlation of ideas has taken their place. The flowers of rhetoric and poetry have lost their freshness and charm; and a technical language has begun to supersede and overgrow them. But the power of thinking tends to increase with age, and the experience of life to widen and deepen. The good is summed up under categories which are not summa genera, but heads or gradations of thought. The question of pleasure and the relation of bodily pleasures to mental, which is hardly treated of elsewhere in Plato, is here analysed with great subtlety. The mean or measure is now made the first principle of good. Some of these questions reappear in Aristotle, as does also the distinction between metaphysics and mathematics. But there are many things in Plato which have been lost in Aristotle; and many things in Aristotle not to be found in Plato. The most remarkable deficiency in Aristotle is the disappearance of the Platonic dialectic, which in the Aristotelian school is only used in a comparatively unimportant and trivial sense. The most remarkable additions are the invention of the Syllogism, the conception of happiness as the foundation of morals, the reference of human actions to the standard of the better mind of the world, or of the one 'sensible man' or 'superior person.' His conception of ousia, or essence, is not an advance upon Plato, but a return to the poor and meagre abstractions of the Eleatic philosophy. The dry attempt to reduce the presocratic philosophy by his own rather arbitrary standard of the four causes, contrasts unfavourably with Plato's general discussion of the same subject (Sophist). To attempt further to sum up the differences between the two great philosophers would be out of place here. Any real discussion of their relation to one another must be preceded by an examination into the nature and character of the Aristotelian writings and the form in which they have come down to us. This enquiry is not really separable from an investigation of Theophrastus as well as Aristotle and of the remains of other schools of philosophy as well as of the Peripatetics. But, without entering on this wide field, even a superficial consideration of the logical and metaphysical works which pass under the name of Aristotle, whether we suppose them to have come directly from his hand or to be the tradition of his school, is sufficient to show how great was the mental activity which prevailed in the latter half of the fourth century B.C.; what eddies and whirlpools of controversies were surging in the chaos of thought, what transformations of the old philosophies were taking place everywhere, what eclecticisms and syncretisms and realisms and nominalisms were affecting the mind of Hellas. The decline of philosophy during this period is no less remarkable than the loss of freedom; and the two are not unconnected with each other. But of the multitudinous sea of opinions which were current in the age of Aristotle we have no exact account. We know of them from allusions only. And we cannot with advantage fill up the void of our knowledge by conjecture: we can only make allowance for our ignorance.