Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 8.djvu/620

Rh 598 ETHICS well as duration, and that the superior good is always to be preferred, and similarly the lesser evil ; that absence of a given amount of good is preferable to the presence of equi valent evil ; that future good or evil is to be regarded as much as present, if equally certain, and nearly as much if very probable. Objections, both general and special, might be urged by a Hobbist against these modes of formulating man s natural pursuit of self-interest ; but the serious controversy between Hobbism and modern Platonism did not relate to such principles as these, but to others which demand from the individual a (real or apparent) sacrifice for his fellows. Such are the evangelical principle of &quot;doing as you would be done by; &quot;the principle of justice, or &quot; giving every man his own, and letting him enjoy it without interference ; &quot; and especially what More states as the abstract formula of benevolence, that &quot; if it be good that one man should be supplied with the means of living well and happily, it is mathematically certain that it is doubly good that two should be so supplied, and so on.&quot; If we ask what motive any individual has to conform -to these social principles when they conflict with his natural desires, Cudworth gives no explicit reply, and the answer of More is hardly clear. On the one hand he maintains that these principles express an absolute good ; which is to be called intellectual because its essence and truth are defined and apprehended by the intellect. We might infer from this that the intellect, so judging, is itself the proper and complete determinant of the will, and that man, as a rational being, ought to aim at the realization of absolute good for its own sake. But this does not seem to be More s view. He explains that though absolute good is dis cerned by the intellect, the &quot;sweetness and flavour&quot; of it is apprehended, not by the intellect proper, but by what he calls a &quot; boniform faculty ; &quot; and it is in this sweetness and flavour that the motive to virtuous conduct lies ; ethics is the &quot; art of living well and happily,&quot; and true happiness lies in &quot; the pleasure which the soul derives from the sense of virtue.&quot; In short, Platonism, in More s mind, has been so far modernized that it turns out as hedonistic as Hob bism ; the difference between the two lies merely in the degree of refinement of the pleasure that is taken as ultimate end. It is to be observed that though More lays clown the abstract principle of regarding one s neighbour s good as much as one s own ith the full breadth with which Christianity inculcates it, yet when he afterwards comes to discuss and classify virtues he is too much under the influence of Platonic-Aristotelian thought to give a distinct place to benevolence, except under the old form of liberality. In this respect his system presents a striking contrast to Cumberland s, whose treatise De Leglbus Naturae (J672), though written like More s in Latin, is yet in its ethical Cumber- matter thoroughly modern. Cumberland is a thinker both land. original and comprehensive, who has furnished material to more than one better-known moralist ; but his academic prolixity and discursiveness, his academic language, and a want of clearness of view in spite of an elaborate display of exact and complete demonstration, have doomed his work to oblivion. At any rate he is noteworthy as having been the first to lay down that &quot;regard for the common good of all &quot; is the supreme rule of morality or Law of Nature, to which all other rules and virtues are strictly subordinate. So far he may be fairly called th3 precursor of modem utilitarianism. It is, however, important to notice that in his &quot; good &quot; is included not merely happiness but &quot; perfec tion ; &quot; and he does not even define perfection so as to exclude from it the notion of moral perfection or virtue, and save his theory from an obvious logical circle. A notion so vague could not possibly be used for determining the subordinate rules of morality with any precision; but in fact Cumberland does not attempt this ; his supreme principle is not designed to rectify, but merely to support and systematize, common morality. This principle, as was said, is conceived as strictly a law, and therefore referred to a lawgiver, God, and provided with a sanction in the effects of its observance or violation on the agent s happi ness. That the divine will is expressed by the proposition &quot; that all rationals should aim at the common good of all,&quot; Cumberland, &quot; not being so fortunate as to possess innate ideas,&quot; tries to prove by a long inductive examination of the evidences of man s essential sociality exhibited in his physical and mental constitution. His account of the sanction, again, is sufficiently comprehensive, including both the internal and the external rewards of virtue and punishments of vice ; and he, like later utilitarians, explains moral obligation to lie in the force exercised on the will by these sanctions ; but as to the precise manner in which individual is implicated with universal good, and the operation of either or both in determining volition, his view seems either indistinct or inconsistent. The clearness which we seek in vain from Cumberland is found to the fullest extent in a more famous writer, whose Essay on the Human Understanding (1690) was Loci already planned when Cumberland s treatise appeared. And yet Locke s ethical opinions have been widely mis understood ; since from a confusion between &quot; innate ideas &quot; and &quot; intuitions,&quot; which has been common in recent ethical discussion, it has been supposed that the founder of English empiricism must necessarily have been hostile to &quot; intui tional&quot; ethics. The truth is that, while Locke agrees entirely with Hobbes as to the egoistic basis of rational conduct, and the interpretation of &quot; good &quot; and &quot; evil &quot; as &quot;pleasure&quot; and &quot;pain, &quot;or that which is productive of pleasure and pain, he yet agrees entirely with Hobbes s opponents in holding ethical rules to be actually obligatory independently of political society, and capable of being scientifically constructed on principles intuitively known. This morality he conceives as the law of God, carefully distinguishing it, not only from civil law, but from the law of opinion or reputation, the varying moral standard by which men actually distribute praise and blame ; as being divine it is necessarily sanctioned by adequate rewards and punishments. He does not, indeed, speak of the scientific construction of this code as having been actually effected, but he affirms its possibility in language remarkably strong and decisive. &quot; The idea,&quot; he says, &quot; of a Supreme P&amp;gt;eing, infinite in power, goodness, and wisdom, whose workman ship we are, and upon whom we depend, and the idea of ourselves, as understanding rational beings, being such as are clear in us, would, I suppose, if duly considered and pursued, afford such foundations of our duty and rules of action, as might place morality among the sciences capable of demonstration, wherein, I doubt not, but from self-evi dent propositions, by necessary consequences as incontes- tible as those in mathematics, the measures of right and wrong might be made out. As Locke cannot consistently mean by God s &quot; goodness &quot; anything but the disposition to give pleasure, it would seem that the supreme rule of his system, as of Cumberland s, must prescribe universal benevolence ; though the only instances which he gives of intuitive moral truths are the purely formal propositions, &quot;No government allows absolute liberty,&quot; and &quot;Where there is no property there is no injustice.&quot; We might give, as a fair illustration of Locke s general Chrl conception of ethics, a system which is frequently repre sented as diametrically opposed to Lockism ; namely, that expounded in Clarke s Boyle lectures on the Being and Attributes of God (1704). It is true that Locke is not particularly concerned with the ethico-theolo- gical proposition which Clarke is most anxious to