Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 8.djvu/625

Rh ETHICS G03 of his feeling with another s. By means of this primary element, compounded in various ways, Adam Smith ex plains all the different phenomena of the moral conscious ness. He takes first the semi-moral notion of &quot; propriety &quot; or &quot; decorum,&quot; and endeavours to show inductively that our application of this notion to the social behaviour of another is determined by our degree of sympathy with the feeling expressed in such behaviour. &quot; To approve of the passions of another as suitable to their objects i? the same thing as to sympathize with them.&quot; Similarly we disapprove of passion exhibited in a degree to which our sympathy cannot reach ; and even, too, when it falls short ; since, as he acutely points out, we often sympathize with the merely imagined feelings of others, and are thus disappointed, when we find the reality absent. Thus the prescriptions of good taste in the expression of feeling may be summed up in the principle, &quot; reduce or raise the expression to that with which spectators will sympathize.&quot; When the effort to restrain feeling is exhibited in a degree which surprises as well as pleases, it excites admiration as a virtue or excellence ; such excellences Adam Smith quaintly calls the &quot; awful and respectable,&quot; contrasting them with the &quot; amiable virtues&quot; which consist in the opposite effort to sympathize, when exhibited in a remarkable degree. From the sentiments of propriety and admiration we proceed to the sense of merit and demerit. Here a more complex pheno menon presents itself for analysis ; we have to distinguish in the sense of merit (1) a direct sympathy with the sentiments of the agent, and (2) an indirect sympathy with the gratitude of those who receive the benefit of his actions. In the case of demerit a direct anti pathy to the feelings of the misdoer takes the place of sympathy; but the chief part of the sentiment excited is sympathy with those injured by the misdeed. The object of this sympathetic resentment, impelling us to punish, is vhat we call injustice; and thus the remarkable stringency of the obligation to act justly is explained, since the recog nition of any action as unjust involves the admission that it may be forcibly obstructed or punished. To the obvious objection that we often approve and disapprove without sympathizing, it is replied that in such cases we correct or supplement present feelings by the general rules derived from preceding experience of our ordinary sentiments. Similarly the received maxims to which we commonly appeal as recognized standards of judgment are formed by the concurrent and mutually confirmed sympathies of man kind generally. Moral judgments, then, are expressions of the complex normal sympathy of an impartial spectator with the active impulses that prompt to and result from actions. &quot;When, however, such judgments are passed on our own con duct, a further complication of the fundamental element is required to explain them. What we call our conscience is really sympathy with the feelings of an imaginary impartial spectator looking at our conduct. Such a spectator, it is true, would not have full means for forming a judgment, but these we can supply in imagination; thus, &quot;praise worthy&quot; (as distinguished from actually praised) conduct may be defined as &quot; that with which an impartial and fully informed spectator would sympathize.&quot; That the general rules of morality impressed on us by this complicated play of sympathy are &quot;justly to be regarded as the laws of the Deity,&quot; Adam Smith takes care to assure us ; but it can hardly be said that his theory affords any cogent arguments for this conclusion, or in any way establishes these rules as objectively valid. In the same way Hume insists emphatically on the &quot; reality of moral obligation ; &quot; but is found to mean no more by this than the real existence of the likes and dislikes that human beings feel for each other s qualities. The fact was, that amid the observations ami analysis of feelings to which the moral sentimentalism of Shaftesbury s school had led, the fundamental ethical questions &quot;What is right&quot; and &quot;Why?&quot; had been allowed to drop into the back ground, and the consequent danger to morality was mani fest. The binding force of moral rules becomes evanes cent if we admit, with Hutcheson, that the &quot;sense&quot; of them may properly vary from man to man as the palate does ; and it seems only another way of putting Hume s doctrine, that reason is not concerned with the ends of action, to say that the mere existence of a moral sentiment is in itself no reason for obeying it. A reaction, in one form or another, against the tendency to dissolve ethics into psychology was inevitable; since mankind generally could not be so far absorbed by the interest of psychological hypo thesis as to forget their need of establishing practical prin ciples. It was obvious, too, that this reaction might take place in either of the two lines of thought, which, having been peacefully allied in Clarke and Cumberland, Lad become distinctly opposed to each other in Butler and Hutcheson. It might either fall back on the moral princi ples commonly accepted, and, affirming their objective validity, endeavour to exhibit them as a coherent and complete set of ultimate ethical truths ; or it might take the utility or conduciveness to pleasure, to which Hume had referred for the origin of most sentiments, as an ultimate end and standard by which these sentiments might be judged and corrected. The former is the line adopted with substantial agreement by Price, Reid, Stewart, and other members of the still existing Intuitional school ; the latter method, with considerably more divergence of view and treatment, was employed independently and almost simultaneously by Faley and Bentham in both ethics and politics, and is at the present time widely maintained under the name of Utilitarianism. Price s Review of the Chief Questions and Difficulties o/ Morals was published in 1757, two years before Adam Smith s treatise. In regarding moral ideas as derived from the &quot;intuition of truth or immediate discernment of the nature of things by the understanding,&quot; Price re vives the general view of the earlier school of rational moralists; but with several specific differences which it is important to notice. Firstly, his conception of &quot; right &quot; and &quot; wrong &quot; as &quot; single ideas &quot; incapable of definition or analysis the notions &quot;right,&quot; &quot;fit,&quot; &quot;ought,&quot; &quot; duty,&quot; &quot;obligation,&quot; being coincident or identical at least avoids the confusions into which Clarke and Wollaston had been led by pressing the analogy between ethical and physical truth. Secondly, the emotional element ( f the moral consciousness, on which attention had been con centrated by Shaftesbury and his followers, is henceforth distinctly recognized as accompanying (lie intellectual intui tion, though it is carefully subordinated to it. While right and wrong, in Price s view, are &quot; real objective qualities&quot; of actions, moral &quot;beauty and deformity &quot; aie subjective ideas; representing feelings which are partly the necessary effects of the perceptions of right and wrong in rational beings as such, partly due to an &quot;implanted sense&quot; or varying emotional susceptibility. Thus, both reason and sense or instinct co-operate in the impulse to virtuous conduct, though the rational element is primary and paramount. Price further distinguishes the perception of merit and demerit in agents as another accompaniment of the perception of right and wrong in actions ; the former being, however, only a peculiar species of the latter, since, to perceive merit in any one is to perceive that it is right to reward him. It is to be observed that both Price and Reid are careful to state that the merit of the agent depend? entirely on the intention or &quot; formal Tightness &quot; of his act ; a man is not blameworthy for unintended evil, though he