Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 8.djvu/627

Rh ETHICS 605 Stewart, whose Philosophy of the Active and Moral Poicers of Man (1828) contains the general view of lleid and Price, expounded with more neatness and grace, but without important original additions or modifications. Stewart lays stress on the obligation of justice as distinct from benevolence ; but his definition of justice represents it as essentially impartiality, a virtue which (as was just now said of Ileid s fourth principle) must equally find a place in the utilitarian or any other system that lays down uni versally applicable rules of morality. Afterwards, how ever, Stewart distinguishes &quot; integrity or honesty &quot; as a branch of justice concerned with the rights of other men, which form the subject of &quot; natural jurisprudence.&quot; In this. department he lays down the moral axiom &quot; that the labourer is entitled to the fruit of his own labour &quot; as the principle on which complete rights of property are founded ; maintaining that occupancy alone would only confer a transient right of possession during use. The only other principles which he discusses are veracity and fidelity to promises, gratitude being treated as a natural instinct prompting to a particular kind of just actions. It will be seen that neither Reid nor Stewart offers more than a very meagre and tentative contribution to that ethical science by which, as they maintain, the received rules of morality may be rationally deduced from intuitive first principles. A more ambitious attempt in the same 1. direction was made by Whewell in his Elements of Morality (184-6). Wbewell s general moral view differs from that of his Scotch predecessors chiefly in a point where we may trace the influence of Kant ; viz., in his rejection of self-love as an independent rational and govern ing principle, and his consequent refusal to admit happiness, apart from duty, as a reasonable end for the individual. The moral reason, thus left in sole supremacy, is represented as enunciating five ultimate principles, those of benevo lence, justice, truth, purity, and order. With a little strain ing these are made to correspond to five chief divisions of Jus, personal security (benevolence being opposed to the ill-will that commonly causes personal injuries), property, contract, marriage, and government ; while the first, second, and fourth, again, regulate respectively the three chief classes of human motives, affections, mental desires, and appetites. Thus the list, with the addition of two general principles, &quot; earnestness&quot; and &quot;moral purpose,&quot; has a certain air of systematic completeness. When, however, we look closer, we find that the principle of order, or obedience to government, is not seriously intended to imply the political absolutism which it seems to express, and which English common sense emphatically repudiates ; while the formula of justice is given in the tautological or perfectly indefinite proposition &quot;that every man ought to have his own.&quot; Whewell, indeed, explains that this latter formula must be practically interpreted by positive law, though he inconsist ently speaks as if it supplied a standard for judging laws to be right or wrong. The principle of purity, again, &quot; that the lower parts of our nature ought to be subject to the higher,&quot; merely particularizes that supremacy of reason over non-rational impulses which is involved in the very notion of reasoned morality. Thus, in short, if we ask for a clear and definite fundamental intuition, distinct from re- &quot;ard for happiness, we find really nothing in Whewell s doctrine except the single rule of veracity (including fidelity to promises) ; and even of this the axiomatic character be comes evanescent on closer inspection, since it is not main tained that the rule is practically unqualified, but only that it is practically undesirable to formulate its qualifications On the whole, it must be admitted that the doctrine of the intuitional school of the present and preceding century has been developed with less care and consistency than ini&quot;-ut have been expected, in its statement of the fundamen tal axioms or intuitively known premises of moral reasoning. Intui- And if the controversy which this school has conducted with tional utilitarianism had turned principally on the determination **!* of the matter of duty, there can be little doubt that it riau would have been forced into more serious and systematic schools, effort to define precisely and completely the principles and method on which we are to reason deductively to particular rules of conduct. 1 But in fact the difference between in- tuitionists and utilitarians as to the method of determining the particulars of the moral code was complicated with a more fundamental disagreement as to the very meaning of &quot; moral obligation.&quot; This Paley and Bentham (after Locke) interpreted as merely the effect on the will of the pleasures or pains attached to the observance or violation of moral rules, combining with this the doctrine of Cumberland or Hutcheson, that &quot; general good &quot; or &quot; happiness &quot; is the final end and standard of these rules ; while they eliminated all vagueness from the notion of general happiness by defining it to consist in &quot; excess of pleasure over pain &quot; pleasures and pains being regarded as &quot; differing in nothing but continuance or intensity.&quot; The utilitarian system gained an attractive air of simplicity by thus using a single perfectly clear notion pleasure and its negative quantity pain to answer both the fundamental questions of morals, &quot; Vhat is right 3 &quot; and &quot; Why should I do it ? &quot; But since there is no logical connexion between the answers that have thus come to be considered as one doctrine, this apparent unity and simplicity has really hidden fundamental disa greements, and caused no little confusion in current ethical debate. In Paley s Principles of Moral and Political Philosophy- Paley. 1 We may observe that some recent writers, vho would generally be included in this school, avoid in various ways the difficulty of construct ing a code of external conduct. Sometimes they consider moral intui tion as determining the comparative excellence of conflicting motives (James Martiueau), or the comparative quality of pleasures chosen (Laurie), which seems to be the same view in a hedonistic garb ; others hold that what is intuitively perceived is the lightness or wrongness ol individual acts, a view which obviously renders ethical reasoning prac tically superfluous. 8 The originality such as it is of Paley s system (as of Bentham s) lies in its method of working out details rather than in its principles of construction. Paley expressly acknowledges his obligations to the original and suggestive, though diffuse and whimsical, work of Abraham Tucker (Light of Nature Pursued, 1768-74). In this treatise, as in Paley s, we find &quot;every man s own satisfaction, the spring that actuates all his motives,&quot; connected with &quot;general good, the root whereout all our rules of conduct and sentiments of honour are to branch,&quot; by means of natural theology demonstrating the &quot; unniggardly goodness of the author of nature.&quot; Tucker is also careful to explain that satisfaction or pleasure is &quot; one and the same in kind, however much it may vary in degree,. . . whether a man is pleased with hearing music, seeing prospects, tasting dainties, performing laudable actions, or making agreeable reflections,&quot; and again that by &quot; general good &quot; he means &quot;&quot;quantity of happiness,&quot; to which &quot;every pleasure that we do to our neighbour is an addition.&quot; There is, however, in Tucker s theological link between private and general happiness a peculiar ingenuity which Paley s common sense has avoided. He argues that men having no free will have really no desert ; therefore the divine equity must ultimately distribute happiness in equal shares to all ; therefore I must ultimately increase my own happiness most by conduct that adds most to the general fund which Providence administers. But in fact the outline of Paley s utilitarianism is to be found a generation earlier, in Gay s dissertation prefixed to Law s edition of King s Origin ofvil,ns the following extracts will show : &quot;The idea of virtue is the conformity. to a rule of life, directing the actions of all rational creatures with respect to each other s happiness ; to which every one is always obliged .... Obligation is the necessity of doing or omitting something in order to be happy .... Full and complete obligation which will extend to all cases can only be that arising from the authority of God. . . . The will of God [so far as it directs behaviour to others] is the immediate rule or criterion of virtue .... but it is evident from the nature of God that he could have no other design in creating mankind than their happiness ; and therefore he wills their happiness ; therefore that my behaviour so far as it may be a means to the happiness of mankind should be .such ; so this happi ness of mankind may be said to be the criterion of virtue once removed- The same dissertation also contains the germ of Hartley s system, as we shall presently notice.