Page:Philosophical Review Volume 24.djvu/123

No. 1.] robbers and murderers, the social structure would fall to pieces and there would be a diminution of wealth, happiness, and welfare. It is true that the individual's chances of success and happiness would be diminished in a disordered society, that immorality as a universal law of life would defeat the very object of life. And it may be said, in general it is to the interest of the individuals of society to care for the public good. But it does not follow from this that the interest of this or that particular individual, in the sense of his pleasure, will be in every case, and so long as he lives, identical with the public happiness. If everybody behaved as certain captains of industry are said to have behaved, society would sink to the level of the primitive horde: in injuring others we (as a group) would be injuring ourselves (as a group). But the individual captain of industry who has succeeded in defrauding others without being found out can hardly be said to have damaged himself, to have diminished his pleasure-returns, to have robbed himself in robbing others. It may be true, as M. Novicow says, that it is not to the interest of judges as a class to sell themselves because judges receive the best treatment in countries in which judges do not sell themselves. But it may be to the interest of a particular judge to sell himself, nonetheless, in the sense that wealth will mean happiness for him personally; and the treatment of judges as a class may be a matter of perfect indifference to him. Only in case the judge is interested in something other than his own pleasant thrills can it be said to be to his interest to be honest. It is to the individual's real interest to be good, to respect the rights of his neighbor, provided we mean by his interest disinterested interest in others, provided we enlarge the notion of his self in the way in which philosophers like Green enlarged it. There is meaning in the statement that self-interest and morality are identical; but not in the sense that the particular thief is really robbing himself because if everybody followed this method of getting rich quickly, no one would get rich quickly. From the premise that universal theft destroys the welfare of the group it does not follow that a particular successful thief in a group in which theft is not universal will be unhappy.

The fourth edition of Professor Wundt's Ethics, which was first published in 1886 in a single volume, comprises three stately volumes, dealing respectively with the "Facts of the Moral Life," the "Development of the Moral World-Views," and the "Principles of Morality and the Departments of the Moral Life." The second edition (1892), from which an English translation was made (1897-1901), did not differ materially from the first; but the third edition, which appeared in 1903, underwent important changes, the part tracing the development of the systems of ethics having been almost entirely rewritten, and the sections on the will, the moral motives, the moral