IV.
Instincts in general are useful, not because they are infallible, much less because they are rational (for they are neither), but because they work quickly and are less capricious than are our less habitual impulses, and so, in common life, are our substitutes for reason. But, in theory, no act is good merely because the instinct called conscience approves of it; nor does conscience in any man always instinc¬ tively approve of good acts. Therefore conscience is, for the purpose of founding an ethical theory, as useless as if it were a mere fiction. It gives no foundation for moral distinctions.
To be sure, we must be understood as referring here not to the moral consciousness of man in its highest rational manifestations; for that there is a rational and well-founded moral consciousness we ourselves desire to show. The conscience that we criticise is conscience as an instinct. When people say that so and so is the right because the immediate declaration of conscience shows it to be the right, they generally mean that so and so is right because it feels right. And when moralists found their eth¬ ical doctrine on conscience, they are in great danger of making their whole appeal to mere feeling. But such mere feeling can only give us problems; it can¬ not solve problems. To illustrate by a notable case: When Butler, in analyzing the data of conscience, in his “ Dissertation of the Nature of Virtue,” comes upon the fact that benevolence, or the effort to in¬ crease the general happiness, is, for our common pop ular conscience, only a part of virtue, not in any sort the whole of it, he really discovers nothing- positive about the nature of virtue, but only gives us a very interesting problem about the nature of virtue. If benevolence were the sole basis of virtue, then, says Butler, for our conscience treachery and violence would be “no otherwise vicious than as foreseen likely to produce an overbalance of misery to society.” Therefore, he continues, “ if in any case a man could procure to himself as great advantage by an act of injustice as the whole foreseen inconvenience likely to be brought upon others by it would amount to, such a piece of injustice would not be faulty or vicious at all.” Even so, it would not be wrong, he points out, to take A’s property away and give it to B, if B’s happiness in getting it overbalanced A’s incon¬ venience and vexation in losing it. But since con¬ science disapproves of such actions, therefore, con¬ tinues Butler, “ the fact appears to be that we are constituted so as to condemn falsehood, unprovoked violence, injustice, and to approve of benevolence to some preferably to others, abstracted from all con¬ sideration, which conduct is likely to produce an overbalance of happiness or misery.” Were God’s “ moral character merely that of benevolence, yet ours is not so.” All this now shows how full of problems our uncriticised conscience is. It is the starting-point, not the guide, of moral controversies.
Conscience approves benevolence, and it also ap¬ proves the repression of benevolence in cases where justice, distributive or retributive, seems to the pop¬ ular mind to be opposed to benevolence. And when some moralist tries to reduce justice in all its forms to benevolence, the natural conscience is dissatisfied. Retribution it approves, not because retribution may ultimately increase happiness, but because retribu¬ tion seems good to it. And if the natural conscience is again appealed to, and is at last brought to admit that benevolence is, after all, really the highest end, and punishment only a means, then this appeal is simply a setting of conscience against itself. The popular conscience is, as an instinct, once for all confused and uncertain about the true relations of justice and benevolence. It is useless to ask this instinct to do what the natural conditions that made it never prepared it to do, namely, to make a system of morals. A thinker like Butler, with his serious¬ ness and depth of insight, defends the claims of con¬ science only by analyses which bring home to us that our conscience is a mystery, and that its asser¬ tions about all the deepest ethical questions become uncertain or confused as soon as we cross-question it. An instinct is, in short, like any other habit. You run fast down a familiar flight of stairs so long as you do not think what your feet are doing. Reflect upon your running, and ten chances to one you shall stumble. Even so conscience is a perfectly confident guide as long as you ask it no philosophical questions.
The objections here in question have been so frequently urged that it is hardly worth while for those who can feel their force to dwell on them very long. It is enough for the present purpose to add what all the moral skeptics from the time of the Sophists have insisted upon, namely, that the con sciences of various men, nations and races, are con¬ flicting in their judgments of acts. This objection, worthless when urged against a well-founded theory of the moral consciousness, is fatal to any theory that makes morality dependent upon a particular emo¬ tional or intellectual “ constitution ” of human nature, that declares morality to be known by men through one faculty or “ sense ” of a peculiar character. If there are many consciences, each claiming rank as the true conscience, and all conflicting, then the choice among these can only be made on the ground of something else than a conscience.
The caprices of moral instinct are not exhausted when one has enumerated, as nowadays men often do, as many practices as one can find approved or demanded by the consciences of filthy savages. Among civilized men, yes, in our own hearts, each of us can find numberless conflicting and capricious estimates of actions, and it has only a psychological interest to study them in detail, or to try to reduce them to any semblance of principle. Such con¬ science as we have about common matters is too eas¬ ily quieted; and, as a mere feeling, the conscience that can be called moral is not readily distinguish¬ able in this, or in any other respect, from a mere sense of propriety, from a reverence for custom, or from the fear of committing an offense against eti¬ quette. That certain blunders hurt us more than our lesser crimes, and that our remorse for them is like our remorse for venial immorality, only more intense, is nowadays a matter of frequent remark. You ride using another man’s season-ticket, or you \ \ tell a white lie, or speak an unkind word, and con¬ science, if a little used to such things, never winces. But you bow to the wrong man in the street, or you mispronounce a word, or you tip over a glass of wa¬ ter, and then you agonize about your shortcoming all day long, yes, from time to time for weeks. Such an impartial and independent judge is the feeling of what you ought to have done. Shall ethics be founded on feeling, which to-day is and to¬ morrow is cast into the oven?
The traditional answer of the advocates of con¬ science, when these facts are urged against them, is well known. They say, various less dignified mental tendencies may at times be mistaken for conscience; but the moral sense is real and trustworthy notwith¬ standing all these mistakes. Shame, or love of praise, or sense of propriety may pass themselves off as conscience; but the genuine conscience, when you find it, is infallible. But we may still rejoin that, if the difficulty is of this nature, the consequence must be very much the same as what we are insist¬ ing upon. For if the question can arise whether a given impulse in me, which I take to be conscience, really is the voice of the infallible conscience or not, then this question cannot be decided by appeal to conscience itself; since the very problem then is: “ Of two impulses, both pretending to represent con¬ science, which is the genuine conscience?” And questions of this sort must be appealed to some higher tribunal than the conflicting impulses them¬ selves. It will not be enough to apply even Antig¬ one’s sublime test to the warring impulses, and to say: This impulse is not of to-day nor of yesterday, and no man can tell whence it came, therefore it is the voice of infallible conscience. For, fine as that saying is, when applied to a genuine eternal truth, the test is not a sufficient one for us in our weakness to apply to the impulses that we find in our poor selves. For we soon forget whence came our preju¬ dices and even our bad habits, and we can fancy that to be of immemorial antiquity which has begun to be in our own parish, and within the memory of the old men. A child born in one of our far western settlements grows up amid a community that is a few years older than himself, and not as old as his eldest brother. Yet he shall look upon all these rickety, wooden houses, and half-graded streets, full of rubbish, as the outcome of an immense past; he shall hear of the settlement of the town as he hears of ancient history, and he shall reverence the oldest deserted, weather-beaten, rotting log-cabin of the place, with its mud chimney crumbling to dust, quite as much as a modern Athenian child may reverence the ruins of the Parthenon. A time when all these things were not, shall be beyond his conception.
Even so, if moral truth be eternal, we yet dare not undertake to judge what it is by merely examining ourselves to see what customs or tastes or moral judgments feel to our present selves as if they must have been eternal. Such absolute validity one might possibly feel as belonging to his mother’s way of mak¬ ing plum-pudding. Snow, to use a comparison of Aristotle’s, is as white after one day as if it had been lying untouched and unmelted for a thousand years. And high judicial authority lately expressed the opinion, a propos of a change in standard time, that usage may alter itself in a day as well as in a century, and be as authoritative in one case as in the other. Nothing feels older than a well-established custom, however recent it may be.
Conscience then cannot be recognized as infallible merely through the test of antiquity as judged by our feeling. Conscience furthermore, or emotions that pretend to the authority of conscience, may be found counseling or approving contradictory ways of action. Therefore conscience is no sufficient moral guide.
But even if all this were waived, if conscience were in actual agreement among all men, and if there were no difficulty in distinguishing the voice of conscience from the voice of passion, or from other prejudices or sentiments, it would remain true that no ultimate theory of the difference between right and wrong could be founded on the assertions of any instinct. Why an individual should obey his conscience unless he wishes to do so, cannot be made clear by conscience itself alone. Nor can the neces¬ sity and real truth of a distinction be made clear by the assertions of a faculty that, however dignified it may be, appears in the individual as a personal emo¬ tion, a prejudice or choice, determined by an im¬ pulse in him. Even if other people actually have this same impulse, that does not make their common prejudice necessary or rational. Conscience, if uni¬ versal, would still be only a physical fact. If* there are actually no differences among various consciences, it is still impossible to see why there might not be. And the possibility is as fatal to the authority of bare conscience as the reality would be. In conscience alone, without some higher rational test, there is no ground evident wherefore its decisions might not have been other than they are. But what the mor¬ alist wants is such a distinction between right and wrong as does not depend upon any mere accident of reality, even upon the accidental existence of a moral sense. He wants to find the eternal ethical truth. We insist then that one of the first questions of the moralist must be, why conscience in any given case is right. Or, to put the case otherwise, ethical doc¬ trine must tell us why, if the devil’s conscience ap¬ proves of the devil’s acts, as it well may do, the devil’s conscience is nevertheless in the wrong.
The discussion has, we imagine, after all, a practi¬ cal importance in a way not always sufficiently re¬ membered. In the name of conscience many crimes have been done. In the name of conscience men condemn whatever tends towards true moral prog¬ ress, so long as this new element is opposed to popu¬ lar prejudice. In the name of conscience they kill the prophets, and stone every one that is sent unto them. In the name of conscience wars are waged, whole tribes are destroyed, whole peoples are op¬ pressed. If conscience is the great practical guide in common life, conscience is also, in many great crises, the enemy of the new light. It is the sensi¬ tive and penetrating eye of the heart, but it is often blind before the coming day, even because it has been so useful to us in finding our way in the night.
It ought to be a commonplace of morals that there are certain times when the moral reason must cast aside the moral instinct, when the lover of the right must silence the voice of conscience. The more dan¬ gerous such moments are, the more dreadful the mis¬ takes that people at such times are apt to make, the more necessary it is that the moralist should dis¬ cover some criterion whereby to decide when instinct fails. And this criterion cannot be conscience it¬ self. We must seek yet deeper.
V.
V.
Our criticism of conscience is only another exam¬ ple of the method before applied to the criticism of the moral ideals. You make a distinction between right and wrong, you give to this distinction the dig¬ nity of a principle, you deduce special moral judg¬ ments therefrom. But then some one asks you for any foundation for the principle, beyond your own caprice. You thereupon seek to produce an ultimate reason for your faith. And your ultimate reason — what is it but some fact external to your choice and to your ideal judgments? But such dead exter¬ nal facts were just what you wanted to avoid. You had said that an ideal must have only an ideal foun¬ dation. And now you say that the ideally right thing depends on God’s nature, on the existence of the universal Reason, or on the assertions of Con¬ science. Say thus what you will, ' have you done what you intended? Have you made evidefit the necessity of your ideal? If, per impossibile, you suppose your present physical beliefs falsified, if the All-Fatner changed his mind, and came to hate his children, or if, per impossibile, the Devil triumphed, or the eternal Ideas melted away like snow, or the universal Reason became insane, or the Consciences of all men grew corrupt, would that alter the ideal for you? If the moral ideal assumes its desired position as judge of all things, then what matters it to the ideal if evil is triumphant in the world? “ Fiend, I defy thee with a calm, fixed mind,” the idealist will say, after the manner of Shelley’s Pro¬ metheus, and that however much the real world may threaten him. Therefore how can the Is pre¬ determine the Ought to be t But if the Ought to be be independent of the Is, how does discussion about the power of God, or his goodness, about the universality of conscience, or its inner strength as a feeling, affect our judgment of the ideal distinction between right and wrong?
Thus we are thrown back and forth between the conflicting demands of criticism. “ Give us a moral system that is no caprice of thine,” say the critics of one sort. That seems reasonable. Therefore we affirm, “ This system of ours is founded on a rock of eternal truth,” namely, on God’s will, or on the intui¬ tion of universal conscience, or on some like fact of the world. But thereupon other critics say to us. “ Wherein do you differ from those who say that might is right, or that success determines the right, or that whatever exists ought to exist? For after all you say, something that is, ought to be, merely because it is.” And always still other critics are \ present, to doubt whether we are right about God or conscience as physical facts. Such critics very plausibly say, “ Why found moral truth, which ought to be so secure and clear, on physical or metaphys¬ ical doctrines that are so often doubted and so hard to establish? ” Such is the general difficulty illustrated in the warfare of the moral ideals. They want some high¬ est judge to decide among them. If they seek this judge in the real world, they seem to endanger their idealism. If they seek their judge among them¬ selves, the warfare begins afresh. For what one of them can be the sole judge, when they are all judges one of another?
CHAPTER IV.
ALTRUISM AND EGOISM IN CERTAIN RECENT DIS¬ CUSSIONS But if the light that is in thee be darkness, how great is that dark¬ ness!
Not even yet have we exhausted the perplexities involved in this fundamental difficulty of moral theory. Some one may say: “Let the ideals in general take care of themselves. We are concerned in this world with individual and concrete duties. These at least are plain.” But these also involve questions concerning the ideal. Let us see then how the same difficulty that has beset the more general moral doctrines, returns to plague us in case of the theoretical treatment of one of these plain duties. Our discussion will here gain in definiteness what it loses in generality. Let us choose a concrete moral question, namely, the problem of the true ground of the moral distinctions and other moral relations be¬ tween what people nowadays like to call altruism and what they like to call egoism.
Upon what, then, if upon anything, is founded the moral precept: Thou shalt love thy neighbor as thy¬ self? Or is there any foundation for it at all? To be quite familiar in discussing this problem, let us take it as it appears in recent discussion. The \ answers of some recent moralists will illustrate for us afresh the great problem of ethics. W e shall find two classes of efforts made to solve the difficulty. On the one hand moralists appear whose tendency is mainly, although not always quite wholly realistic. They say that, assuming the selfish aim as from the beginning self-evident, the unselfish aim soon appears as a necessary concomitant and assistant of the self¬ ish aim. Such writers, from Hobbes to the present day, have insisted upon unselfishness as a more or less refined selfishness, the product of enlightenment. To this view one opposes very naturally the objec¬ tion that real unselfishness is thus in fact rendered impossible. The moral ideal resulting is therefore, whether right or wrong in itself, at all events at war with other well-known ideals. And hence the expla¬ nation satisfies nobody. One still lacks a judge to end the warfare.
On the other hand, however, more idealistic mor¬ alists have tried to make unselfishness dependent on some impulse, such as pity or sympathy, whose dic¬ tates shall be perfectly definite and self-evident, and yet not, like the supposed dictates of conscience, either abstract or mysterious. But to such a foun¬ dation one opposes very naturally again the objec¬ tion that all such judgments of feeling are capri¬ cious, that pity and sympathy are confused and deceitful feelings, wholly unfit to give moral insight, and that no ideal can be founded on the shifting sand of such realities.
The results of such criticisms will once more be skeptical, but the skepticism on which we are here insisting is so necessary a foundation for ethics, that we make no apology for dwelling upon it yet farther, devoting to the special problems suggested by these recent discussions of selfishness and unselfishness a separate chapter.
I.
I.
In a collection of Servian popular tales may be found one that runs somewhat as follows: Once there lived two brothers, of whom the elder was very in¬ cautious and wasteful, but always lucky, so that in spite of himself he grew constantly richer, while the younger, although very industrious and careful, was invariably unfortunate, so that at last he lost every¬ thing, and had to wander out into the wide world to beg. The poor wretch, after much suffering, resolved to go to no less a person than Fate himself, and to inquire wherefore he had been thus tormented. Long and dreadful wildernesses were passed, and finally the wanderer reached the gloomy house. Now visit¬ ors at Fate’s dwelling dare not begin to speak when they come, but must wait until Fate shall address them, and meanwhile must humbly do after Fate whatever he does. So the wanderer had to live in the house for several days, silent, and busily imitat¬ ing Fate’s behavior. He found that Fate lives not always in the same way, but on some days enjoys a golden bed, with a rich banquet and untold heaps of treasure scattered about; on some days again is surrounded with silver, and eats dainty but some¬ what plainer food; on some days has brazen and copper wealth only, with coarse food; and on some days, penniless and ragged, sleeps on the floor, digs the ground, and gnaws a crust. Each night he is asked by a supernatural voice: “ How shall those live who have this day been born? ” Fate always replies: “ As I have fared this day, so may they fare.”
Thus our beggar found the secret of his own mis¬ fortunes; for he had been born on a day of poverty. But when at last Fate broke the silence, the visitor begged him to tell whether there could be any way whereby he might escape from the consequences of his unlucky birth. “I will tell thee,” said Fate. “ Get thee home again, and ask thy brother to let thee adopt his little daughter. For she was born on one of the golden days. Adopting her, thou shalt thenceforth call whatever thou receivest her own. But never call anything thine. And so shalt thou be rich.” The beggar joyfully left Fate’s dreary house, with its sad round of days, and went back to the world of labor and hope. There, by following the advice that he had received, he became in fact very wealthy; since all that he undertook prospered. But the wealth was his adopted daughter’s. For always he called his gains hers. One day he grew however very weary of this, and said to himself: “ These fields and flocks and houses and treasures are not really hers. In truth I have earned them. They are mine.” No sooner had he spoken the fatal words than light¬ ning fell from heaven and began to burn his grainfields, and the floods rose to drown his flocks. So that terror-stricken the wretch fell on his fkce and cried: “Nay, nay, O Fate, I spoke no truth; they are not mine, but hers, liers alone.” And thereupon flame and flood vanished, and the man dwelt thence¬ forth in peace and plenty.
II.
The really deep thought that imperfectly expresses itself in this little Servian tale may suggest many sorts of reflections. Just now we shall busy our¬ selves with only one of the questions that are brought to mind by the story. Many who nowadays have much to say about what they call altruism, actually explain all altruism as a kind of selfish evasion of the consequences of cruder selfishness, so that at bottom they really counsel men much as Fate coun¬ seled the wanderer. They say in effect: “ To make thyself happy, do certain things called duties to thy neighbor. That we call altruism. Thou shalt have thy reward. For what is more useful to a man than a man? If therefore thou dost well to him, thou shalt make him in many ways of great service to thee. And so, to get happiness for thyself, see that thou be not openly merely a seeker of thy happi¬ ness; but call that which thou seekest his happiness. Calling it his will help to make it thine. Be selfish by casting aside grosser selfishness. Live for the others as the means of living for thyself. In co¬ operation is safety. Act therefore as a good mem¬ ber of the community, and thou shalt prosper. But such action requires altruism. As the man gave his wealth to his adopted daughter, so that he might own it himself and outwit his destiny, so must thou make thy interests into the interests of society, and by so doing be true to thyself.” But now such al¬ truism, as one at once sees, has no right to parade itself as genuine altruism at all, and if it be the end of conduct, there is no moral couduct distinct from cleverness. But if this be true, it is at least incum¬ bent upon the moralist to explain why the popular ideal of unselfishness is thus so very far wrong.
More or less disguised, the doctrine here generally stated appears in modern discussion since Hobbes. Let us follow it into some of its hiding-places, and to that end let us distinguish selfishness and unself¬ ishness as ideals or ends of conduct, from selfishness and unselfishness as means, accidentally useful to get an end.
III.
Altruism is the name of a tendency. Of what tendency? Is it the result or the intent that makes a deed altruistic? Was our hero an altruist when he gave to his adopted daughter the name and the enjoyment of a possessor of wealth? Or would he have needed in addition to all this a particular dis¬ position of mind ere he could be called an altruist?
We need not dispute about mere names as such. Let everybody apply the name Altruism as he will; but possibly we shall do well to recall to the reader’s mind what ought nowadays to be the merest com¬ monplace of ethics, namely, that we cannot regard any quality as moral or the reverse, in so far as the expression of it is an external accident, with* which the man himself and his deliberate aim have nothing to do. Ethical judgments deal with purposes. On any theory of right and wrong the man himself, not the accident of fortune, determines the moral char¬ acter of his act; and this view must be held equally whether one believes the man’s will to be free or to be bound. Hence the unforeseen or unintended out¬ come, or any other accidental accompaniment of my act, does not make me egoistic or altruistic in case egoism and altruism are to be qualities that have any moral character at all. If my property is acci¬ dentally destroyed by fire, and if the loss causes great damage to my creditors or to people dependent on me, the loss makes me no less or more an altruist, although I can no longer do good as before. If my purely selfish plan chances to do others good, I am no less an egoist, although I have made my fellows happy. In short, he who means anything, and does what he can to realize his intention, must be judged according to his intent. Circumstances control the outcome, and they make of the chance discoverer of the first bit of gold in a California mill-race a greater altruist, to judge solely by consequences, than a hero would be who sacrificed himself in a good cause, and lost the battle. But no moral system could make genuine saintliness out of the deed of the man who by chance has found what the world needed. And to take one more example, the power die stets das Bose will, und stets das Glute schafft, is not altruistic in the moral sense, however vast its creations may become.
All this we maintain, because, if you are morally criticising a disposition, you must study what it is,