(1672), though written like More’s in Latin, is yet in its ethical
matter thoroughly modern. Cumberland is a thinker both original
and comprehensive, and, in spite of defects in style and
clearness, he is noteworthy as having been the first to
lay down that “regard for the common good of all”
is the supreme rule of morality or law of nature. So far he may
be fairly called the precursor of later utilitarianism. His fundamental
principle and supreme “Law of Nature” is thus stated:
“The greatest possible benevolence of every rational agent
towards all the rest constitutes the happiest state of each and
all, so far as depends on their own power, and is necessarily
required for their happiness; accordingly Common Good will
be the Supreme Good.” It is, however, important to notice that
in his “good” is included not merely happiness but “perfection”;
and he does not even define perfection so as to exclude
from it the notion of absolute moral perfection and save his
theory from an obvious logical circle. A notion so vague could
not possibly be used with any precision for determining the
subordinate rules of morality; but in fact Cumberland does not
attempt this; his supreme principle is designed not 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
its effects on the agent’s happiness. That the divine will is
expressed by it, Cumberland, “not being so fortunate as to
possess innate ideas,” 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 is indistinct if not actually inconsistent.
The clearness which we seek in vain from Cumberland is found to the fullest extent in Locke, whose Essay on the Human Understanding (1690) was already planned when Cumberland’s treatise appeared. Yet Locke’s ethical opinions have been widely misunderstood; since from a confusion Locke. between “innate ideas” and “intuitions,” which has been common in recent ethical discussion, it has been supposed that the founder of English empiricism must necessarily have been hostile to “intuitional” ethics. The truth is that, while Locke agrees entirely with Hobbes as to the egoistic basis of rational conduct, and the interpretation of “good” and “evil” as “pleasure” and “pain,” 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,—though he does not regard these principles as implanted in the mind at birth. The aggregate of such rules 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. “The idea,” he says, “of a Supreme Being, infinite in power, goodness, and wisdom, whose workmanship 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-evident propositions, by necessary consequences as incontestable as those in mathematics, the measure of right and wrong might be made out.” As Locke cannot consistently mean by God’s “goodness” anything but the disposition to give pleasure, it might be inferred that the ultimate standard of right rules of action ought to be the common happiness of the beings affected by the action; but Locke does not explicitly adopt this standard. The only instances which he gives of intuitive moral truths are the purely formal propositions, “No government allows absolute liberty,” and “Where there is no property there is no injustice,”—neither of which has any evident connexion with the general happiness. As regards his conception of the Law of Nature, he takes it in the main immediately from Grotius and Pufendorf, more remotely from the Stoics and the Roman jurists.
We might give, as a fair illustration of Locke’s general conception of ethics, a system which is frequently represented 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-theological proposition which Clarke. Clarke is most anxious to maintain,—that the fundamental rules of morality are independent of arbitrary will, whether divine or human. But in his general view of ethical principles as being, like mathematical principles,[1] essentially truths of relation, Clarke is quite in accordance with Locke; while of the four fundamental rules that he expounds, Piety towards God, Equity, Benevolence and Sobriety (which includes self-preservation), the first is obtained, just as Locke suggests, by “comparing the idea” of man with the idea of an infinitely good and wise being on whom he depends; and the second and third are axioms self-evident on the consideration of the equality or similarity of human individuals as such. The principle of equity—that “whatever I judge reasonable or unreasonable for another to do for me, that by the same I declare reasonable or unreasonable that I in the like case should do for him,” is merely a formal statement of the golden rule of the gospel. We may observe that, in stating the principle of benevolence, “since the greater good is always most fit and reasonable to be done, every rational creature ought to do all the good it can to its fellow-creatures,” Clarke avowedly follows Cumberland, from whom he quotes the further sentence that “universal love and benevolence is as plainly the most direct, certain and effectual means to this good as the flowing of a point is to produce a line.” The quotation may remind us that the analogy between ethics and mathematics ought to be traced further back than Locke; in fact, it results from the influence exercised by Cartesianism over English thought generally, in the latter half of the 17th century. It must be allowed that Clarke is misled by the analogy to use general ethical terms (“fitness,” “agreement” of things, &c.), which overlook the essential distinction between what is and what ought to be; and even in one or two expressions to overleap this distinction extravagantly, as (e.g.) in saying that the man who “wilfully acts contrary to justice wills things to be what they are not and cannot be.” What he really means is less paradoxically stated in the general proposition that “originally and in reality it is natural and (morally speaking) necessary that the will should be determined in every action by the reason of the thing and the right of the case, as it is natural and (absolutely speaking) necessary that the understanding should submit to a demonstrated truth.” But though it is an essential point in Clarke’s view that what is right is to be done as such, apart from any consideration of pleasure or pain, it is to be inferred that he is not prepared to apply this doctrine in its unqualified form to such a creature as man, who is partly under the influence of irrational impulses. At least when he comes to argue the need of future rewards and punishments we find that his claim on behalf of morality is startlingly reduced. He now only contends that “virtue deserves to be chosen for its own sake, and vice to be avoided, though a man was sure for his own particular neither to gain nor lose anything by the practice of either.” He fully admits that the question is altered when vice is attended by pleasure and profit to the vicious man, virtue by loss and calamity; and even that it is “not truly reasonable that men by adhering to virtue should part with their lives,
- ↑ It should be noticed, however, that it is only in his treatment of Equity and Benevolence that he really follows out the mathematical analogy (cf. Sidgwick’s History of Ethics, 5th ed., pp. 180-181).
