the individual. The moral reason, thus left in sole supremacy,
is represented as enunciating five ultimate principles,—those of
benevolence, justice, truth, purity and order. With a little
straining 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, “earnestness”
and “moral purpose,” 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 “that every man ought to
have his own.” Whewell, indeed, explains that this latter
formula must be practically interpreted by positive law, though
he inconsistently speaks as if it supplied a standard for judging
laws to be right or wrong. The principle of purity, again, “that
the lower parts of our nature ought to be subject to the higher,”
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 regard 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 becomes evanescent on closer inspection,
since it is not maintained 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 18th and 19th centuries has been developed with less care and consistency than might have been expected, in its statement of the fundamental axioms or intuitively known premises of moral reasoning. Intuitional and utilitarian schools.And if the controversy which this school has conducted with utilitarianism had turned principally on the determination of the matter of duty, there can be little doubt that it would have been forced into more serious and systematic 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 intuitionists 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 “moral obligation.” 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 Hutcheson that “general good” or “happiness” 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 “excess of pleasure over pain”—pleasures and pains being regarded as “differing in nothing but continuance or intensity.” 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 mortals, “What is right?” and “Why should I do it?” 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 disagreements, and caused no little confusion in ethical debate.
In Paley’s Principles of Moral and Political Philosophy[2] (1785), the link between general pleasure (the standard) and private pleasure or pain (the motive) is supplied by the conception of divine legislation. To be “obliged” is to be “urged by a violent motive resulting from the command Paley. of another”; in the case of moral obligation, the command proceeds from God, and the motive lies in the expectation of being rewarded and punished after this life. The commands of God are to be ascertained “from scripture and the light of nature combined.” Paley, however, holds that scripture is given less to teach morality than to illustrate it by example and enforce it by new sanctions and greater certainty, and that the light of nature makes it clear that God wills the happiness of his creatures. Hence, his method in deciding moral questions is chiefly that of estimating the tendency of actions to promote or diminish the general happiness. To meet the obvious objections to this method, based on the immediate happiness caused by admitted crimes (such as “knocking a rich villain on the head”), he lays stress on the necessity of general rules in any kind of legislation;[3] while, by urging the importance of forming and maintaining good habits, he partly evades the difficulty of calculating the consequences of particular actions. In this way the utilitarian method is freed from the subversive tendencies which Butler and others had discerned in it; as used by Paley, it merely explains the current moral and jural distinctions, exhibits the obvious basis of expediency which supports most of the received rules of law and morality and furnishes a simple solution, in harmony with common sense, of some perplexing casuistical questions. Thus (e.g.) “natural rights” become rights of which the general observance would be useful apart from the institution of civil government; as distinguished from the no less binding “adventitious rights,” the utility of which depends upon this institution. Private property is in this sense “natural” from its obvious advantages in encouraging
- ↑ We may observe that some recent writers, who would generally be included in this school, avoid in various ways the difficulty of constructing a code of external conduct. Sometimes they consider moral intuition as determining the comparative excellence of conflicting motives (James Martineau), 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 rightness or wrongness of individual acts—a view which obviously renders ethical reasoning practically superfluous.
- ↑
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, 1768–1774).
In this treatise, as in Paley’s, we find “every man’s own
satisfaction, the spring that actuates all his motives,” connected
with “general good, the root whereout all our rules of conduct and
sentiments of honour are to branch,” by means of natural theology
demonstrating the “unniggardly goodness of the author of nature.”
Tucker is also careful to explain that satisfaction or pleasure is
“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,” and again that by “general good” he means
“quantity of happiness,” to which “every pleasure that we do to our
neighbour is an addition.” 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 of Evil—as the following extracts will show:—“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 happiness 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. - ↑ It must be allowed that Paley’s application of this argument is somewhat loosely reasoned, and does not sufficiently distinguish the consequence of a single act of beneficent manslaughter from the consequences of a general permission to commit such acts.
