him chiefly, in so far as he made a study of morality, was
the development of moral conduct in its preliminary stages.
Darwin. He was principally concerned to show that in morality,
as in other departments of human life, it was not
necessary to postulate a complete and abrupt gap between
human and merely animal existence, but that the instincts and
habits which contribute to survival in the struggle for existence
among animals develop into moral qualities which have a
similar value for the preservation of human and social life.
Regarding the social tendency as originally itself an instinct
developed out of parental or filial affection, he seems to suggest
that natural selection, which was the chief cause of its development
in the earlier stages, may very probably influence the
transition from purely tribal and social morality into morality
in its later and more complex forms. But he admits that natural
selection is not necessarily the only cause, and he refrains from
identifying the fully developed morality of civilized nations
with the “social instinct.” Moreover, he recognizes that
qualities, e.g. loyalty and sympathy, which may have been of
great service to the tribe in its primitive struggle for existence,
may become a positive hindrance to physical efficiency (leading
as they do to the preservation of the unfit) at a later stage.
Nevertheless to check our sympathy would lead to the “deterioration
of the noblest part of our nature,” and the question, which
is obviously of vital importance, whether we should obey the
dictates of reason, which would urge us only to such conduct
as is conducive to natural selection, or remain faithful to the
noblest part of our nature at the expense of reason, he leaves
unsolved.
It was in Herbert Spencer, the triumphant “buccinator novi temporis,” that the advocates of evolutionary ethics found their protagonist. Spencer looked to ideas derived from the biological sciences to provide a solution of all the enigmas of morality, as of most other departments of life; Spencer. and he conceived it “to be the business of moral science to deduce from the laws of life and the conditions of existence what kinds of action necessarily tend to produce happiness and what kinds to produce unhappiness.” It is clear, therefore, that any moral science which is to be of value must wait until the “laws of life” and “conditions of existence” have been satisfactorily determined, presumably by biology and the allied sciences; and there are few more melancholy instances of failure in philosophy than the paucity of the actual results attained by Spencer in his lifetime in his application of the so-called laws of evolution to human conduct—a failure recognized by Spencer himself. His own contribution to ethics was vitiated at the outset by the fact that he never shook himself free from the trammels of the philosophy which his own system was intended to supersede. He began by disclaiming any affinity to Utilitarianism on the part of his own philosophy. He pointed out that the principle of the greatest happiness of the greatest number is a principle without any definite meaning, since men are nowhere unanimous in their standard of happiness, but regard the conception of happiness rather as a problem to be solved than a test to be applied. Universal happiness would require omniscience to legislate for it and the “normal” or, as some would say, “perfect” man to desire it; neither of these conditions of its realization is at present in existence. Further, the principle that “everybody is to count for one, nobody for more than one,” is equally unsatisfactory. It may be taken to imply that the useless and the criminal should be entitled to as much happiness as the useful and the virtuous. While it gives no rule for private as distinct from public conduct, it provides no real guidance for the legislator. For neither happiness, nor the concrete means to happiness, nor finally the conditions of its realization can be distributed; and in the end “not general happiness becomes the ethical standard by which legislative action is to be guided, but universal justice.” Yet the implications of this latter conclusion Spencer never fully thought out. He accepted bodily without farther questioning the hedonistic psychology by which the Utilitarians sought to justify their theory while he rejected the theory itself. Good, e.g. defined by him “as conduct conducive to life,” is also further defined as that which is “conducive to a surplus of pleasures over pains.” Happiness, again, is always regarded as consisting in feeling, ultimately in pleasant feeling, and there is no attempt to apply the same principles of criticism which he had successfully applied to the Utilitarians’ “happiness” to the conception of “pleasure.” And, though he maintains as against the Utilitarians the existence of certain fundamental moral intuitions which have come to be quite independent of any present conscious experience of their utility, he yet holds that they are the results of accumulated racial experiences gradually organized and inherited. Finally, side by side with a theory of the nature of moral obligation thus fundamentally empirical and a posteriori in its outlook, he maintains in his account of justice the existence of the idea of justice as distinct from a mere sentiment, carrying with it an a priori belief in its existence and identical in its a priori and intuitive character with the ultimate criterion of Utilitarianism itself. The fact is that any close philosophical analysis of Spencer’s system of ethics can only result in the discovery of a multitude of mutually conflicting and for the most part logically untenable theories. It is frequently impossible to discover whether he wishes by an appeal to evolutionary principles to reinforce the sanctions and emphasize the absolute character of the traditional morality which in the main he accepts without question from the current opinions about conduct of his age, or whether he wishes to discredit and disprove the validity of that morality in order to substitute by the aid of the biological sciences a new ethical code. The argument, for instance, that intuitive and a priori beliefs gain their absolute character from the fact that they are the result of continued transmission and accumulation of past nervous modifications in the history of the race would, if taken seriously, lead us to the belief that ultimate ethical sanctions are to be sought, not by an appeal to the moral consciousness, but by the investigation of brain tissue and the relation of man’s bodily organism to its environment. Yet such a view would be totally at variance with much that Spencer says (especially in his treatment of justice) concerning the trustworthiness and inevitable character of men’s constant appeal to the intuitions of their moral consciousness. Moreover, the very fact itself of the possibility of inheriting acquired moral characteristics is still hotly debated by those biologists with whom should rest the ultimate verdict. Again, the argument that “conduct is good or bad according as its total effects are pleasurable or painful,” and that ultimately “pleasure-giving acts are life-sustaining acts,” seems to involve Spencer in a multitude of unverified assumptions and contradictory theories. In the first place it is never clear whether Spencer regards the fact that a particular course of conduct is accompanied by a feeling of pleasure as a test of its life-preserving and life-sustaining character, or whether he wishes us to use as our criterion of what is pleasant in conduct the fact that the conduct in question seems conducive to the continued existence of man’s organic life. He apparently passes from one criterion to the other as best suits the purpose of the moment. He does not prove the coincidence of life-sustaining and pleasant activities. He assumes throughout that the pleasant is the opposite of what is painful, and seems unaware of the difficulty of determining by means of terms so highly abstract the specific character of moral action. We find in his theory no satisfactory attempt to discriminate between the pleasure aimed at by the altruist and the immediate pleasure of egoistic action. Similarly he disregards the distinction between pleasant feeling as an immediate motive of conduct and the idea of the attainment of future pleasure whether by the race or by the individual. Spencer is involved in effect in most of the confusions and contradictions of hedonistic psychology.
Nor is his attempt to construct a scientific criterion out of data derived from the biological sciences productive of satisfactory results. He is hampered by a distinction between “absolute” and “relative” ethics definitely formulated in the last two chapters of The Data of Ethics. Absolute ethics would deal with such laws as would regulate the conduct of ideal man in an ideal
