society, i.e. a society where conduct has reached the stage of
complete adjustment to the needs of social life. Relative ethics,
on the other hand, is concerned only with such conduct as is
advantageous for that society which has not yet reached the
end of complete adaptation to its environment, i.e. which is at
present imperfect. It is hardly necessary to say that Spencer
does not tell us how to bring the two ethical systems into correlation.
And the actual criteria of conduct derived from biological
considerations are almost ludicrously inadequate. Conduct, e.g.,
is said to be more moral in proportion as it exhibits a tendency
on the part of the individual or society to become more
“definite,” “coherent” and “heterogeneous.” Or, again, we
should recognize as a test of the “authoritative” character of
moral ideas or feelings the fact that they are complex and representative,
referring to a remote rather than to a proximate
good, remembering the while that “the sense of duty is transitory,
and will diminish as fast as moralization increases.” In
fact, no acceptable scientific criterion emerges, and the outcome
of Spencer’s attempt to ascertain the laws of life and the conditions
of existence is either a restatement of the dictates of
the moral consciousness in vague and cumbrous quasi-scientific
phraseology, or the substitution of the meaningless test of
“survivability” as a standard of perfection for the usual and
intelligible standards of “good” and “right.”
A similar criticism might fairly be passed upon the majority of philosophers who approach ethics from the standpoint of evolution. Sir Leslie Stephen, for instance, wishes to substitute the conception of “social health” for that of universal happiness, and considers that the conditions Leslie Stephen. of social health are to be discovered by an examination of the “social organism” or of “social tissue,” the laws of which can be studied apart from those laws by which the individuals composing society regulate their conduct. “The social evolution means the evolution of a strong social tissue; the best type is the type implied by the strongest tissue.” But on the important question as to what constitutes the strongest social tissue, or to what extent the analogy between society as at present constituted and organic life is really applicable, we are left without certain guidance. The fact is that with few exceptions evolutionary moral philosophers evade the choice between alternatives which is always presented to them. They begin, for the most part, with a belief that in ethics as in other departments of human knowledge “the more developed must be interpreted by the less developed”—though frequently in the sequel complexity or posteriority of development is erected as a standard by means of which to judge the process of development itself. They are not content to write a history of moral development, applying to it the principles by which Darwinians seek to explain the development of animal life. But the search of origins frequently leads them into theories of the nature of that moral conduct whose origin they are anxious to find quite at variance with current and accepted beliefs concerning its nature. The discovery of the so-called evolution of morality out of non-moral conditions is very frequently an unconscious subterfuge by which the evolutionist hides the fact that he is making a priori judgments upon the value of the moral concepts held to be evolved. To accept such theories of the origin of morality would carry with it the conviction that what we took for “moral” conduct was in reality something very different, and has been so throughout its history. The legitimate inference which should follow would be the denial of the validity of those moral laws which have hitherto been regarded as absolute in character, and the substitution for all customary moral terms of an entirely new set based upon biological considerations. But it is precisely this, the only logical inference, which most evolutionary philosophers are unwilling to draw. They cannot give up their belief in customary morality. Professor Huxley maintained, for example, in a famous lecture that “the ethical progress of society depends not on imitating the cosmic process, still less in running away from it, but in combating it” (Romanes Lecture, ad fin.). And very frequently arguments are adduced by evolutionists to prove that men’s belief in the absolute character of moral precepts is one of the necessary means adopted by nature to carry out her designs for the social welfare of mankind. Yet the other alternative, to which such reasoning points, they are reluctant to accept. For the belief that moral obligation is absolute in character, that it is alike impossible to explain its origin and transcend its laws, would make the search for a scientific criterion of conduct to be deduced from the laws of life and conditions of existence meaningless, if not absurd.
Perhaps the one European thinker who has carried evolutionary principles in ethics to their logical conclusion is Friedrich Nietzsche. Almost any system of morality or immorality might find some justification in Nietzsche’s writings, which are extraordinarily chaotic and full of the Nietzsche. wildest exaggerations. Yet it has been a true instinct which has led popular opinion as testified to by current literature to find in Nietzsche the most orthodox exponent of Darwinian ideas in their application to ethics. For he saw clearly that to be successful evolutionary ethics must involve the “transvaluation of all values,” the “demoralization” of all ordinary current morality. He accepted frankly the glorification of brute strength, superior cunning and all the qualities necessary for success in the struggle for existence, to which the ethics of evolution necessarily tend. He proclaimed himself, before everything else, a physiologist, and looked to physiology to provide the ultimate standard for everything that has value; and though his own ethical code necessarily involves the disappearance of sympathy, love, toleration and all existing altruistic emotions, he yet in a sense finds room for them in such altruistic self-sacrifice as prepares the way for the higher man of the future. Thus, after a fashion, he is able to reconcile the conflicting claims of egoism and altruism and succeed where most apostles of evolution fail. The Christian virtues, sympathy for the weak, the suffering, &c., represent a necessary stage to be passed through in the evolution of the Übermensch, i.e. the stage when the weak and suffering combine in revolt against the strong. They are to be superseded, not so much because all social virtues are to be scorned and rejected, as because in their effects, i.e. in their tendency to perpetuate and prolong the existence of the weak and those who are least well equipped and endowed by nature, they are anti-social in character and inimical to the survival of the strongest and most vigorous type of humanity. Consequently Nietzsche in effect maintains the following paradoxical position: he explains the existence of altruism upon egoistical principles; he advocates the total abolition of all altruism by carrying these same egoistical principles to their logical conclusion; he nevertheless appeals to that moral instinct which makes men ready to sacrifice their own narrow personal interests to the higher good of society—an instinct profoundly altruistic in character—as the ultimate justification of the ethics he enunciates. Such a position is a reductio ad absurdum of the attempt to transcend the ultimate character of those intuitions and feelings which prompt men to benevolence. Thus, though incidentally there is much to be learned from Nietzsche, especially from his criticism of the ethics of pessimism, or from the strictures he passes upon the negative morality of extreme asceticism or quietism, his system inevitably provides its own refutation. For no philosophy which travesties the real course of history and distorts the moral facts is likely to commend itself to the sober judgment of mankind however brilliant be its exposition or ingenious its arguments. Finally, the conceptions of strength, power and masterfulness by which Nietzsche attempts to determine his own moral ideal, become, when examined, as relative and unsatisfactory as other criteria of moral action said to be deduced from evolutionary principles. Men desire strength or power not as ends but as means to ends beyond them; Nietzsche is most convincing when the Übermensch is left undefined. Imagined as ideal man, i.e. as morality depicts him, he becomes intelligible; imagined as Nietzsche describes him he reels back into the beast, and that distinction which chiefly separates man from the animal world out of which he has emerged, viz. his unique power of self-consciousness and self-criticism, is obliterated.
It was upon this crucial difficulty, i.e. the transition in the
