The preface to Readings in Ethics is as follows:
In the opinion that a knowledge of the history of philosophy is indispensable to further critical and constructive work, history seemed also the most desirable introduction to ethics. Moreover, the students ought to be acquainted with the sources rather than depend wholly on second-hand material. But of the text-books available, those solely historical gave no extended selections, the source-books were too comprehensive for a one term introductory course, and no book combined source and explanation. Such an ideal combination has been the distant goal of the present attempt.
In the preparation of this book the following division of labor has obtained. Chapters I-VII, IX-XI, XIII, are the work of Dr. Gordon H. Clark; chapters XII, XIV-XVII of Professor T. V. Smith; and chapter VIII was contributed by Dr. Francis Palmer Clarke of the University of Pennsylvania.
The first group of chapters makes free use of Selections in Ethics printed in 1928 by Mr. Thomas A. Cowan of the University of Pennsylvania as a temporary measure awaiting this publication. The author is happy to make due acknowledgement and also wishes to thank Dr. Francis Irwin for much valuable criticism. Especial acknowledgment is given to Professor Capps for his permission to quote, in the first part of the book, from those excellent translations of ancient writings, The Loeb Classical Library. Definite references are given with the several selections. (Preface, pg. v)
Each chapter contains an introduction to select material by a philosopher or movement. The following are the introductions to the chapters for which Clark was responsible (1-7, 9-11, 13). I'll be quoting from the second edition (1935).
1931.
Readings in Ethics. Gordon H. Clark and T.V. Smith, eds. New York: F.S. Crofts and Company.
Introduction, Chapter I, pgs. 3-8
When Socrates in the Phaedo was about to undertake a particularly intricate argument he warned his hearers against an all too frequent reaction. A man, without sufficient knowledge of an acquaintance’s character, trusts him implicitly and is disappointed. In the next situation, with as little knowledge, he relies on another person who also proves unfaithful. Through a number of such experiences he becomes a hater of mankind and concludes all men are thoroughly unreliable. This is hasty, Socrates insists. For though many be weak in character, yet some are of the highest integrity.
By this illustration, Socrates wishes to save his friends from becoming haters of reasoning. Some arguments, though few in number, are good. But since mediocre and bad arguments together outnumber those which can be trusted, all should be carefully scrutinized. Otherwise, when our misplaced trust is revealed, we may become misologists.
Even in the most abstract of subjects, such a warning is not out of place. In ethics it is almost indispensable. For when one may entertain skeptical opinions, say on symbolic logic, without undue stress resulting, ill advised moral beliefs may cause irreparable damage. Perhaps only a few students turn in action from the extreme of blind provincialism to a more foolhardy and equally unreflective radicalism. Yet no doubt many are caused a mental torture above what is necessary to that period of life.
To stabilize the student, one may recall that some disturbance is normal and unavoidable. And If we expect it, we can prepare for it. Plato gave the warning, in his delightful parable of “The Cave,” that such an experience was inevitable. He likens it to the blindness caused by leaving a dark cave and entering into the bright world of light above. Descartes, too, had the same experience, and for the benefit of those who were to follow, he writes a set of tentative rules. Just as one will not destroy his present home and live in the fields while a new one is a-building, but will rather prepare a temporary dwelling place until the new one is fit for occupancy, so he will live by those rules while examining his most important beliefs.
If Descartes, whose problems were not essentially moral, needed such, what must we do while examining the very rules which govern us? Are we to speak the truth while investigating the advisability of truth-speaking? Or should we give ourselves over unreservedly to lying at the first doubt? Or should we sometimes lie and sometimes be truthful as we proceed from one state of mind to the next? And the same questions apply to stealing and to all other vices and virtues.
First then we must write down, as Descartes did, those things we most believe to be true. “It is my duty to be honest.” “I ought always to tell the truth.” “Murder is a crime; adultery, a heinous pollution.” To these maxims, and whatever others we regard as sacred and fundamental, we must vow to be loyal, lest our immature reflection lead us to do what will cause us long and bitter remorse.
Having done these things, we are about ready to begin our study. In it we shall find many contradictory opinions and much confusion. But before we can judge of these contradictions we must endeavor to determine the purpose of the writer. It may be that two authors, or one author in two places, writing for different purposes, make statements that are only apparently conflicting and the confusion of which we are conscious may be in our own minds only. Therefore we must know what questions are being asked and to which question each answer belongs.
To formulate, then, the various questions that students of ethics have set for themselves, will be of great help. It will do most, we think, to remove the objection which too many students raise against too many courses, viz. “I studied it, but what is it all about?” If the student is to get any benefit from the course, he should have, at the beginning, at least a vague idea of what it is all about. But scholarly definitions are so loaded with intricate connotations that they are virtually meaningless to the novice. Instead then of a definition, we may do well to list some of these questions.
The very first question ever asked was, What things ought I to do? And every moralist since then has to some extent tried to answer. The early moralists occupied themselves chiefly with this one problem. Pythagoras gave his disciples rules for living, which range from the exalted insistence on loyal friendship to the command not to sit with the left leg crossed over the right. Among the Hebrews, God himself is said to answer in the books of the law. Such then are the results of asking, What things ought I to do?
The next question flows naturally and necessarily from the first. It is this, If I must be a loyal friend, if I must worship but on God only, what is meant by being a loyal friend, or what is meant by worshipping God? Owing to his life-long insistence on examining the meaning of the various virtues, the name of Socrates has been inseparably attached to this problem. If we must be just, what is justice? For if we do not know what justice is, how is it possible to be just, unless by accident, and this is no virtue?
Flowing as naturally from the second as the second flows from the first, comes the question, if the meanings of two virtues become mutually incompatible under certain conditions which is to be preferred? That virtues do sometimes conflict is testified by every consciousness. Who has not felt the opposing pulls of two duties? The answers to this problem are found in Plato and Aristotle, the Epicureans and in all those who, arranging the virtues in ascending and descending scales, try to tell us what is the Highest Good. Once we find what the Highest Good is, then virtues are better or worse as they are more or less effective means of attaining the Highest Good.
Another question, later in time but more fundamental in importance, becomes prominent in modern ethics. It is this: If we say murder is wrong and justice is right, why is it wrong or right? What is the basis of morality? What makes an act right or wrong? Is man under obligation to do anything? Or is all morality an illusion, foisted on one group of people by another?
These question, and especially the last, are by no means easy. For thousands of years men have been puzzling over them and the best we can do is to trust that we are coming nearer the final answer as time goes on. And as we study the answers that various men have given, and perhaps ourselves try to answer some, we must from first to last bear in mind just what kind of inferences are valid at various stages of our progress. If we are frightened at the possibility of morality’s being an illusion, or if we grasp that possibility as an excuse for the unrestrained exercise of our most primitive emotions, are the inferences on which we ground our action legitimate and valid? If, after a few hours’ study, we are unable to explain why moral obligation is binding on each individual, are we at liberty to conclude that it is not binding? And at each step we must be careful to draw no conclusion beyond the limits of our evidence.
Finally, is there any way of avoiding the mistakes of others? Can we approach nearer to the correct conclusions than have those preceding us? How can we be sure we are approaching truth rather than going in the opposite direction? Permit a question. Many students participate in athletics. Now, if the quarter-back lie in bed for two weeks thinking steadily about football, will he be better fitted for playing? Not only would he grow weak but would not his counterpane tactics be unsound as well? Clearly he must both think and check his thinking in practice.
Now, ethics has both a theoretical and a practical phase. To examine the meaning of justice requires intellect; to discharge our just obligations require will power and action. Aristotle emphasizes this latter aspect by describing virtue as an habitual manner of acting and therefore parents should make their children practice the correct actions which when repeated became the enjoyable habit of virtue. A selection will be quoted in which Aristotle compares this procedure to learning to play the harp. And the added implication must be noted that as the better harpist is the better judge of music so the more virtuously a man lives the better he can discern right from wrong. The former aspect, the intellectual, is emphasized in the early Platonic dialogues. This text book, then, must choose to be either an exhortation to form good habits or an investigation, rather the history of the investigations, of what “right” and “good” mean. It is frankly the latter. Some students have been disappointed with this approach because it seems so impractical, and recent writers have called attention to the need of the student, who, away from home for the first time, meets serious temptations. The authors are far from being uninterested in the students battle. Nothing would give them greater pleasure than to help him integrate his impulses and harmonize his interests with the highest good. But in the first place that is more effectually accomplished if not by the student himself then for him through personal contact; second, this is a course in philosophy and not a book of sermons. Yet philosophy is not ultimately impractical. If we cannot here solve the problems of fraternity politics, we hope to approach guiding principles applicable to all of life. The student must not expect too immediate a result, but the habit of reflection, which at its best the course is designed to initiate, if persisted in will be useful in all situations. The persistence, and therefore the good of the course, is the student’s affair. While the tutor may share the blame for an inefficient life, as some in the last few years have been protesting, it is pleasant for the tutor and wholesome for the student to believe that the major responsibility lies on the student himself. He already knows men whose ethical skill has degenerated into a faculty of inventing fallacious justification for acts they know to be wrong. Ethics may do the same for him, or it may help him to self-respect. That is determined not so much in the class room as in the dormitory, not so much in college as in life.
Pre-Platonic Period, Chapter II, pgs. 9-12
During the sixth century before Christ, the earliest thinkers made considerable progress in natural philosophy, but until the later half of the fifth century little systematic attention was paid to ethics. Whatever moral principles the earlier men had were at best but loosely related to their philosophy. Heraclitus of Ephesus (500) comes nearest to relating his ethical to his cosmological theories. Having argued that the world is composed fundamentally of fire, and that our soul is a spark from the original fire, he later adds “it is pleasure or death for souls to become moist… When a man is drunk he is led by the hand of a beardless boy, stumbling, not knowing whither he goes, for his soul is wet. A dry soul is wisest and best.” But there is no extended theory.
Pythagoras, who lived before Heraclitus, organized a politico-philosophical-religious brotherhood, which continued in existence through several centuries, teaching a mathematical philosophy and emphasizing a certain way of life. The obscurity of the logical connection between these two aspects of Pythagoreanism finally produced a schism in the school, yet not before Plato in his day learned to respect them in both particulars. In addition to their peculiar rules, such as, one must not eat beans, they emphasized the acknowledged virtues of piety, temperance, bravery and especially friendship. By living virtuously the soul, which is immortal, will merit a happy life after death. But again no system is worked out.
The men who first emphasized ethical speculation as against the study of physics were the Sophists. As early as 450 B. C., though more prominently from 425 to 375 the failure to find truth in nature became apparent. By means of a penetrating investigation of nature, and a constant dialectic among the rival schools, people began to see that not truth had been attained. For these reasons, the Sophists concluded that truth is impossible. Then moral truth also is impossible. Then we may act in any way we please. There is no right or wrong. The philosophical development necessitating this outcome is clean-cut. And, further, the social and political conditions aided the break-down of Greek morality. The geographical horizons, widened through the Persian wars, revealed strange customs which, after all, might be just as good, just as right, as the old Greek customs. The Peloponesian wars with their attending graft and violation of public rights made an easy approach to the violation of private rights. Poetry and the drama contributed their share by dissecting morality, discovering its diseased condition and embarrassing it with questions.* This did not of course occur all at once. The early Sophists did not profess the immorality which the later ones based on their teaching. Protagoras and Gorgias were respectable gentlemen but this could hardly be said of their successors, Thrasymachus and Callicles.
Against their doctrines, which will be reflected in the quotations from Plato, one forceful figure appears, Socrates.
Since Socrates unfortunately left no writings, our knowledge of him depends chiefly on the reports of two men intellectually very different from each other, Plato the philosopher and Xenophon the historian. In Plato’s dialogues, Socrates appears as the main character but while in the earlier dialogues we have an historical portrait, in the later ones Socrates becomes merely the mouthpiece of Platonic philosophy. Xenophon, a man of practical affairs, unable to appreciate Socrates’ real depth, instead of attributing too much philosophy to Socrates, took away much that he had and saw in him only an earnest convincing moral preacher. Yet by so doing, Xenophon saves us from considering Socrates – and in this respect Plato’s account is not altogether adequate – as a man with no positive convictions and the worst of the Sophists, the conception his enemies actually adopted. By fitting Xenophon and Plato together, then, and with the little that Aristotle adds, we can trace Socrates’ main position.
First, Socrates would not admit that truth was impossible of attainment. That sophistic conclusion was premature to say the least. Truth may be difficult to find, perhaps a single individual unaided may fail, but we are separated from truth by no impassable barrier. If the early physicists failed, it was because they used the wrong method; they were seeking in the wrong place. In so far as the Sophists denied the possibility of truth in natural science, they were right, but this should lead one to seek it in the psychological and moral field. And, besides, the way the Sophists made use of their skepticism shows that their conclusions were hasty. Though they deny knowledge is possible, yet they claim to be wiser than all others. They ridicule justice, piety, temperance, and yet do not know what they ridicule. A little questioning is all that is needed to prick the bubble of their conceit.
It was Socrates’ chief delight to meet a young Sophist in the market place, flatter him by agreeing with his own opinion of himself, and with a confession of ignorance, ask to be taught. Since Socrates could not remember long lectures, the young man was to teach by answering questions which he speedily found too subtle for him. Thus Socrates was forced to remain in his original ignorance. These negative results gained for him the reputation of being the most skeptical and dangerous person in Athens and it was on the charge of corrupting the youth that he was finally condemned to death. But Socrates was not confusing people just for the fun of it. He had a more profound purpose. Unless we find out what justice is, what courage, temperance, piety are, we can neither talk about them nor know what they command. The first task, then, is accurate definition of terms, and since there are more poor definitions than good ones, it is natural to expect more negative than positive results.
The method for discovering and testing definitions was also new with Socrates. It was induction. A definition, say of the beautiful, based on common knowledge, was proposed and then examined in the light of particular cases. Suppose the definition is, the beautiful is the useful, since blind eyes and decrepit race horses are ugly. But some things are very useful in doing evil and no one would include in the beautiful (fine, noble) that which is productive of evil. Hence the definition must be revised.
Without definition there can be no knowledge. Without knowledge there can be no virtue. Socrates assumed that everyone wants what is good for him, and if he knew how, would get it. Therefore all evil is the result of ignorance. To make the world a paradise, only education is needed. To the Greek mind it seemed impossible that a person could know what is good and deliberately choose evil. This facile assumption led to many an interesting paradox. The following quotation will illustrate not only the paradox by the Socratic irony and the inductive method. It is taken from Plato’s dialogue Lesser Hippias (371e to 376c).
* This period was one of unusual activity in many fields. Everyone knows something about its sculpture and architecture; the theatre, both tragic and comic, presents the model for ages to come; the political and military history, connected as it is with the civilization of the East, is of peculiar interest. The student is strongly urged, therefore, to spend a little leisure examining the life of these Greeks. What he finds will lend attraction to the scientific or philosophical development touched on in this course and after the final examination, when the course will be largely forgotten, it will remain with him as that vague, indescribable thing – “culture.”
Plato (427-347 B. C.), Chapter III, pgs. 21-25; 37-38
Of most philosophers we can state their precise positions, but no passage in Plato can be singled out with such definiteness. For his dialogues record at least three stages of development.* Probably the most brilliant, original, and profound thinker in the world’s history, he was constantly revising his opinions so that the earlier viewpoints differ in several respects from the later. Shortly after Socrates’ execution, Plato, his pupil for many years, wrote a series of dialogues to defend the memory of his master and to make known his method. These include, among others, Euthyphro, Apology, Crito, Protagoras the last of this group, and Lesser Hippias which we have quoted. A developing literary ability distinguishes them rather than their philosophical content.
During this period he seems to have considered the good in life to be its pleasure. Not that he was unprincipled or licentious; his disgust and withdrawal from Athenian politics in which, owing to his family connections, he might easily have been an important figure testifies to his earnest moral convictions. The pleasures of even the slightest immorality, as well as the aggravated greed of politicians brings pain. To live well, then, we should choose pleasures which produce more pleasure and never lead to pain. This position, a form of Hedonism, is expressed in the Protagoras, but as we find it more fully stated in later writers, we shall not quote this dialogue.
Some years later, Plato visited Tarentum in Italy where he met Archytas, a Pythagorean. The Pythagoreans were exponents of a “strenuous” morality as opposed to “easy-going” hedonism. Further, their system emphasized the basis which a future life afford morality, an element often lacking in hedonism. Plato, perhaps already aware of the difficulties of his youthful opinions, and wonderfully impressed by the new world of thought revealed to him, adopted several of their views and to the end of his life never relinquished his belief in immortality. The dialogues he then wrote present a system which may be called Middle or Standard Platonism, and include the transition period in Gorgia, and then Phaedo, Symposium, and the Republic. Although this is sometimes called Standard Platonism, his most original and profound work in the much later dialogues, Sophist, Politicus, Timaeus, and Philebus. These are much more difficult and do not contain so large a proportion of ethical material. However, there will be a selection from Philebus.
The swing from his early hedonism which held that good is identical with pleasure, to the strenuous morality of strict virtue was at first a little extreme. In the Phaedo, at least, if not in the Gorgias, he teaches that all pleasure is evil because it interferes with study. This asceticism he had to modify. Some pleasures, though not all, are legitimate and good, but this very statement implies a higher standard by which we are to judge pleasures. The readmission of pleasure as an element in the good life is found in the Republic but more conspicuously in the Philebus. Plato’s insistence on immorality, however, is not affected by this relaxing and mellowing of his ascetic period. That the activities of this life ought to be determined with regard to the character of the next is his conviction, not only in the Gorgias and Phaedo, but also in his very latest works.
The first selection, an argument against overestimating the value of pleasure, is taken from the dialogue Gorgias. Plato, because he considered oral discussion rather than written exposition the ideal method of philosophical instruction, wrote entirely in dialogue form. With the exception of the late dialogues, Socrates is the chief speaker and is the advocate for Plato’s views. The present dialogue consists of three conversations, one with Gorgias, one with Polus and one with Callicles. While discussing the nature of rhetoric with Gorgias, who is pictured as a powerful orator, Socrates is interrupted by Polus who wants explained a relevant ethical point. Granting that the orator sways the masses as Polus proudly claims, and thus controls the city, Socrates insists that the ability to do or have done what one thinks best is a dangerous power if one makes a mistake in thinking.
Because Polus at first wants to brush aside such reasoning as ethereal, Socrates presents his position in two compelling paradoxes: first, To do wrong is a greater evil than to suffer wrong at the hands of another; second, Having done wrong, it is worse to escape than to accept the punishment.
The proof depends on the common opinion that although to do wrong harms a man less, still it is more shameful than being harmed. But shameful means productive either of pain or evil or of both. To do a wrong obviously is not more painful, therefore is must be more evil if more shameful. Then by a further argument, comparing punishment to medicine, he shows that to escape punishment is far worse than being punished.
Callicles finds is impossible to accept either the argument or the conclusion. Polus was forced to the conclusion because he shamefully accepts the convention which calls dishonesty and injustice shameful. The Law of Nature, illustrated in the animal world, in international relations and in athletics, is that only the fittest survive. He alone is truly happy who, like the tyrant, can impose his will on all others. Conventional morality is slave morality, but the world belongs to the strong. Philosophy is a pleasant diversion for boys, but it is the man of action who does things. Might makes Right.
The frankness of this avowal pleases Socrates by he is unable to understand exactly what is meant by the “fittest,” “the strong” or “Might.” Evidently numerical strength is not intended, for this is how the masses have made the conventional morality to which Callicles objects. Nor does the world belong to the strong in the sense of the few wise men. It is absurd to give all the medicine to the physician and all the clothes to the tailor, simply because the one is wise in medical matters and the other in sartorial adornment. Rather he is strong who can impose his will on others, who rules but is not rules, even by himself. Self-control is slave morality. Luxury, licentiousness and liberty is Callicles’ demand. At this point the selection begins.**
* Our division of Plato’s ethical life into three periods is of methodological value even if its factuality be disputed.
** To make sure that the following selections are understood, the student should make an outline of the argument. As an aid for this selection and as a model for others this outline is suggested. Note that the underlying thought is that if Callicles is to condemn any kind of gratification whatsoever, he must distinguish between good and pleasure. An example of a very disgusting pleasure has been produced and Callicles inconsistently condemns it. But an example is not a proof, and therefore our selection is necessary.
To prove that Good Is not unconditional enjoyment.
Courage and Knowledge are different from pleasure.
If pleasure is identical with Good,
Then Courage and Knowledge are different from the Good, (not Good), Socrates will deny the conclusion for the following reasons.
To be happy and to be wretched are opposite states.
A person can not enjoy Good and suffer Evil at once.
Hunger itself is painful and eating pleasurable.
Since we eat while hungry, we enjoy pleasure and suffer pain at the same time.
Therefore pleasure is not the Good and pain not itself Evil.
Further, the pleasure and the pain cease together, whereas Good and Evil come and go alternately.
Second proof.
If pleasure and Good are identical, then the pleased man is the Good man.
This makes a moron as good as a scientist.
And a coward perhaps better than a hero.
Then after considerable argument not reproduced in this book, Plato explains in mythical form the relation of the future life to morality. The pagination is 495b to 499b and 524b to the end.
…
The development of Plato’s thought from the time he wrote the Gorgias until he wrote Philebus, the next selection, however engrossing to the reader and important to philosophy, can barely even be outlined in a few pages. While Plato forever remained satisfied with the general high moral tone of his position in the Gorgia, his argument, he thought, might be made more cogent and his views in some detail brought nearer the truth. At first he tended toward a more severe condemnation of pleasure. Taking as an historical setting the scene of Socrates’ death, the most appropriate and powerful literary device available for so solemn a purpose, he constructed, in a dialogue whose philosophic value is surpassed by only one or two of his most mature works, a well-reasoned apologetic for strict asceticism. Pleasure, at this stage of his life, he seemed to regard as a distinct evil on the ground that it interfered with the highest development of man’s personality. But later, forced by the recognition that some pleasures are indispensable to life itself, he began to admit “pure” pleasures into a properly balanced life.
As is was the custom in Greek literature, philosophy, and public opinion to regard four particular virtues as cardinal in importance, viz., justice, wisdom, courage, and temperance, each writer took pains to explain these four in detail. And since justice is a function of a government as well as a virtue of an individual, Plato, intensely interested in the welfare of his country, carefully worked out an ideal system of political science. In this work, the Republic, several times the length of his other dialogues, he gives interwoven sociological and psychological explanations of these four cardinal virtues. Plato never lost interest in the practical affairs of government. His last work of any importance, written in old age was the Laws, an attempt, lengthier than the Republic, to modify the ideal state to fit actual conditions. Philosophy for Plato was not something far removed from the issues of life. It was rather a method of living. And since one must live in an organized community one must know political science and ethics. This, in turn, presupposes a knowledge of human psychology. But since human beings are contained in a material universe, parts of which can be of use to them, a man who wishes to live most rationally ought to have a knowledge of physics and astronomy. This, in turn, requires mathematics. And mathematics is founded on the science of logic and epistemology. Thus in the period between the Republic and the Laws, Plato’s writings deal with the more profound or basic sciences; ethics reappears only in the Philebus and even here it is connected with intricate logical problems. Philebus was probably written just before the Laws. The rigorous asceticism of middle age is gone. Pleasure has a part in the good life. Nevertheless, he is willing to stand by his early views in the Gorgias. For of the five or six ingredients of the good life, pleasure, i.e. permissible pleasures, stands last.
Aristotle, Chapter IV, pgs. 53-59
At about the age a modern student enters college, Aristotle began formal study in the school of Plato. For twenty years, i.e. until Plato’s death, the world’s two most exceptional intellects enjoyed each other’s inspiration. But though so strangely close in time, in temperament they were strangely distant. While the Academy was the source of advanced mathematics Aristotle’s equipment and tendencies, as manifested in his books on animals, were biological. Some rumors assert that Aristotle became hostile to the Academy and even to Plato himself, and, furthered by the vast difference in literary style, less adequately shown by the Ethics than by the Metaphysics, there has arisen the feeling that Plato and Aristotle represent contrasting extremes in philosophy. This is exaggeration. While Aristotle discerned serious difficulties in Plato’s philosophy, and modified his system in important respects, yet very often it is nearer the truth to say that he systematized Plato’s more mature conclusions. A great deal of the Nicomachean Ethics, for example, is decidedly reminiscent of the various dialogues, though, as study shows, the former is not devoid of originality.
In the chapter on Plato it was necessary to omit large sections of his teaching. An important part of this concerned the Good, a concept of central importance. Before one can know the truth about virtue, before one can attain any truth at all, he must understand the Good. It is the source both of all knowledge and existence. This sort of transcendental Good, exceptionally subtle if not downright mysterious, Aristotle considers unintelligible. But the meaning of its minor manifestations, such as the good of a pruning-hook, to use Plato’s own illustration, (Rep. Bk. I), Aristotle can well utilize in a treatise on ethics without involving the student in a metaphysical Good of the universe. For ethics concerns the good of man, what is good for man and what is man good for. These two questions are intimately connected. Before we can know the science of pruning-hooks, it is necessary to discover their use and how to care for them. We must do the same for man considered as a voluntary agent if we are to acquire the science of human conduct. Everything, pruning-hook and man, has a purpose, or end of action. It has been made in order to accomplish a given function. If it do so, it is a good pruning-hood or, as the case may be, a good man. What, then, is the end or purpose of man?
Any system of ethics which takes its start from the purpose or function of man is called a teleological system. As was seen in Plato’s development, here it is well also to note how various concepts used in ethical theory presuppose philosophical or metaphysical enquiries of a more fundamental type. The concept of purpose has been a troublesome and difficult point in the construction of philosophic systems. Those who have struggled with it have often done so inadequately; some, who assume it without discussion, leave a serious lacuna in their thinking. And some, with more boldness than patience, deny there is any such thing. Aristotle considered, at least, that he had in other of his writings made the point sufficiently clear. He differs from Plato in refusing to subordinate all ends indiscriminately to one single universal end, the (Platonic) Good. Thus while his ethics is teleological, his complete system is not so in exactly the same sense as was Plato’s. But even denying a universal good, it still remains a logical possibility that the various ends to which a man can strive may be subsumed under one final human good. Granted that the activities of business have as an end the acquirement of wealth, it follows that in a series of actions the first action is done for the second, or has the second as an end, and the second the third until the final end, wealth, is attained. But the same man may initiate another series of actions which leads to the acquirement of esteem or honor. Can honor and wealth, and all other such ends be regarded as means to the final purpose of man or are there two or a few irreducibly ultimate ends? The problem of essential purpose is even more difficult than that of purpose; metaphysics must again be invoked. But for this course we restrict ourselves to discovering that Aristotle did not answer these questions with a categorical yes or no. They are not so simple as to exclude various distinctions. But by the choice of a single term Aristotle does seem to infer that there is one single end to which all human actions ultimately leads.
If we can select a word to denote this end, we may dispense with cumbrous phrases, but the selection of a name does not solve the problem. The word Happiness is chosen because of its connotations. The question remains, however, What is happiness? Just as before we asked, What is the ultimate end or purpose of human actions in general?
Before being specific, we know by definition that it is something final or ultimate, that is, it is an object we choose for its own sake and not as a means to something beyond. And likewise, if final it must be self-sufficient; it requires nothing else to make it absolutely desirable. To describe it explicitly, however, we must know the essential purpose of man, that purpose by which man is distinguished from all else. If this be known, the conclusion may be drawn that Happiness consists in a rational and virtuous life. Rational and virtuous now remain to be explained. But Aristotle insists that these explanations cannot compete in definiteness with those of mathematics. A child, aided merely by reference to apples or marbles, easily grasps the statement, twice two is four. And a little later in life geometrical principles are quite as easily deduced from a minimum of illustrations. The problems of ethics, on the other hand, present such complications that only with a wealth of experience can its principles be more or less vaguely discerned. Therefore it follows that children, with little knowledge of life, should receive practical moral training, rather than instruction in moral theory, and second, that even the reflective adult should not expect too great an accuracy in ethics. Indeed, to demand such accuracy shows one to be unreflective.
Although the nature of morality lacks the clarity and simplicity of mathematics, still we can analyze experience and arrive at conclusions sufficient for the guidance of life. For example, following the tendency which became more and more obvious in Plato as he advanced from the Republic to the Philebus, we see that virtue must be a median term between two extremes. To every virtue there are two corresponding vices. Take the case of generosity. If a man be too careless with his money we regard him as foolish and call him a spendthrift. If, on the other hand, he squeeze every penny, we say he is stingy. Thus generosity lies as middle term between prodigality and miserliness. We do not claim it lies exactly in the middle as equally removed from both extremes. Usually generosity is a little more akin to prodigality, but it is a point on a line deviation from which in either direction spoils, proportionately to the amount of deviation, the life of the agent. So while generosity or any virtue is a mean between extremes, yet in respect to value it is an extreme – the noblest course of action possible. The Nicomachean Ethics, which is the main source of Aristotle’s views of the matter, consists of ten books. So far, a few of the more important point in Book I and II have been mentioned. In Book III de discusses, for the first time in history, the vexatious problem of volition. After this discussion there follows to Book IX analyses of individual virtues in which Aristotle displays keen psychological insight into human nature and at the same time gives us a glimpse of the Greek way of looking at morality. It is in Book X that he continues with his more systematic presentation.
Contrasted with the ancients, modern custom has ben wording the moral problem perhaps in a more highly developed fashion but certainly more obscurely to the superficial. When we talk about right and wrong and our duties to other people, the none too conscientious man, if he conclude that obligation is a fraud on the public, may consider that by so recognizing it he has now dispensed with morality. The original phrasing of the problem did not permit such a self-deception. The question the Greeks asked was, what kind of a life is the best for man to live. Callicles, in answering, might reject all current notion, but, since any answer whatsoever states obligations and duties of some kind, he has not dispensed with moral theory. We have seen how Aristotle partially answered by making the best life one of virtuous activity.
But the nature of man, his purpose or function, is not exhausted in moral virtue. Animals displaying many, if not all, such virtues are the heroes of stories which delight dog-lovers or horsemen and illustrate what we might truly call human sagacity, courage, and sometimes trickery. If man is different from the animals, if there is more to his nature, we must turn away from those characteristics which he has in common with other animate objects and search for his essential purpose. It is found in intellect; he can, at least some can, study philosophy. His ability in intellectual pursuits differentiates man from all else; it is this which makes him a man, and if he is to be a good man this faculty must be developed to its acme.
The opening lines of the Metaphysics read: - “All men naturally desire knowledge. Their love of sense-perceptions illustrates it; for even apart from their utility they are appreciated for their own sake, and most of all the sense of sight. Not only in order to do things, but also when nothing is to be done, we choose sight, so to speak, rather than the others. The reason is that this of all the senses gives us the most information.” A little further on, Aristotle says that only after the necessities of life had been provided for by the craftsman did some have the leisure for intellectual development. They then found time to wonder. The sphere of their wonder grew from trivial banalities to the perplexing puzzles which have troubled philosophers ever since. “Thus,” says Aristotle, “if they too to philosophy to escape ignorance, it is patent that they were pursuing science for the sake of knowledge itself and not for any utilitarian applications.”
Plato, too, through his life, had been coming more and more to this opinion. While he was always interested in what knowledge would accomplish in actual political situations, and in the Republic prescribed that the philosopher should descend from the world above and help men, yet occasionally as in Theaetetus, he makes the philosopher a veritable stranger among men, ignorant of the affairs of this world, but calm and sober in the dizzy heights of speculation where the practical man would lose all balance.
A man cannot lead a good life without being morally virtuous; neither can he be a good man without intellectual excellence as well. He must practice contemplation, pursue knowledge for knowledge’s sake. Fully to understand what is meant by the contemplation of nature apart from utility one must compare Aristotle with those schools which denied that this was the highest form of life. The Epicureans and the Stoics, as the next two chapters will indicate, held no very high opinion of pure theory. Lives of pleasurable or virtuous activity were their respective ideals.
More thoroughgoing was the denial of Aristotle’s principles by the English Utilitarians and French Positivists. It is a long and intricate story, hardly proper material for an ethics text. But in short, at the dawn of modern experimental science, men had become disgusted with the scientifically sterile Aristotelianism prevalent through the Middle Ages. Experimenters began that series of investigations, discoveries, and inventions which has dazzled the contemporary mind. But at the same time, the thinkers of this period found it impossible to answer the questions, what is matter, what is electricity, what is gravitation? Their knowledge was limited to how these things acted. To know how things act is sufficient to use them for invention and since this is the dominant interest, it is not surprising that some should claim that the nature or essence of these things is unknowable, that man needs no knowledge in excess of his power, that the subjugation of nature for our utilization and not its contemplation for the satisfaction of our wonder is the ultimate aim in life. So the irony of fate opposes the scientific view of philosophy to the view of the father of most of the sciences. But however great the asce.c activity they had produced moral giants whom posterity ever admitted. The best known perhaps is the picturesque Diogenes whose preference for sunlight to Alexander the Great has been so frequently repeated. Typical, also, was his remark about the house of a gourmand which was up for sale; “being so filled with debauchery,” he said, “no wonder you vomit your owner.” It is undeniable that both the Cynics and the Cyrenaics were extreme. Their importance lies in their giving rise to two really great schools, Stoicism and Epicureanism respectively.
Shortly before 300 B. C. Epicurus founded in Athens a school which for more than five hundred years remained true to his principles. More adequately to appreciate the long history of these ancient schools, we can note that the University of Pennsylvania – one of the very few colleges organized before the Revolution – has not yet completed two hundred years. And even Oxford is short of the record of Plato’s Academy. Another point of passing interest is the prominence of open air instruction in antiquity. Whereas today we teach in class rooms almost exclusively, Aristotle used a grove of trees and Epicurus a garden.
To promote happiness, according to Epicurus, is the sole aim of philosophy. Mathematics, logic, and cultural subjects in general, he somewhat despised. Natural science, since it liberates us from superstition, is more useful. But the study of ethics is man’s most important occupation. The minimum of logic, which even the Epicureans required for the study of ethics, may be safely omitted here. The main points of their physics, however, should be kept in mind. The purpose of this science is to teach us that no divine providence governs the world. We learn that the gods – and there are gods strange to say – care nothing for man; they neither reward nor punish him. This lesson relieves us of superstitious fears. Further than that, physics is not to be pursued. The various possible hypotheses are all good, except the one which affirms God’s care. Detailed problems, such as, whether the same sun rises every morning or every day has a new sun; why the moon waxes and wanes, concerning which there were many theories current; whether the moon shines with a borrowed light or with its own; all these detailed problems are not worth bothering about. Physics is to free us from superstition, and that is sufficient. It succeeds by assuming that nothing exists but matter in purposeless motion. We do not have a tongue in order to speak; it just happens we have a tongue and by accident we can speak. The atoms of matter, which in moving accidentally form men and things, do not always obey fixed laws. Every once in a while, an atom happens to jump out of its course. This peculiarity, which is called chance, or an uncaused declination, is the reason that man, a composite of such atoms, is free from mechanical law. And of all the concepts which in the history of ethics have been thought essential to man’s responsibility and hence to morality itself, none has been more emphasized and abused than freedom. Stoicism, as we shall see, takes quite an opposite attitude on this question.
Man’s aim is to live happily, and for Epicurus happiness means pleasure. His improvement upon the Cyrenaics consists in his including, first, mental as well as sensual pleasures, second, future as well as present pleasures, and, third, negative rather than positive pleasures. First, contentment of mind, freedom from anxiety, is of greater value than the elaborate feasts which so delighted Aristippus. And this harmonizes with the second point, because sense-pleasures bring pain, but contentment never does. Regard for the future is so important in the system that prudence is the highest virtue. And insistence on prudence leads us to conceptions one little expects in egoistic hedonism. To prevent mutual harm, Epicurus will be perfectly just, and even secret injustice is to be avoided on account of the anxiety it entails. The same reasoning leads one to a high estimate of friendship. Indeed an Epicurean will even die for a friend. This, as the student will notice when he reads Epicurus’ paragraphs on death, is inconsistent with his system… The inconsistency of dying for a friend is the more evident when we hear he would not become a father, nor enter politics because of the inconveniences involved.
The third point was his choice of negative rather than positive pleasures. Intense sense-pleasures are a strain. They involve future pain and require, in many cases, increased stimulation. If one draw a curve crossing and recrossing a horizontal line, the high peaks, representing intense positive pleasure, are followed by deep troughs of pain. A small strip lying just above the line will stand for negative pleasure. Man’s best life, then, can be represented by a slightly wavy line hovering just above the horizontal. This schematization may not be entirely adequate or exact. By intensity of pleasure one is not to understand a greatness in amount. Corn and water and simple fare give the most extreme pleasure when anyone needs them, but he do not ordinarily call a plain meal an intense pleasure. Pleasure, for the Epicureans, seems to be nothing more than the complete absence of pain or rather this is the greatest amount of pleasure possible. When once all pain is removed, the pleasure may vary but can never be increased.
Thus it will be seen that the term “epicurean” applied opprobriously is an unhistorical usage. Whenever today we condemn indulgence in food and drink, we may say Epicurean, but we mean Cyrenaic.
Stoicism, Chapter VI, pgs. 96-101
The turning of a few pages in a text book hardly suffices to indicate the passing of a century with its changes. In governmental affairs Plato’s ideal republic had succumbed to the principles of Callicles, in philosophy, drama, and art Athen’s glory was gone forever. Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle; Aeschylus, Sophocles and Euripides; Polygnotus, Phidias and Praxiteles, were geniuses without successors. Those who did succeed were not Athenians, nor were they geniuses; but the founded schools of wide-spread influence. We have finished with one.
And now, before the men of Athens stands a Semite teaching a new doctrine, which, in some respects, was reechoed by another Semite three hundred years later as he spoke to the school the former had founded, saying: “God… dwelleth not in temples made with hands, neither is worshipped with men’s hands as though he needeth anything, seeing he giveth to all, life and breath and all things,… for in him we live and move and have our being.” Where these immortal words were proclaimed to some who listened and to some who laughed, there stood three centuries previously, Zeno (342-270 B. C.), the founder of Stoicism.
Forced by shipwreck to land in Athens, this son of a Phoenician merchant was first attracted to the rigorous morality of the Cynics. And though their crudities finally repelled him, their self-control left an eternal mark on his soul. Zeno then studied with all the leading teachers and eventually launched his own program, Stoicism. His successor, Cleanthes, head of the Stoa (264-232 B. C.), being more capable in literature than in philosophy, nearly ruined the school, though his fine qualities won the personal admiration of great numbers. After him, Chrysippus vigorously reestablished Zeno’s work, (232-206 B. C.), systematized the doctrine, and left Stoicism a powerful institution. For more than four centuries Stoic influence not only molded the philosophies and consciences of men, but in Cicero and Marcus Aurelius directed the affairs of an empire as well.
Epicurean philosophy remained always the same; Stoicism shows change and development and may for elementary purposes be divided into a Greek and a Roman period. In both periods the Stoics were called upon to resist social degeneration, to convert Callicles or Catiline to the principles of clean living and honest government. The Last Days of Pompeii by Edward Bulwer (Lord) Lytton, and Sienkiewicz’ Quo Vadis, novels of tremendous interest, vividly depict the pitiable depth to which society had sunk. To the Stoics was apportioned the task of struggling vainly against this degradation, the task of replacing external luxury and internal turmoil by external simplicity and inward peace. Since the Cynics failed because the neglected the intellectual issues involved, the Stoics made it an integral part of their program to formulate a complete philosophy which would serve as the basis of moral life. In opposition to Aristotle, who considered knowledge as an end in itself and put morality in an inferior position, both Epicureans and Stoics pursued knowledge solely as a means of virtue. The Epicureans, however, despised much learning as irrelevant. But the Stoics, while giving ethics the chief place, held logic and physics in high regard. And after developing, in the Greek period, a system of epistemology and physics, Roman Stoicism stressed ethics even more.
As a theory of physics the Stoics taught an apparently inconsistent materialism, for while nothing is real which does not occupy space, yet matter by itself is motionless and formless. Inseparably joined with matter is an active molding principle which rationally directs the events of the world. These two seem to become completely identified at the beginning and end of the world cycle. In a general conflagration the heavens pass away and the elements melt with a fervent heat, and only fire remains. This fire, the fundamental stuff of the universe, is the rational, conscious, molding principle and very God. So we see that originally the Stoic doctrine was a form of pantheism. As the school developed, however, a theistic trend left strict pantheism rather in the background.1
Since this diving reason or fire penetrates all matter, every event depends on its activity. The law so illustrated is called Fate or Destiny, an endless chain of causation. In later times in harmony with the theistic tendency, it was called Providence, but in any case the Stoics take issue with the indeterministic Epicurean system. No atom can jump out of its appointed course, all things must fulfill God’s plan. The Stoics took good care to reply in detail to every argument against Providence. God is perfect, he rules over all; since he knows the future, the future is certain. To suppose that either of two future events is equally possible is equivalent to saying that something can happen without an adequate cause, and this would destroy the unity of the universe.
The soul of man, corporeal as everything is, consists of fiery breath akin to the universal fire. It is divided into eight parts, the five senses, the powers of reproduction and of speech and of the will. This latter, which combines the intellect and volition, is the dominant part, the only true soul in the strict sense and the seat of personal identity. Volition rather than intellection is man’s chief characteristic. Indeed judgment itself depends on the will. Our convictions are in our power just as truly as our actions and we are responsible for both. Yet if all events are determined from all eternity including the decisions of the will, how can man be responsible for what he does? Does it not seem strange that the school which most insists on rigid determinism should be the ethical school par excellence of antiquity? How a man can be held responsible for an act which by necessity he must do may at first seem a difficult problem; yet we find the Stoics even condemning most men. The Stoics do not completely solve this problem, although it can be done by showing that responsibility is independent of freedom. The Stoics do, however, point the way to a solution. Man in a very special sense is his will; the decision of the will makes an act one’s own. We are responsible for what proceeds from our will, for such an act is our act, and whether we might have acted otherwise or not is irrelevant.
This background of physics and psychology is sufficient as an introduction to their ethics proper. Since the universe is governed by a beneficent providence, the ideal life is one “according to nature.” The attempt to give precise significance to this phrase constitutes a good part of Stoic history. Its most satisfactory interpretation is a life “according to reason.” For reason is that characteristic of man which most closely links him with the principle of the universe. Since, as we have seen, intellect and will are completely unified in Stoicism, a life according to reason would limit the number of our desires, most of which are quite foolish, and free us from irrational emotion. How this brings happiness within our grasp is shown in the selection from Epictetus on Things in Our Power.
The advice to live rationally, however, will not be very concrete until the Stoics tell us what actions reason bids us do. Does it command a search for pleasure? On this point the Stoics are decidedly antagonistic to the Epicureans. They maintained that the Epicureans used the word pleasure ambiguously and thus dodged many real objections to their theory. But if it is strictly limited to sense-pleasure, as it should be if anything definite is meant, the Stoics reject the assumption that pain and pleasure are commensurable, which, since it is essential to Hedonism, should be recalled when Jeremy Bentham is studied. Sense-pleasure is not a good at all, but, physiologically, is a sign of decay in the sensing organ. Besides, pleasure being irrational cannot be according to reason which prescribes, the Stoics strenuously insist, a life of virtue.
Even apart from pleasure, virtue is sufficient for happiness, for though we do not escape pain thereby, we do become superior to it. Virtue is not the external act but the volition from which the act proceeds. It is strength of will and moral insight and therefore in our power. Health and wealth are beyond our control, but even though we cannot control circumstances, we can control our reaction to them. This self-control must be exercised not only with regard to pleasure but all emotions. The Stoics had identified intellect and will, they had denied Aristotle’s distinction between intellectual and moral virtues and had insisted on the unity of the soul; hence, on this basis, emotion becomes not a sometimes dangerous though altogether natural part of us to be kept under control, but a perversion of reason itself to be entirely eradicated. This develops the paradox that while the Stoics were the kindest, most cosmopolitan men of the time, regarding all men as brothers irrespective of race, nationality, and condition, and, contrary to their predecessors the Cynics, were quite sociably inclined, yet they condemned as irrational emotion that love and pity which brought the troubles of others to one’s own heart. The truly wise man, hypostatized in the Stoic Sage, eliminates all emotion from life. And when this is accomplished he is not merely a good man but totally virtuous and absolutely perfect.
Need one insist that the Stoic Sage is a most extraordinary person? And the great gulf fixed between him and common folk is more terrifying when we are told that there are no degrees in virtue. One man cannot be more virtuous than another; either he is virtuous or he is not and there is no middle ground. A man may drown in two inches of water as completely as in two fathoms, so a man with one vice is just as vicious as a man with many. “For whosoever shall keep the whole law, and yet offend in one point, he is guilty of all.” Mankind is divided into two classes only, the absolutely wise and the absolutely foolish. And with the very infrequent exceptions of men like Socrates and Diogenes all are wicked, cowardly and avaricious (Seneca.)
Since virtue and vice are so separate there is no such thing as a gradual passage from the latter to the former. Of two blind men one may receive his sight tomorrow and the other never, but at present one is as bling as the other. Of two vicious men one may be perfect tomorrow, but he is altogether vicious now. The actual passage from one state to the other is not a process but an instantaneous conversion. This rigorous doctrine was however to some extent modified as time went on. Later Stoics began to admit degrees of virtue for the ordinary man and retained the Sage more as an ideal than as a reality. They introduced among the things which are neither good nor bad but indifferent the distinction of preferable and not preferable; so that while health and wealth were not good in the sense virtue is, yet they are better than sickness and poverty. But how consistent these Roman modifications were with the original Greek theory is a matter of private interpretation.
1. Sen. Ep. 10. Epic. I IX. The expressions are vague and can be forced to conform with pantheism, but their tone is more harmonious with a theistic world-view.
Early Christianity, Chapter VII, pgs. 113-123
While Stoicism and Epicureanism were at their height, there spread through the Greco-Roman world several eastern religions. One of these was Christianity. In the literature on the relationships among the eastern religions, the Greek philosophies and Christianity, arguments are advanced to show that Christianity is nothing more than a particular combination of pagan ideas. These attempts to explain Christianity in terms of Greek philosophies and Hellenistic religions have occasionally been extreme. For example, that the Christian doctrine of the Trinity is an adaptation of the Neo-Platonic Trinity is hardly tenable. The two trinities are totally distinct in attributes, activities, and purposes. Again, the attempt to find in Hermes Trismegistus the source of the Christian plan of salvation, the Christian sacraments and other Christian tenets has been definitely defeated.1
Nevertheless there are relations and marked similarities between elements of Christian teaching and elements of pagan systems. Plato, when he forbids the good man to wrong anyone and declares it is better to suffer than to commit injustice, anticipates the words of Jesus, “Love your enemies… do good to them that hate you…”2 Further, while Plato, Aristotle, and the Cynics had said that right living was not merely a matter of external action, Stoicism, with its reasoned contempt of external circumstances and its far wider appeal, more closely parallels Christian thought by placing emphasis on the inwardness of true morality. Internal reformation was essential. Again, the Stoics are similar to the Christians in dividing all people into two groups, the wise and the foolish, the saved and the lost. The Stoics again were no less severe in their manner of asserting “whosoever shall keep the whole law and yet offend in one point, he is guilty of all.”3 Like Christianity Stoicism, too, appealed to all classes of society, they both welcomed the slave as well as the Emperor.
It was the differences, however, and not the similarities which attracted the attention of those to whom Christianity first was preached. Superficial agreement did not obscure the fundamental antagonism. To the educated respectable citizen of the first century, not paganism but Christianity appeared immoral and atheistic. The Greeks considered Christians deficient in education; the Romans accused them of defective patriotism. In the Martyrdom of Polycarp the Romans designate the Christians as atheists and Lucian sluringly puts Epicureans, atheists, and Christians into one class. That those who saw paganism and Christianity at first hand, did not consider the latter as merely another innocuous pagan sect is poignantly attested by the blood which dyed the banner of those who followed in his train.
There is one fundamental difference between the pagan and Christian theories which makes all other differences appear subsidiary. According to Greek philosophy, the chief end of man was the perfect development of his natural abilities. Aristotle made contemplation the height of man’s attainments because he regarded reason as man’s highest function. The Stoics (in the selection quoted) said, “nature herself never gives us any but good inclinations.” Epictetus says “You are a distinct portion of the essence of God and contain a certain part of him in yourself,” cultivate therefore the god within you. And the other schools say similar things.
But Christianity has not merely a totally different aim but a radically opposite one. In the New Testament instead of the development of the natural abilities the desirable thing is found to be the death of the natural man and the birth of a new and supernatural man. The death of the old nature is necessary because of its corruption. Even before birth every individual is implicated in Adam’s original sin and alienated from the life of God. “The carnal mind is enmity against God, for it is not subject to the law of God neither indeed can be, So then they that are in the flesh cannot please God.”4 The result is that all have sinned, there is none righteous or capable of pleasing God in any respect whatever. This depraved nature, extending its corruption through all man’s faculties, must therefore be eradicated and a new nature begotten.
“Verily, verily, I say unto thee, Except a man be born from above, he cannot see the kingdom of God.”5 – And a few verses below the contrast between the natural and spiritual is made very distinct. “That which is born of the flesh is flesh; and that which is born of the Spirit is spirit.”6 This new birth is accomplished not by the will of man but by the will of God which gives to those who believe on his only begotten Son the power to become sons of God. And the ethics of the gospels and epistles are based squarely on the Son’s messianic mission to save the world. Without emphasizing the Christian belief in Jesus’ messianically centered program, Christian ethics are completely misunderstood.
“It has not yet been sufficiently recognized that there is no ethical teaching of Jesus in the Gospels which does not derive its specific character from the consciousness of his Messiahship. Of course, general moral maxims occur, as might have been enunciated at any time and under any circumstances, and are in so far independent of the historical situation. But these do not constitute the specific strand in Jesus’ ethical teaching; they are not the things that render it new and unique. Some enlightened Jew of that period might and may have enunciated them before Him. But, if we take Jesus’ ethical teaching as a specific phenomenon in the history of ethics, then it immediately springs into view that its differentiating character lies in its Messianic complexion. His contemporaries felt this better than the modernizers of his figure seem to do, for they recognized that his teaching was in authority unlike that of the Scribes. Nor did this relate merely to the difference between the Rabbinical appeal to tradition and the authoritativeness of the prophetic mode of speech in Jesus. The ‘exousia’ of Jesus far transcended the self-assurance wherewith the greatest prophet might have claimed the identification of his message with the very word of God. Jesus speaks not only as authoritative, but as sovereign in the sphere of truth. One feels his authority in the world of ideas rests on his sovereignty in the realm of realities, to which the ideas belong. He did not come primarily to propound a new system of ethics as a thinker, but to summon into being a new kingdom of moral realities. He stands and speaks out of the midst of a great redemptive movement in which He is Himself the central and controlling factor. In this profound sense the Messianic idea underlies all the high idealism of his ethics, and alone renders it historically intelligible. Not the holding aloft of a high standard in the abstract, not the preaching that men should be sons of God, and perfect as the Father in heaven, and lovers of their neighbors, but the silent, majestic assumption that all this has now become possible, and is now to be called into being in a great epochal revelation, this is the element in the Gospels that can not be duplicated elsewhere. It is in evidence in the Sermon on the Mount, and that not only at the close, where Jesus represents Himself as in the day of judgment deciding the destiny of men on the basis of their ethical relation to Himself, but equally as much at the beginning, where He links to the fundamental ethical and religious requirements the absolute eschatological promises: theirs is the kingdom of heaven; they shall see God; they shall be satisfied with righteousness. Viewed in this light, the beatitudes are just as profoundly Messianic as the parable of the wise and foolish builders. We simply have no groups of moral teaching, from which the Messianic spirit, thus conceived, is absent. Nor is there any tradition-material in which Jesus appears preoccupied with his own ethical condition, as could not have failed to happen had his consciousness possessed no higher content than that of being the ethico-religious ideal.”7
Since, then, man must be redeemed from sin by the blood of Jesus before he can live a truly moral life, the chief end of man will not be the development of his corrupt unspiritual nature. And since the moral life is the expression of the new nature which Christ graciously or freely implants, the motive for moral action diverges widely from that of non-Christians.
In modern discussions the question of motive has held a more important place than in Greek philosophy. Why do men act morally? A popular view to-day and one which Plato espoused makes on act morally to merit or achieve eternal beatitude. On the whole the Greeks thought they answered the question by saying the moral life was best and immorality is the result of ignorance. No really educated man would be immoral. To-day, however, moral philosophers, denying the adequacy of this explanation, think it wise to admit the possibility of a man’s knowing what is right and at the same time doing what is wrong. If this be true, one must answer again, why do men act morally? The problem becomes most acute when a right action apparently benefits another at the expense of the agent or when a wrong action apparently benefits the agent. One of the solutions was sympathy. Since man happens to be sympathetic he helps others at his own expense.
But Jesus gave his religion another motive. Without minimizing whatever efficacy sympathy has, Christianity regards neither it nor the Greek solution as satisfactory and fundamental. Further, it dissents radically from Plato’s views than man achieves heaven on the basis of his moral endeavors. The early Christians made it quite clear that our own righteousness is as filthy rags, that all are under God’s wrath and curse and that no one can save himself. Morality is not the cause but the consequence of redemption. Since the Christian is saved freely by God’s grace the motive to virtuous action in general is our gratitude to him who has redeemed us from the curse by giving his life a ransom for many.
The morality developing naturally from the implantation of a new nature does not parallel the Greek conception. “For he that soweth to his flesh shall of the flesh reap corruption; but he that soweth to the Spirit shall of the Spirit reap life everlasting.8 From the fundamental importance of the new birth flow all other differences.
In Greek ethics it was customary to distinguish between the practical or moral virtues, such as courage, justice, honor, and the theoretical or intellectual virtues. In both of these departments of life the fundamental chasm appears between the widely separated results. The names by which the virtues are called sometimes remain the same, but the concepts for which they stand are often quite different. For example, both the Greek and the Christian would call wisdom good. But what Aristotle or Epicurus called wisdom and thought good, the Christian might call foolishness. Plato, Aristotle and even the Stoics, we might say all pagan antiquity, so emphasized wisdom as to consider only the wise man, only the philosopher, as strictly virtuous. In the Bible as well, not only in the books of Solomon but in many other passages also, wisdom receives no meagre praise. But in the New Testament the natural wisdom of the Greeks which engenders pride is regarded as a possible stumbling block on the way to the Kingdom of God. Christ sent Paul “to preach the gospel; not with wisdom of words, lest the cross of Christ be made of none effect. For the preaching of the cross is to them that perish, foolishness… For it is written I will destroy the wisdom of the wise… Hath not God made foolish the wisdom of this world?”9 There is a further passage which a philosophy instructor might properly impress on his students: “Beware lest any man spoil you through philosophy.”10
I Cor. I, II clearly states that the natural man is by his very nature incapable of understanding true wisdom. The wisdom of God is Jesus Christ himself, a reference to the opposing claims of the Gnostics, and in him, as Colossians continues, are hid all the treasures of wisdom and knowledge. Other passages speak of the darkened understanding of the natural man who can not please God.11
The evil deeds proceeding from a darkened understanding include among them some of the moral or practical virtues which were so highly praised by the Greek philosophers.
It may seem strange at first that the moral virtues even of a pagan are considered worthless from a Christian standpoint. But Christianity goes further and declares them to be not only worthless, but actually dangerous and harmful because, seeming good, they deceive. They lead on to put his trust in them, to rely on them alone whereas “without faith is it impossible to please” God.12 The virtuous Greek was not able clearly to see his need of a new birth. Deceived by his own morality he was blinded to his own imperfection.
The most highly valued virtue in the ancient world, and the one least prized by Christians, was courage and patriotism. Courage, as Aristotle said, mirroring the prevailing conception, was essentially a political and war-time virtue. But the followers of Christ who told Peter to sheath his sword, who declared that his kingdom was not of this world, abandoned the practice of courage and patriotism. They were willing to bear persecution; in fortitude they excelled, but patriotism seemed a vice. In this world the Christian is a pilgrim and a stranger. He is looking for a city whose builder and maker is God,13 his citizenship is in heaven. They were willing to render to Caesar what was Caesar’s.14 Obedience to all laws which did not conflict with Christian principles, they insisted upon.15 But their main attention was directed to rendering unto God what was God’s.
Among the virtues catalogued by Aristotle, pride and high-mindedness is called “the crown of the virtues.” Though Aristotle warns against conceit, yet the high-minded man, “will be only moderately pleased at great honors conferred upon him by virtuous people, as feeling that he obtains what is naturally his due or even less than his due.” Christianity, on the contrary, emphasizes humility. “Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven… Blessed are the meek, for they shall inherit the earth”16 “Whosoever will be great among you, shall be your minister; And whosoever of you will be the chiefest, shall be the servant of all.”17
The astounding thing is that while the Greek school in general appealed only to a select class of specially educated people and even with those usually failed of actual reform, as is pictured for us in Kingsley’s Hypatia, and while the comparatively wide appeal of the Stoics neither affected the masses nor stayed the corruption of the Emperor’s court, Christianity, within twenty-five years of its inception have a totally new life to thousands and thousands. This new life most noticeably expressed itself in a virtue which the Stoics condemned and which certainly was absent from the practice of the public. In Ben Hur, or in the sources if they are open to us, the most abominable cruelty makes us recoil. Against this, the Christians preached and practiced love, pity, mercy. The Founder had a word of compassion for the woman taken in adultery, for the thief on the cross, and for the very ones who crucified him, “Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do.” And in Quo Vadis the Christian, as he is being tortured on a cross, forgives and thereby converts Chilo Chilonides, his betrayer. Stoicism never achieved this state of mind. While it taught that all men were brothers, that the Sage will serve all, one would err if he admitted their troubles to his heart. For the Stoics, imperturbability is all important and the anguish of vicarious suffering, the very foundation to Christianity, is absolutely foreign both to Stoicism and to all the other schools. Love, then, is the striking Christian virtue. “For God so loved the world that he gave his only begotten Son,”18 and, “Though I speak with the tongues of men and of angels and have not love, I am become as sounding brass or a tinkling cymbal… And now abideth faith, hope, love, these three; but the greatest of these is love.”19
The various other instances of the new life’s divergence from the old, such as insistence on chastity, spiritual equality of the sexes and so on, while of great practical importance, contribute nothing to the development of theory. But there is one difference which can hardly be omitted and which appropriately concludes this chapter. It is the subject of death and the future. All peoples, it seems, including the Greeks and most of their philosophers, believe in life after death. Pythagoras, Heraclitus, Empedocles, Plato, all held this belief in some form or other. While these philosophers and the secret societies of mystery religions altered in some degree the original Homeric conceptions, yet most people were affected by the dreary and dismal picture of Hades which that poet gives. After death our shades, deprived of reasoning power, wander in gloom, in actual misery if our bodies are left unburied, and in general drag out a weary existence. A papyrus letter20 from one friend to another on the death of the latter’s child says bluntly that in such trials there is no hope of consolation to be given. The Greeks loved a cheerful bodily existence in a world of sunlight and their views of death were not pleasant in the least. But while the Greeks at best hoped for a not too miserable immortality of the soul, the Christian enthusiastically proclaimed the resurrection of the body on the basis of the resurrection of their Founder attested by more than five hundred eye-witnesses. The immortality of a disembodied spirit in gloomy Hades and a complete bodily life of satisfying activity under the happiest conditions makes a decided contrast between pagan and Christian in all phases of life. The resurrection body, free from earthly limitations, is to live in a world where there is no more death, neither sorrow, nor crying, in a city which had no need of the sun, for the glory of God did lighten it, and the Lamb is the light thereof. The other-worldliness of the Christian is never more misrepresented than when it is said to produce gloom, for the New Testament is replete with expressions of joy and exhortations to be of good cheer. Death, then, is the passage to where one’s treasure is. The grace is swallowed up in victory and has lost its sting.21
1. Cf. J. G. Machen, Origin of Paul’s Religion.
2. Mt. 5:44.
3. Jas. 2:10.
4. Rom. 8:7, 8. Cf. also Rom. 5:12, 18, 19.
“Wherefore, as by one man sin entered into the world, and death by sin; and so death passed upon all men, for that all have sinned… Therefore as by the offence of one judgment came upon all men to condemnation; even so by the righteousness of one the free gift came upon all men unto justification of life. For as by one man's disobedience many were made sinners, so by the obedience of one shall many be made righteous.”
Eph. 2:3
“Among whom also we all had our conversation in times past in the lusts of our flesh, fulfilling the desires of the flesh and of the mind; and were by nature the children of wrath, even as others.”
Eph. 4:17-24.
“This I say therefore, and testify in the Lord, that ye henceforth walk not as other Gentiles walk, in the vanity of their mind, Having the understanding darkened, being alienated from the life of God through the ignorance that is in them, because of the blindness of their heart: Who being past feeling have given themselves over unto lasciviousness, to work all uncleanness with greediness. But ye have not so learned Christ; If so be that ye have heard him, and have been taught by him, as the truth is in Jesus: That ye put off concerning the former conversation the old man, which is corrupt according to the deceitful lusts; And be renewed in the spirit of your mind; And that ye put on the new man, which after God is created in righteousness and true holiness.
Ps. 51:5.
“Behold, I was shapen in iniquity;
And in sin did my mother conceive me.”
5. John 3:3.
6. John 3:6.
7. Geerhardus Vos, Self-Disclosure of Jesus, pp. 61, 62.
8. Gal. 6:8.
9. I Cor. 1:17-20.
10. Col. 2:8.
11. Rom. 1:21-28.
12. Heb. 11:6.
13. Heb. 11:10.
14. Matt. 22:21.
15. I Peter 2:12-15.
16. Matt. 5:3, 5.
17. Mk. 10:43, 44.
18. John 3:16.
19. I Cor. 13.
20. Oxyrh. 115. Contrast I Thess. 4:13.
21. The aim here has been to record the Christian system as accurately as the space permitted and as sympathetically as possible. For an account which is frankly antagonistic, the student is advised to read the chapter in Paulsen’s System of Ethics.
Thomas Hobbes (1588-1679), Chapter IX, pgs. 170-179
Because of their far-reaching effects on ethics we must not forget, though we must pass in silence, the history of the Italian Renaissance, the Protestant Reformation and the birth of empirical science, which together mark the beginnings of the modern period. We now find ourselves in the England of the seventeenth century, a land bleeding through civil wars, half-hearted rejoining in the ruins of a too rigid scholasticism, neither Protestant nor Catholic and as yet unable to make full use of the new science. English philosophical writing, compared with the production of other nations, shows a disproportionately large interest in ethical problems. The course of English history, including as it does the Presbyterian insistence on freedom of conscience, the American Revolution with its views of political right and wrong, the Englishman’s own desire for self-government, brings to the front the need of speculation regarding the ultimate basis of morality. Perhaps the English people has taken its moral issues more seriously than other nations. With the names of Spinoza, Rosseau, Kant, before us, we cannot, however, deny considerable moral speculation on the Continent; but for us, with an English tradition behind us, the history of English ethics is more to the point. The first great figure in this development lived in the midst of the struggle between the old and new orders and a brief paragraph on these conditions is apposite.
Charles I, who ascended the throne in 1625, in an attempt to establish a monarchy as absolute as that of his contemporary Louis XIV, found it impossible to force Parliament to levy taxes sufficient for a large standing army. When so frustrated he would dissolve one Parliament and call another only to be checked again. Then refusing to convene Parliament for a period of eleven years, 1629-1640, he practically achieved absolute power, but without his desired army. Further, the purely political struggle was complicated by religious vexations. While the Anglican Church was reverting to Romanism, the dissenting Puritans were tending exactly to the opposite extreme. These latter were persecuted until many left the country. But Charles further tried to force the Scotch Presbyterians to conform to Anglo-Catholicism and they rebelled. This development made an army imperative, so Charles called Parliament in April 1640. At first he seemed assured of success. But the Scots encountered little resistance in Charles’ armies, many of his soldiers having been drafted against their wills, and defeat confronted him. In November 1640 the “Long Parliament” convened. It swept away Charles’ political and religious inquisitions, abolished the tortures inflicted on dissenters and set the captives free.
The struggle then shifting from the battle-field to Parliament gave the opportunity for plots, intrigues, and counter-plots. The Cavaliers supported the King, and Round Heads or Whigs fought for religious liberty and a more democratic government. The Kind now had a small but well trained army, the Whigs had the power of taxation by no leaders and no soldiers. The Protestant cause looked hopeless. Then Charles plotted once too often. England armed against him overnight. But the leaderless man-power would have been useless against the army, had there not appeared the gigantic figure of Oliver Cromwell who led them to victory.
As in a previous footnote, the student is again advised to familiarize himself with this period of history, not merely because it will aid the study of ethics but also because here, as in the French Revolution and the American Civil War, we are witnessing the birth of a nation.
The intellectual situation in this century is quite as interesting as the political. Four centuries before, in the lifetime of the greatest scholastic, Thomas Aquinas, the roots of this new intellectual development are found hidden in prison. To insure security and safety, an aim hardly accomplished, Roger Bacon wrote in cipher the peculiar details of the beginnings of empirical science.1 But Roger Bacon lived much too soon. Induction based on experimentation was just becoming popular in the age we are now studying. Francis Bacon had fostered the new method in England; Galileo we find at the same time hard at work in Italy; Kepler also, and Copernicus in the not too distant past. Harvey had just discovered the circulation of the blood, 1616; Descartes, Gassendi, and Mesenne were at that very moment pushing their investigations with the utmost vigor. Even the older generation of the present day, whose life stretches between oil lamps and television, buggy-rides and aviation, has not witnessed a more rapid and surprising progress. Einstein to-day can be taken far more complacently than ever they could take Copernicus. Small wonder the world was upside down.
In the sphere of ethics there is a proportionate complexity. Instead of the deductive method of the scholastics, supposed to have little or no connection with actual life, scientific experimentation was proposing as a substitute with serious implications to be mentioned presently. The political conditions emphasized the interrelationship of ethics and jurisprudence. If a world which theoretically at least if not always practically governed absolutely by the harmonious working of pope and emperor suddenly finds the absolute authorities broken in fact and the very theory discarded, the individual is personally faced with the problem, to which power shall I pledge allegiance, if any, and under what conditions may I renounce my obligations? With the Scotch army sweeping down from the north and the King advancing from the south, or, with Cromwell here and Charles there, the man between discoveries the necessity of answering such questions. But the practical necessity of quick decision does not conduce to an impartial and thorough philosophic investigation. These questions, actually involving theories of government, sociology, morality, a not over-conscientious person will answer by a shrewd guess concerning the outcome of the immediate battle. To justify one’s decision, however, leisure for contemplation must be found. And in this turbulent century, one man at least was sufficiently diplomatic and frequently enough a fugitive to escape major interruptions in his contemplative activity.
It is unnecessary to follow all the personal history of Thomas Hobbes (1588-1679). By disposition he belonged to the aristocratic part and when he first published his philosophic views they pleased the King because they justified the government in power. But when another government came to power, Hobbes’ philosophy, we cannot actually say his sympathies, automatically changed sides. Some of his contemporaries acrimoniously charged him with duplicity but with the advantage of present-day perspective he seems to have been disloyal only when avoidance of martyrdom required it. Another source of inconvenience was his opponents’ mathematical abilities. Not having discovered geometry until forty years of age, his insistence that the circle could be squared, was conducive neither to friendship nor respect. Add to this a too highly developed conceit, occasionally producing an incivility which among other things changed Descartes from a possible friend to a scornful enemy and we can easily imagine the petty inconveniences which might and did result.
Some of his unguarded statements have remained, to the first of which some who have read a preceding chapter may be inclined to agree. “Aristotle was the worst teacher that ever was, the worse politician and ethick.” “Had I studied books as much as other men, I had known no more than other men.” He calls Peter Lombard and Duns Scotus, two famous scholastics whose system he opposes, “two of the most egregious blockheads in the world.”
The effect of such language, applied to his contemporaries as well as to those long antecedent, is characteristically stated by one whose work on Hobbes is especially recommended to the particularly interested student.2
“The moral is, I suppose, that a man ought to read Euclid before he is forty. He will assimilate the principles better, and he will also be made aware of the danger of mistaking blunders for original discoveries. That is an error of which he will be cured by examiners. Anyhow, besides wasting his energy, Hobbes had put himself in a curiously uncomfortable position by the time of the Restoration. Intellectual audacity combines awkwardly with personal timidity. The poor old gentleman, aged seventy-two, whose great aim was to keep out of harm's way, had stirred up an amazing mass of antipathies. His political absolutism was hateful to constitutionalists like Clarendon as well as to the more popular politicians: to the two parties, that is, which were about to become tories and whigs. Anglican bishops and non-conformist divines agreed that he was an atheist, and what was to some almost as bad, a hater of all ecclesiastical authority. His political views might suit the courtiers, but no one could be more hostile to their leanings to Rome. Political absolutism and religious scepticism made a creed which could not be openly avowed, though it might and did excite some tacit sympathy. He had, however, spoken with a certain authority as a representative of science. Now the scientific and philosophical world had ostracised him. They had pronounced him to be a charlatan. A man who could make such a mess of squaring the circle was presumably a paradox-monger in philosophy. His opponents would taunt him with a failure admitted by every one but himself. It is true that popular opinion looks upon philosophers with a dash of amused contempt. Like Shakespeare's fools they are allowed a certain license. Their queer opinions, even if atrocious, are so far removed from practical business as to be harmless and rather amusing playthings. Personally Hobbes was generally agreeable; and so venerable in appearance that one would prefer to leave him in quiet. He had some anxious moments, but on the whole was tolerated.”
It is now time to outline the more fundamental aspects of Hobbes’ philosophy on which he based his moral, or as his opponents had it, his immoral theory. Whatever degree of disapprobation one places on Hobbes, he cannot deny him a remarkable degree of consistency. As a young man Hobbes became possessed of a few major ideas, to a thorough elaboration of which he devoted his life; and if he be reproached as one-sided, obstinate and logical to a fault, his fault is at least the finest possible method of testing his initial assumptions. In spite of his espousal of the new inductive method, he was governed by these assumptions, and so attached to general principles was he, that it is said he criticized the Royal Society of London for paying so much more attention to the minute experiences than to fundamental postulates. Living between two ages he is a curious mixture of the deduction of the old and the induction of the new.
For the sake of convenience Hobbes’ system may be divided into three sections: the philosophy of nature or physics; the philosophy of man or psychology; and ethics and politics.
His conception of the universe is thoroughly materialistic. All forms of life in all its aspects are but complicated relationships of material particles in motion. The most brilliant philosophy excogitated by the subtlest mind is the motion of parts of the brain. Not quite a materialist, Descartes, whose relation to Hobbes has been mentioned, excepted man alone from the reign of mechanical law in a material universe. Animals are soulless machines but not man. This, Hobbes rightly saw, was inconsistent. Going the whole way, therefore, he declared man, too, to be a product of mechanical forces, an integral part of the universe, determined to act just so. This involved Hobbes in theological questions of determinism and free will which recall to us the Fate of the Stoics.
Materialism decides Hobbes’ psychological attitude. Pleasure, he says, is a motion of parts of the body which helps vital action; pain, a motion which lowers vitality. Each man’s actions are naturally directed to preserving himself or, if he be in no special danger, to the heightening of life which means the procuring of pleasure. All actions have this end. We desire longer life and more pleasure, and having satisfied the present particular desire, we desire something else as another mean to the same end. Never will one reach the state of desiring nothing. Very obvious is the fact that the more man’s desires are satisfied the more he desires. To desire nothing is, as Callicles before him had said, the life of a stone or a corpse.
All this makes man essentially self-seeking. No individual cares anything for the good or pleasure of another except in so far as the condition of the other affects himself. And on this egoistic basis Hobbes explains all the emotions ordinarily called altruistic. “Pity is imagination or fiction of future calamity to ourselves proceeding from the sense of another man’s calamity.” “The passion of laughter proceedeth from the sudden imagination of our own odds and eminency; for what is else the recommending of ourselves to our own good opinion by the comparison of another man’s inferiority or absurdity.” These definitions have been the butt of considerable ridicule. Philosophers have pointed out their inadequacy, and respectable people generally, regarded them as evincing extraordinary depravity. Sir Leslie Stephen says,8 “In our eyes it (Hobbes’ egoism) may be redeemed by the charming simplicity and utter unconsciousness of offence with which he propounds his atrocious theories. He becomes unintentionally humorous.”
But Hobbes had become disgusted with previous ethical speculation. It had been too clumsy, too unscientific. And though Hobbes was more deductive in temper than perhaps he would have care to admit, he takes this opportunity to insist on induction and observation. If ethical theory, like physics, is to be grounded in experience, we must observe what men actually desire. It is this, however, which entails the serious consequences hinted at as a result of scientific experimentation. The question arises whether ethics should be not essentially a normative but merely a descriptive science. If ethics limits itself to a description of what men as a matter of fact do, is it justified in omitting all account of what men don’t do but ought to? And if ethics must be normative, the further problem presents itself, how may one proceed from what a man does to what he ought to do? Hobbes by no means dissolves the difficulty. It may even seem that he has left no room for the commonly acknowledged virtues of justice, loyalty, honesty, or duties in general.
More perplexing does the paradox become when he describes the natural state of man as that of a war of each against all. Each man desires to control all possible means to life and pleasure, and the desires conflict. Though the state of war ensuing is perfectly natural in that everyone is free from governmental restraint, it is perfectly intolerable. None knows at what moment his goods may be stolen or his life taken. And while he is entirely free, in so far as his strength and wit enable him, to pursue his aims, no condition could be less propitious for their achievement. In such a war justice and injustice in their accepted meanings, right and wrong as moral characteristics of action, do not exist. Might alone makes right. And since all men are fairly equal in strength and cunning the result can only duplicate that of the Kilkenny cats. To this state of insecurity and anarchy Hobbes saw England on its way. Only by demonstrating the necessity of stable government could Hobbes contribute to his country’s welfare. So he imagined in the past what he saw in the future, the intolerable conflict and what men would be forced to do about it.
Since the war of each against all leads to the certain defeat of their aims, men will, simply because they are selfish, make rules of living and agree to abide by the rules. Through unfortunate experience man is taught the need of cooperation. At this point a very practical consideration forces itself upon the one who is about to make such a social contract. These rules are to become morality; they will, by stating our duties and obligations to other men, limit our freedom. But obviously, being framed, as they are, by self-seeking men, it would be suicidal to obey them unless guaranteed that everyone else would obey them.
The agreement must be made permanently binding, else mankind, as is now the case in England, will be in danger of slipping back into the unbearable state of nature. Now there is one means only by which morality can be enforced upon all men. Everyone must surrender all his rights to one person, the king, who thereby becomes absolute monarch. From now on no one has the right to rebel against the established government, because the king, holder of all rights, dispenses to each subject what he thinks fit and of course never permits any to rebel. His laws, then, constitute morality.
Even so, after the state has been formed, its laws of justice, honesty, chastity in effect, the citizens are no less selfish in obeying the king than they were in the state of nature. They are, however, much more efficiently selfish. Nor is the state other than self-seeking. When it honors a man, it is either bidding for his future services, or, in the case of paying tribute to a fallen soldier, trying to stimulate similar conduct in others.
The mention of a social contract by which man forms a government for his preservation reminds us of a French philosopher of the next century, J. J. Rousseau. The student will do well to learn here, and apply it in all other reading, that similarity of phraseology is not equivalent to similarity of meaning. Rousseau also had a state of nature, but, though equally imaginary, or momentary if ever actual, it was a happy condition. Civilization for Rousseau, corrupts man, and government is necessary to stay the corruption and alleviate the misery. Further, the government into which men enter by social contract is not the absolute monarchy of Hobbes. France was beginning to experience the consequences of such a government and Rousseau saw the deluge approaching.
Rousseau serves, at this point, not only to direct attention to the possibility of comparing and contrasting two thinkers so as to extend one’s ethical horizon beyond England; but as well to illustrate the interdependency of ethics and politics. Those interested in this latter problem must review Plato and Aristotle and anticipate Bentham.
1. For one of the most unbelievable achievements of pure genius, read The Cipher of Roger Bacon, Newbold and Kent, University of Pennsylvania Press, 1928.
2. Stephen, Sir Lesli, Hobbes, pp. 56, 57.
3. Op cit., p. 140.
Benedict de Spinoza*, Chapter X, pgs. 198-202
Plato, in his seventh epistle, describes the man who is “really on fire with philosophy,” as one who “passes his life in whatever occupations he must, but through it all never ceases to practice philosophy and such habits of daily life as will be most effective in making him an intelligent and retentive student, able to reason soberly by himself. Other practices than these he shuns to the end.” Spinoza is a pitiable, or should we say heroic, example of this principle. The Spanish persecution of the Jews had driven his family to Amsterdam where he was born. Since the rules of orthodox Judaism were irksome to his freedom loving nature, he finally abjured the religion of his people and was expelled from the synagogue; he considered orthodox Christianity equally repellent and attacked the truthfulness of the Holy Scriptures – attacks that we well received when taken up by Wellhausen and the Tubingen school of the nineteenth century, but which were not so well received in Spinoza’s day. Finding it healthful to leave Amsterdam because of his espousal of freedom in both religious and civil affairs, he came, after some wandering, to The Hague, where, grinding lenses at wages no union would ever permit, he sustained himself in poverty – refusing, for the sake of his freedom, offers of pensions and even of a professorship – until, eaten with consumption, he died. Through it all he never ceased to practice philosophy and such habits of daily life as would be most effective in making him able to reason by himself.
Able to reason! What more noble aim could Spinoza imagine? And he so set himself to the task that Leibniz dubbed him “un moulin de raisonnement.” To reason: the student will soon see one result of this goal. Spinoza’s main work and the one here quoted is entitled, “Ethica: ordine geometrice demonstrate, etc.,” nor are there many pages free from axioms, definitions, postulates, theorems, proofs, and corollaries. We are truly in a geometry book whose subject is ethics. Fortunately, Spinoza included some notes, prefaces, and appendices which make smoother reading.
But there is another and deeper meaning to reason, a meaning obtained by contrasting reason with experience. Our senses frequently deceive us, they contradict each other, and perhaps none of them acquaint us with truth. Descartes, the great French philosopher whose later years overlapped with Spinoza’s youth, had dreamed of a method by which all uncertainty could be eliminated and real truth attained. Descartes, however, was not entirely faithful to his inspiration and Spinoza undertook to perfect the method. With geometry as a guide, it was necessary to find axioms such that the number of planets about the sun, and the rules for daily living as well, could be deduced as rigorously as the theorems of Euclid.
What can such an axiom be? From it must come all things that are. Obviously the only adequate source of all our universe contains is God. Hence the fundamental axiom of Spinoza’s system is the existential proposition, God exists.
If this be so, one might reflect, Spinoza, although he rejected Judaism without accepting Christianity, could not have wandered far from religion. Do not the Christians accept the Law and the Prophets of the Jews? And would not both Jew and Christian approve a religion whose basis is God? But one must learn that when a philosopher says God, he may not mean God. Both Jew and Christian regard God as an Almighty Personal Being who chose to create the world. Two Christians, Descartes and Leibniz, may have disagreed on the question whether God made this world good by choosing it, or whether God chose this world because it was good. But all agree He chose and created. But for Spinoza, on the contrary, there was neither choice nor creation, for his God is not a personal being.
Spinoza defines God as “a being absolutely infinite, that is, a substance consisting in infinite attributes… I say absolutely infinite, not infinite after its kind: for of a thing only infinite after its kind, infinite attributes may be denied.” And so for Spinoza, God is an extended thing, as well as a thinking thing, in fact God is the only substance there is, God is Nature, following its course not from any choice or purpose but on account of its logical and mechanical constitution.
This theory is called Pantheism, and since to call everything God and to deny that there is a God are logically equivalent, it is not surprising that Spinoza’s contemporaries regarded him as a atheist. Nevertheless the word God is on his lips more frequently than is fitting for an atheist, and there pervades his work a deep religious mysticism, so much so that a later writer referred to him as a Gottrunkener Mensh – a God-intoxicated man.
Deus sive natura – God or nature, then, determines the course of events not in the sense that a Supreme Person might voluntarily determine them with a purpose in mind, but in the sense that the axioms of geometry determine the theorems which follow. As might be expected man is not exempt from the universal mechanism. We cannot discuss the parallelism of mind and body, his theory being that neither affects the other but that the two orders of events, mental and corporeal, harmonize and dovetail because derived from the same original axioms. The following quotation from the first pages of Part III must be taken as a sufficient introduction to his ethics:
“Most writers on the emotions and on human conduct seem to be treating rather of matters outside nature than of natural phenomena following nature's general laws. They appear to conceive man to be situated in nature as a kingdom within a kingdom: for they believe that he disturbs rather than follows nature's order, that he has absolute control over his actions, and that he is determined solely by himself. They attribute human infirmities and fickleness, not to the power of nature in general, but to some mysterious flaw in the nature of man, which accordingly they bemoan, deride, despise, or, as usually happens, abuse…
“Nothing comes to pass in nature, which can be set down to a flaw therein; for nature is always the same, and everywhere one and the same in her efficacy and power of action; that is, nature's laws and ordinances, whereby all things come to pass and change from one form to another, are everywhere and always the same; so that there should be one and the same method of understanding the nature of all things whatsoever, namely, through nature's universal laws and rules…
“Experience teaches us no less clearly than reason, that men believe themselves to be free, simply because they are conscious of their actions, and unconscious of the causes whereby those actions are determined; and, further, it is plain that the dictates of the mind are but another name for the appetites, and therefore vary according to the varying state of the body. Everyone shapes his actions according to his emotion, those who are assailed by conflicting emotions know not what they wish; those who are not attacked by any emotion are readily swayed this way or that. All these considerations clearly show that a mental decision and a bodily appetite, or determined state, are simultaneous, or rather are one and the same thing, which we call decision, when it is regarded under and explained through the attribute of thought, and a conditioned state, when it is regarded under the attribute of extension, and deduced from the laws of motion and rest.”
What advice can such a system give to one who wants to live well? What kind of ethics can be developed from pantheistic determinism? What becomes of Spinoza’s love of freedom? His own answer will be found in the selections which follow, if only we understand them. How is it a solution to be told that we should regard all events, our death for example, sub specie aeternitatis? A plausible interpretation of this key-phrase is that we cannot knowingly hate the inevitable. We are worried only by what we think might happen otherwise; we are saddened only by what we believe might not have been. What we see to be inevitable we accept calmly, and so are freed from the stress of emotion. The aim of life, therefore, is to understand each thing in its relation to the whole universe, to follow its deduction from the original axiom, to see it as an integral and indispensable part of the system – sub species aeternitatis.
* In the first edition of this text book, there was no chapter on Spinoza, which accounts for the summary tone of the introduction to Thomas Hobbes. Spinoza and Hobbes died about the same time, but Hobbes is the earlier writer and Spinoza in one of his works criticizes Hobbes’ theory of government. When, however, the students comes to Butler, Bentham, and the other English writers, he must remember that Hobbes rather than the continental moralists is their background.
Chapter XI, Joseph Butler and His Century, pgs. 228-234
Partly because of certain disagreeable personal traits of Hobbes, but largely because of the uncompromising boldness with which he baldly announced the selfishness of man, his countrymen, through the next hundred years, set to work to construct more pleasing systems of ethics. Some considered true morality a more fundamental matter than the arbitrary decrees of an emperor. But in thus criticizing Hobbes, they misjudged him. For him, too, true morality, the seeking of pleasure, was more fundamental; absolutism was but its indispensable means. Others insisted that man was not the selfish brute that Hobbes depicted, that he had genuine altruistic tendencies. And some regarded Hobbes as merely one-sided, seeing that altruism and selfishness might finally be reconciled.
Contemporaries with Hobbes were the Cambridge Platonists. Ralph Cudworth (1617-1688), the most influential member of this group, wrote Eternal and Immutable Morality, a book which was published in 1731, forty-three years after his death. Hobbes had made all knowledge motions of the brain stimulated by contract through sensation. He had further made the good in life depend upon desire or volition. To both these positions Cudworth opposed the philosophy of Plato and the Neo-Platonists. The world of sense, since it is but the image of reality, is not the object of knowledge. Knowledge requires a World of Ideas, which, as the Neo-Platonists from Plotinus to Proclus maintained, can, on account of its ideal character, exist only in a mind, and the divine mind is the only mind which can contain the world. These ideas, including the Idea of Good from which all moral distinctions are derived, are independent of mere volition either human or divine. Hobbes had made good depend on man’s will to pleasure; Duns Scotus and William of Occam, in the later Middle Ages, referred morality to God’s will. They argued that if God is subject to a principle of good which he did not establish by divine decree, he is limited and therefore not an omnipotent God. Good can only exist as God has willed. Neither Plato nor Cudworth appreciated this reasoning and consequently Cudworth holds that it is not because God forbids certain acts that they are wrong, but that because they are wrong, God forbids them.
Similarly against Hobbes he argues that laws to not make right and wrong but are rather the approximate expression of what has always been such. And, as previously implied, the knowledge of right and wrong is not gained through empirical investigation, but is in some sense innate. For this reason one may label Cudworth a rational intuitionist; rational because intellect rather than volition or emotion determines morality, and intuitional because the knowledge of the intellect does not have its origin in previous sense experience.
Henry More (1614-1687) attempted to make explicit the fundamental principles of morality which Cudworth called intuitive. In doing so More revealed one of the difficulties which besets every intuitional theory. A reasonable man will allow one or two unproven assumptions if the theory deduced is consistent and satisfactory. But More lists some two dozen ultimate moral principles. This, if anything, runs counter to the primary necessity of theoretic unity. The intuitionists from More’s time on have been consistently guilty of too great a liberality in ultimate principles and no one is surprised to learn of another school arising to supplant intuitionism. It will be the utilitarianism of the next chapter.
In the meantime there were others who opposed Hobbes. Shaftesbury (1671-1713), and Hutcheson (1694-1747), though intuitionists, were unable to agree to the rationalism of Cudworth. Particularly directed against egoism is their stress on the altruistic aspects of man’s nature.*
“That the perceptions of moral good and evil, are perfectly different from those of natural good, or advantage,” says Hutcheson, “every one must convince himself by reflecting upon the different manner in which he finds himself affected when these objects occur to him. Had we no sense of good distinct from the advantage or interest arising from the external senses, and the perceptions of beauty and harmony; the admiration and love toward a fruitful field, or commodious habitation, would be much the same with what we have toward a generous friend or any noble character; for both are or may be advantageous to us; and we should no more admire any action, or love any person in a distant country or age, whose influence could not extend to us, than we love the mountains of Peru, while we are unconcerned in the Spanish trade. We should have the same sentiments and affections toward inanimate beings, which we have toward rational agents; which yet every one knows to be false. Upon comparison we say, "Why should we admire or love with esteem inanimate beings? They have no intention of good to us; their nature makes them fit for our uses, which they neither know nor study to serve. But it is not so with rational agents: they study our interest, and delight in our happiness, and are benevolent toward us.’
“Suppose we reap the same advantage from two men, one of whom serves us from delight in our happiness, and love toward us; the other from views of self-interest, or by constraint: both are in this case equally beneficial, or advantageous to us, and yet we shall have quite different sentiments of them. We must then certainly have other perceptions of moral actions than those of advantage: and that power of receiving these perceptions may be called a moral sense, since the definition agrees to it, viz.: a determination of the mind to receive any idea from the presence of an object which occurs to us, independent on our will.
“This perhaps will be equally evident from our ideas of evil done to us designedly by a rational agent. Our senses of natural good and evil would make us receive with equal serenity and composure, an assault, a buffet, an affront from a neighbour, a cheat from a partner, or trustee, as we would an equal damage from the fall of a beam, a tile, or a tempest; and we should have the same affections and sentiments of both. Villainy, treachery, cruelty, would be as meekly resented as a blast, or mildew, or an overflowing stream. But I fancy every one is very differently affected on these occasions, though there may be equal natural evil in both. Nay, actions no way detrimental may occasion the strongest anger and indignation, if they evidence only impotent hatred or contempt. And on the other hand, the intervention of moral ideas may prevent our hatred of the agent, or bad moral apprehension of that action, which causes to us the greatest natural evil. Thus the opinion of justice in any sentence, will prevent all Ideas of moral evil in the execution or hatred toward the magistrate, who is the immediate cause of our greatest sufferings.
“This is the second thing to be considered, ‘Whether our sense of the moral good or evil in the actions of others, can be overbalanced, or bribed by views of interest.’ Now I may indeed easily be capable of wishing that another would do an action I abhor as morally evil, if it were very advantageous to me: interest in that case may overbalance my desire of virtue in another. But no interest to myself will make me approve an action as morally good, which, without that interest to myself, would have appeared morally evil, if upon computing its whole effects, it appears to produce as great a moment of good in the whole, when it is not beneficial to me, as it did before when it was. In our sense of moral good or evil, our own private advantage or loss is of no more moment, than the advantage or loss of a third person, to make an action appear good or evil. This sense therefore cannot be over-balanced by interest. How ridiculous an attempt would it be, to engage a man by rewards, or to threaten him into a good opinion of an action which was contrary to his moral notions? We may procure dissimulation by such means, and that is all.
“We are not to imagine that this moral sense, more than the other senses, supposes any innate ideas, knowledge, or practical proposition. We mean by it only a determination of our minds to receive amiable or disagreeable ideas of actions when the occur to our observation, antecedent to any opinions of advantage or loss to redound to ourselves from them; even as we are pleased with a regular form, or an harmonious composition, without having any knowledge of mathematics, or seeing any advantage in that form, or composition, different from the immediate pleasure.”
But more important than the insistence on altruism is their positing a special moral faculty, not the reason or intellect, not volition, but the moral sense, by which man becomes aware of right and wrong. The guidance furnished by the moral sense, which we may name conscience,** is not necessarily inconsistent with what reason would determine to be best, but, though it may be corrupted, it is less likely to lead us astray than reason is to be mistaken. Thus for the ordinary man conscience is the safest guide. The emotional or aesthetic intuitionism of Shaftesbury and Hutcheson, with other facts, led English thought from the consideration of rational principles to a greater degree of introspection and heavier emphasis on empirical psychology.
The vagueness of the phrase moral sense, and the lack of penetration, for the men between Hobbes and Butler were not the greatest of the world’s thinkers, greatly diminish the value of their systems. But on their pages are found original suggestions which greater minds have probably utilized.
David Hume and Adam Smith, who in different ways made sympathy the highest motive to moral action, though belonging to this period, we must pass by to come to the most important ethical writer of the century, Joseph Butler (1692-1752).
The life of Joseph Butler was as free from startling events as was Hobbes’ beset by them. Not even marriage disturbed his private tranquility. After preparing for the ministry he took orders, obtained advancement in due season, was later consecrated as bishop, attained a fame which has since steadily increased, and finally took quiet leave of this world’s activities. He left behind him a most closely reasoned defense of Christianity, The Analogy of Religion to the Constitution and Course of Nature, on which his fame chiefly rests, and, omitting a few minor matters, Fifteen Sermons explaining his system of ethics. While their study begets the pious hope that his non-philosophical parishioners slumbered peacefully, it is difficult to overestimate their importance for subsequent ethical speculation. The intellectual biography of Henry Sidgwick, included in the Preface to the sixth edition of The Methods of Ethics, is a typical example of such an influence. Butler is, of course, not an exclusive but an indisputable factor in the formulation of both yesterday’s and to-day’s ethics in England. Two of his sermons are here reproduced.***
* The following illustrative material is taken at random from Inquiry Concerning Moral Good and Evil, by Francis Hutcheson.
** The word conscience changes its meaning from author to author. In Cudworth it would be a synonym for practical reason; note its use in Butler; for a special discussion, study Is Conscience and Emotion, a contemporary investigation including anthropological material, by Hastings Rashdall.
*** As was the case with Plato, here also an outline of the selection is given.
I. Man’s Nature is revealed in its purpose.
1. Two cautions.
2. Its difficulty does not make the task impossible.
II. An appeal to Nature is an appeal to Conscience.
1. Statement: illustrative parallel between optics and ethics.
Man has altruistic propensions approved by conscience.
2. Objection: when passion arises we approve of cruelty and selfishness, yet passion is natural.
Each man must follow his individual nature without blaming another.
3. Reply: Nature has several meanings. The meaning above makes it impossible to act contrary to nature and hence empties obligation of all significance.
a. Two meanings of nature excluded.
b. Nature means conscience, a superior principle of reflection which judges other internal principles as well as actions, thus making man a moral agent. It is supreme.
c. Argument clarified by the contrast of disproportion.
III. Superior principles should govern by virtue of their nature.
1. Self-love an illustration.
a. Acting contrary even to the strongest part of one’s nature does not cause disproportion.
b. But disproportion is caused by acting contrary to a higher principle.
2. Conscience is also superior.
a. Strength is an irrelevant consideration; if passion rules, it is usurpation.
b. Conscience has authority; since its purpose is to govern, it was put in us for the purpose of governing.
3. Consequences of denial. We would ruin ourselves, harm others and blaspheme God.
Therefore, we cannot deny the authority of conscience.
Chapter XIII: Bentham and Mill, pgs. 287-291
Not the theoretic flaws in the preceding ethical thought merely, but the definite need of political reform in a land groaning from abuses led Jeremy Bentham (1748-1842) to devise a system of ethics without which reform was impossible. During his life time occurred the disastrous culmination of British abuse in America and the far greater calamity of the French Revolution. Had the governments in question but cared for the interests of their subjects instead of applying the principles of our old friend Callicles, the world might have lived as a happy family. But the king, the aristocracy, and the legal profession had tacitly banded together to protect and fortify privilege. The law had grown so cumbersome, so unintelligible, technicalities had so multiplied, judge-made law had so superseded written enactments, that any one of a hundred reasons was sufficient to thwart the just cause of an unprivileged person.
And what had the ethical philosophers done about it, except to permit the atrocious system to grow and spread? Their theoretical faults had obscured the issue. When Cumberland had appealed to eternal and immutable intuitions, he was dealing “in sounds instead of sense.” A younger man, John Locke, the fountain head of all British philosophy, had shown that there were no such things as innate ideas. To base one’s ethics on intuition was a step backward to the school of Descartes. The English lawyers, the aristocracy and the common people should learn once for all that the only basis on which to judge the moral worth of an act, be it the act of an individual or the act of the government, is its tendency to produce the greatest surplus of pleasure over pain for all the nation.
Other men had already said as much. Cumberland, a century before, had enunciated the principle. On the continent – and Bentham not only had quite a continental education but was recognized there as a political genius long before he became known in England – Montesquieu and Helvetius contributed to his development, and especially Beccaria, an Italian. The last had worked out the elements of the moral arithmetic for which Bentham is so well known. Hutcheson used the formula of the greatest happiness of the greatest number. Hume knew of utility. But Bentham combined their suggestions, formed a school and actually initiated reforms in England, not to mention the sphere of his influence in other countries.*
Yet owing to the very fact that Bentham and his disciples achieved so much practically, it may turn out that their theory is not so greatly superior to others.
Underlying his activity is the aim to make morals and politics as accurate as physics. We recall that Aristotle considered such an aim to betray a lack of reflection, and this is but one of the points on which Bentham differs radically from that ancient authority. Pleasure is a very definite state of consciousness, its quantity can be scientifically measured. Thus one pleasure can be determined to be better or greater than another and one pain greater or worse than another. Units of pleasure and units of pain can be cancelled and the result, by revealing which of two or more lines of action will produce the greatest surplus of pleasure, will indicate which one is the right or moral action. The basis of morality may be a feeling but the method of distinguishing right from wrong is as rational as mathematics. Because both Hutcheson and Hume distinguish these by means of feeling rather than reason, Bentham, in making practical morality a rational problem, deviates from one group of predecessors and in making the problem as exact as arithmetic progresses beyond others.
Bentham’s clarity of expression makes a minimum of explanatory material necessary. Easy comprehension of his system hastens the consideration of difficulties. The divergence between Bentham’s view of ethics as an exact science and the Aristotelian position has been noted. We may pass to the alleged ambiguity of the terms pleasure and happiness. For Bentham now words could be more univocal. If a person does not know what makes him happy, or what pleases him, can he know anything? But speculation, from Plato’s time till now apparently indicates that Bentham was over-optimistic. His disciple John Stuart Mill, a selection from whom immediately follows that from Bentham, will unintentionally illustrate this point. If pleasure be unambiguous, if it be so precise as to admit of arithmetric determination, Bentham becomes the greatest ethicist in the world’s history. As a matter of fact, pleasure has never been so exactly measured yet. The assumption that all pleasures are commensurable, and that they are commensurable with all pains as well, remains to be demonstrated. Bentham at times doubted his own assumption, but knew not how to replace it. Mill denied the assumption. For him pleasure admits not only quantitative but also qualitative differentiation.
There is a further problem. In Bentham’s ethics as in Hobbes’, each man’s course of life is determined by pleasure or by what he thinks will yield pleasure. Aside from pleasure there is really not motive to action. Nevertheless the morality of an act depends on its tendency to produce the greatest happiness of the greatest number. But unless the happiness of all is consistent with one’s personal happiness, why should one aim at the happiness of all. Bentham seems to have assumed they harmonize. But in the practical business of a reform movement it appears quite otherwise. When his principle of utility was called dangerous, he was puzzled until he reflected that utility might be dangerous to the power of privilege. On the whole Bentham was unconscious of the difficulty. Previous philosophers had not been. Paley, basing morality on pleasure, harmonized private and public pleasure by God’s equalizing rewards and punishments in the future life. Bentham considered God’s judgments only in so far as they caused physical results in the present world. Hume had made sympathy unite all people in a bond so strong that all their various interests were fused. Bentham, however, depends primarily on the artificial sanctions of the legislator. Then who is to control the legislator in creating the sanctions? Perhaps the voters. But perhaps the legislator may prove too strong and apply legal sanctions for his own ends.
On the whole, as we have said, Bentham was not concerned with the problem. Mill (1806-1873) after him, tried to unify the sole motive of personal pleasure and the utilitarian principle of pleasure for all in a feeling of the unity of humanity. John Austin, and still later Henry Sidgwick, which latter will long remain an outstanding figure in ethics, return in one way or another to the position of Paley and Butler, that God harmonizes the individual and the universal good.
Bentham’s failure in this particular leads back to a final question which was mentioned in the chapter on Hobbes.
A scientific description of what men actually do, Hobbes and Bentham agree, leads to psychological hedonism – the doctrine that men seek their pleasure only. But utilitarianism decides that man ought to seek the pleasure of the greatest number. Aside from the question raised through a conflict between two pleasures, by what process may one step from a description of facts to a statement of what one ought to be? How can a normative science be generated from a descriptive basis? It may be, and it is Sidgwick’s opinion, that utilitarianism is forced to an intuition which Bentham and Mill rejected in their predecessors.
* Cf. Growth of Philosophic Radicalism by Elie Halevy; The English Utilitarians, Vol. I, by Leslie Stephen.