IDEALISTIC ETHICS. Idealistic ethics specifically designates the ethics of Hegel, his Kantian predecessors, and immediate disciples; the inclusion of Berkeley, Leibniz, and Plato (all idealists in virtue of the term's elasticity) would leave no common ethics to be discussed.
Hegelian ethics develop out of Kant's attempt to escape Spinozistic mechanism. Kant agreed that all bodily motions, including the motions of the human body, are mathematically determined by the inviolable laws of causation. But morality, to which Kant was fervently attached, presupposes God, freedom, and immortality. To harmonize these two themes Kant postulated two worlds: the sensory world of space, time, and causality, and the noumenal world of things in themselves, free transcendental egos, and God. This solution encounters both epistemological and ethical difficulties (cf. Kant).
Johann Gottlieb Fichte (1762-1814) admitted that there is no logical flaw in scientific mechanism. But though mechanism cannot be disproved, it is morally unacceptable. No philosophy can demonstrate it own principles, and in these matters one is face with an ultimate choice. Whether a man chooses Spinozism or freedom depends on what kind of a man he is. Fichte chose morality and freedom.
The moral self, now accepted as the fundamental principle of philosophy, also removed the epistemological difficulties of an unknowable world. Kant had analyzed knowledge into two components; the forms of the mind, such as space, time, and causality, which it imposes on experience, and the contents that are given to the mind by experience. Das Gebenes, the data, required an unknowable source. If, however, we commence with the moral self, the objects of nature become constructions of my consciousness. I give them to myself, and no unknowable source is needed.
This idealism avoids the great absurdity of materialism. The latter denies fundamental reality to mind, as for example the twentieth century behaviorists deny even the existence of consciousness; but knowledge can begin only with some sort of Cogito. Philosophy and experience both start with the self. But if this is the starting point, the objects of nature are derivative. Having so deduced them, a philosopher cannot then reverse himself and profess to explain the self as a result of nature.
The moral self also solves the problem of solipsism. The moral self has obligations. But neither Humean images nor Kantian phenomena have. Therefore the self is not a phenomenon. Furthermore no obligations are due to images or phenomena. Obligations can exist only among persons. Therefore solipsism is impossible and I am a member of a world of free spirits.
If these free spirits were totally independent, the world would be a chaos. Beyond the plurality is a single, all inclusive Absolute Self.
Fichte's Absolute Self is by no means the personal God of Christianity. Fichte opposed Christianity: its people are hedonistic (since they desire heaven) and therefore immoral; and what is worse, its God is also hedonistic because he created the world for his own pleasure. Such a God is the devil.
Therefore Fichte concludes, "It is not doubtful... that there is a moral world order... that every good action succeeds and every evil fails, that for those who love only the good, all things must work for the best... It can as little remain uncertain... that the concept of God as a particular substance is impossible and contradictory."
Hegel, in conformity with his triadic method, divides the general subject into Abstract Right, Morality, and Social Ethics. Although abstract right is supposed to concern externalities, like property, and morality concerns inner motivation, the former includes a theory of the person that lays the foundation for early twentieth century personalism.
A person is a consciousness that knows itself, as animals do not, and therefore has rights. Things have no rights. Therefore property is justified. The exercise of property rights may be possible only in a State, but the right itself is inherent in the individual. This means that not merely property is justified, but private property.
How far Hegel would have approved of latter developments may be hard to decide. Even communism can argue that the State does not abolish private property but merely distributes it - the good one actually eats must be private.
A consideration of crime and punishment brings morality into focus. Crime reveals an opposition between the will of one individual and the universal will. But since the latter is the essence of the former, a criminal will does not conform to what is ought to be. Thus it violates its own personality. It negates its own right. Punishment is the negation of the negation. Morality consists in the conformity of the individual will to the universal.
But morality is a one-sided abstraction that must be completed by social ethics. Freedom, the rational goal of man in history, is the individual's subjection to the State. The State is the individual's true self, and if, as is sometimes the case, an individual must be sacrificed to or for that State, it is a sacrifice of the individual to his own higher self.
Hegel went into many details about marriage and the family, agriculture and industry, the judicial system including the police, the forms of government, and world history - none of which can be included here. Hegel's influence on Marx (q.v.( must also be omitted to allow space for a disciple who was more orthodox and mora interested in Ethics. Thomas Hill Green (1830-1882), an English idealist, was very much interested in refuting utilitarianism. Empiricism had resulted in skepticism; evolution had reduced morality to a vestigial fear inherited from animal ancestors; and physics explained all phenomena mechanically. Green gave the idealist reply.
To begin with, knowledge cannot be explain empirically or mechanically. Naturally change does not know itself. Knowledge of change is not a part of the changing process, for, if it were, it could not know any process as a whole but would be confined to the moment.
Since, therefore, man is free, rather than a natural product, morality is possible. Green is not concerned with an indeterminism that asserts unmotivated willing; he wishes to maintain the existence of moral motives that are not natural phenomena. This rules out animals wants. Such appetites do not lead to distinctively human action. Morality requires a self-conscious subject and the idea of self-satisfaction or self-realization.
Such a man and such a morality cannot exist in the world that materialistic science pictures. The universe must be conceived as personal. We can conceive of such a world, a world that is an object to a single mind, and a connected whole, only because we are conscious objects to ourselves. The irreducibility of this self-objectifying consciousness to mechanistic science compels us to regard this our consciousness as the presence in us of the mind for which the world exists.
This divine mind or God is not merely a Being who has made us; he is a Being in whom we live and have our being. We are one in principle with him. He is all that human spirit is capable of becoming.
Therefore, morality consists in self-realization. It cannot consist in utilitarian pleasure. Our aim must be a state of self-conscious life that is intrinsically desirable, the full realization of our capabilities.
A. C. Bradley, ed., Prolegomena to Ethics, Oxford, Oxford University, 1883; G. W. F. Hegel, The Philosophy of Right, tr., T. M. Knox, Oxford, 1942; Sidney Hood, From Hegel to Mars, New York, 1936; W. T. Stace, The Philosophy of Hegel, London, 1924; E. B. Talbot, Fundamental Principle of Fichte's Philosophy, New York, 1906.
Gordon H. Clark
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