CHAPTER XIV
THE LATER UTILITARIANISM. BIOLOGICAL AND SOCIOLOGICAL ETHICS
Beneke, Feuerbach, Laas, Auguste Comte, John Stuart Mill
THE fact that speculative philosophy also is unable to establish the optimistic-ethical world-view upon nature-philosophy is not felt with all its weight in the intellectual life of Europe. In that philosophy we have, indeed, a form of thought which flames out like a flash of lightning and vanishes as quickly, but it is confined to Germany. The rest of Europe takes hardly any notice of Fichte and Hegel, just as, indeed, it paid scarcely any attention to Kant. It does not understand that these adventurous advances in the struggle for the optimistic-ethical world-view have been undertaken by leaders who see clearly that the battle is not to be won on the usual lines. The universal conviction is, of course, that the victory was won long before, and can no longer be disputed. It is only later that people in France and England see what Kant, Fichte, and Hegel aimed at, and what their significance was in the struggle for world-view.
For the intellectual life of Europe, then, the world-view of rationalism still stands upright at a time when it has, in truth, already collapsed. Generally speaking a generation lives, of course, less by the world-view that has been produced within it than by that of the previous age. The light of a star is still visible to us when it has long ceased to exist. There is hardly anything in the world that clings so toughly to life as a world-view does.
It never becomes clear, then, to the popular utilitarian ethic that in the course of the first half of the nineteenth century it is being gradually robbed of its world-view by [pg 151] new modes of thought, those of historical science, romanticism, nature-philosophy, and natural science. Certain that it is still in favour with the healthy human reason, it remains unmoved at its post, and still does a considerable amount of work. Whenever, too, it considers its future prospects, it assumes that if it should ever have to give up all connexion with rationalism, it will be able to come to terms with positivism, that world-view which has been sobered by exact sciences. As a matter of fact, rationalism does merge imperceptibly into a kind of popular positivism. The optimistic-ethical interpretation of the universe is still relied on, but less unreservedly and less enthusiastically than previously. In this weakened form rationalism maintains itself till the end of the nineteenth century, and even till somewhat later, always working to produce the temper that desires civilization, whether independently or accompanied by popular religiousness.
While, then, Kant, Fichte, and Schleiermacher are struggling with the ethical problem, Bentham supplies the world with an ethic. The periodical entitled _The Utilitarian_ (_L’Utilitaire_) is started in Paris in 1829 to propagate his views. In England the _Westminster Review_ works for him. In 1830 Friedrich Eduard Beneke’s translation of his _Principles of Civil and Criminal Legislation_ paved a way for him in Germany. At his death—which occurred in 1832, a year after Hegel’s—Bentham could take to the grave with him the conviction that, thanks to him, an ethic which provided enlightenment both for the reason and for the heart had proved victorious everywhere.
All the earlier methods followed to establish utilitarianism continue at work in the nineteenth century. Friedrich Eduard Beneke (1798-1854),_(_50_)_ the translator of Bentham, [pg 152] and Ludwig Andreas Feuerbach (1804-1872)_(_51_)_ take up with confidence the attempts of David Hartley and Dietrich von Holbach to derive the unegoistic directly from the egoistic, and try hard to complete them in a deepened psychology. Beneke believes himself able to show how through the continuous influence of reason on the feelings of pleasure and non-pleasure, there builds itself up in man a capacity for moral judgement which holds up before him as the highest goal for his activity the all-round perfecting of human society. Feuerbach derives altruism from the possession by man of an impulse to think himself into the personality of others and to put himself in their place. Thereby, he says, his impulse to seek happiness loses its original independence, and suffers if the happiness of others is spoilt. At last, under the influence of habit, man forgets altogether that his relation of helpfulness with his fellows was originally meant to satisfy the impulse to seek his own happiness, and he conceives his own care for their welfare as duty.
Ernest Laas (1837-1885),_(_52_)_ repeats the view that ethics consist primarily in the individual’s acceptance of the rules laid down by society, an acceptance which from being a matter of habit becomes at last unconscious and automatic.
In general, however, the utilitarianism of the nineteenth century props itself up with the assumption which is first made by David Hume and Adam Smith, that from the very beginning the non-egoistic is given in human nature side by side with the egoistic.
Auguste Comte (1798-1857)_(_53_)_ in his _Physiology of Society_ praises as the greatest achievement of his time the then commencing recognition of the fundamental social tendency in human nature. The future of mankind depends in his opinion on intelligence working correctly and perseveringly [pg 153] on this endowment, and so rendering man’s natural benevolence capable of achieving the noblest and most beneficial objects. If devotion to the universal good remains at work in the multitude of individuals so as to provide the necessary complement to their natural egoism, there will arise out of the rational understanding between the two a society which is ever bringing itself nearer to perfection in its economic and social relations.
A great defender and developer of utilitarianism in England was John Stuart Mill (1806-1873),_(_54_)_ who in this followed in the footsteps of his father, James Mill (1773-1836).
Darwin and Spencer
Utilitarian ethics receive unexpected help from natural science. Biology declares itself able to explain by reference to its origin the devotion to others which thinkers had decided to accept as inherent in man by the side of the egoistic, but not further derivable from it. The unegoistic, so it teaches, does as a matter of fact grow out of the egoistic, only it does not issue from it afresh on every occasion as a result of conscious reflexion by the individual. The change has taken place in the species by a long and slow process, and is now revealed as an acquired faculty. The conviction that the welfare of the individual is best secured if the whole body of individuals is also active in promoting the common good has been established by experience in the struggle for existence. Action on this principle has thus become a characteristic of individuals which develops more and more in the course of generations. We possess this devotion to others as descendants of herds which maintained themselves in the struggle for existence while others succumbed in it, because the social impulses were developed in them the most strongly and the most universally.
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This thought is developed by Charles Darwin (1869-1882)_(_55_)_ in his _Descent of Man_, and by Herbert Spencer (1820-1903)_(_56_)_ in his _Principles of Ethics_. Each of these thinkers refers to the other.
Altruism is therefore now regarded as something natural and at the same time as something which has come into existence through reflexion, and the relation subsisting between it and egoism as having admittedly become rational. On this judgement is founded at the same time the conviction that the co-operation of these two impulses, as it developed in the past, will allow itself also to be perfected in the future. More and more will these two impulses show clearly their mutual dependence on each other. From sporadic altruism, developing in the animal kingdom for the production and maintenance of new generations, we have advanced to a settled altruism which serves the maintenance of the family and society. To bring this to completion must now be our aim. We shall succeed if the compromise between egoism and altruism continues to grow better adjusted and more purposive. We must advance to the view which at first seems to be a paradox that (to use Spencer’s language) the general prosperity can be reached mainly through a corresponding struggle of all individuals for their own prosperity and that of individuals, on the other hand, partly through their struggle for the general prosperity.
Comte’s _Physiology of Society_ is thus given a foundation in natural science by Darwin and Spencer.
Utilitarianism now continues on its way full of satisfaction at having found itself conceived by modern biology and in the history of evolution as something natural. But it has not thereby become either fresher or more capable. It advances more and more slowly. Its breath fails. What is the matter with it? Its ethical energy leaves it because [pg 155] it has conceived itself to be something natural. The fatal fact that ethics cease to be ethics in proportion as they are brought into harmony with natural happenings, is fulfilled not only when ethics are developed out of nature-philosophy but also when they are explained by biology.
Ethics consist in this: that natural happenings in man are seen, on the basis of conscious reflexion, to carry within them an inner contradiction. The more this contradiction is removed into the sphere of that which goes back to instinct, the weaker do ethics become.
The origin of ethics is assuredly this: that something which is contained as instinct in our will-to-live is taken up through conscious reflexion and further developed. The great question is, however, what this last and most original element in the instinct of solidarity is, this element which by thinking is developed far beyond everything instinctive, and in what way this development is accomplished. By proclaiming developed herd-mentality to be ethics, Darwin and Spencer show that they have not gone to the root of the problem of the relation between instinct and thinking reflexion in ethics. If nature wishes to have a perfect herd, she does not appeal to ethics, but gives the individuals, as in the ant- or the bee-kingdom, instincts by the force of which they are wholly merged in the society.
But ethics are the putting into practice the principle of solidarity on a basis of free reflexion, and this practice, moreover, directs itself not only to individuals of the same species, but to everything living in general. The ethics of Darwin and Spencer are a failure from the first, because they are too narrow and do not leave the irrational its rights. The social impulse which they put in the place of the sympathy which is assumed by Hume and Adam Smith is set at a lower pitch than the latter, and is correspondingly less calculated to explain real ethics.
The transition from egoism to altruism, then, it is equally impossible to carry through if one transfers the proceeding from the individual to the species. The fact that the process is thereby prolonged allows numerous series of [pg 156] most delicate transitions to be taken into account and their results to be summed up as inheritance of acquired characters. Nevertheless, that does not explain truly ethical devotion. The fruits of ethics are hung upon the bush of social impulse, but the bush itself did not bear them.
The weak points in biological and sociological utilitarianism
The strength of utilitarianism lies in its simplicity. Bentham and Adam Smith still show this quality. They have society in their minds as the sum of a number of individuals, not as an organized body. Their efforts are directed to inducing human beings to do as much good as they can to each other.
With John Stuart Mill this simplicity disappears. To him, and then in still stronger measure to Spencer and others, it occurs that the ethic of the conduct of an individual to his fellows cannot be carried through as a matter of reasoning. Hence, they conclude, “scientific ethics” has to do only with the relations between individuals and organized society as such.
Bentham’s simple utilitarianism puts before the individual an estimate of the manifold ways in which society needs his devotion if it is to see all its members prosperous, and appeals to his enthusiasm. The utilitarianism which has become biological and sociological tries to reckon up for the individual the correct balance between egoism and devotion. It pretends to be social-science transformed to sentiment.
Adam Smith keeps ethics and sociology still apart in such a way that he is not a sociologist when he speaks as a moralist, and not a moralist when he puts forward sociological theories. Now, however, the two points of view are worked in together, and indeed in such a way that ethics are merged in sociology.
The ethic of the simple utilitarianism is concerned with actions produced by enthusiasm, the biologico-sociological ethic with the conscientious employment of the complicated [pg 157] machinery of organized society. In the former an occasional piece of ineffective action means at worst a waste of power, in the latter a disturbance of the organism. Hence thorough-going utilitarianism comes to a depreciatory estimate of the ethic of the individual which springs from ethical convictions in the individual and does not think biologically and sociologically.
That in the sphere of individual ethics there are no more discoveries to make, passes with the later utilitarians for admitted. They regard them as an uninteresting hinterland, to advance into which is not worth while. They therefore confine themselves to the fertile coast land of social ethics. They see, no doubt, that the streams which water this lower ground come from the hinterland of individual ethics. But instead of following them up to their sources their only care is to make the lower ground safe from occasional inundations which may be caused by them. They therefore lead the streams into such deep-lying channels that the land gets parched.
Scientific ethics undertakes the impossible, viz. to regulate devotion from outside. It tries to drive water-mills without any head of water, and to shoot with a bow which is but half-bent.
How tortured are Spencer’s disquisitions on absolute and relative ethics! For the natural, ethical point of view absolute ethics consists in this: that a man experiences directly in himself an absolute ethical “must.” Because absolute ethics thinks of devotion without limits and would lead straight to a self-sacrifice which would in some way or other suspend life and activity, it has to come to an understanding with reality and decide what measure of self-sacrifice is to be made, and how far that minimum of compromise can be allowed which is necessary to ensure a continuation of life and activity. In this origin out of absolute ethics of applied, relative ethics the scientific, biological point of view cannot acquiesce. Spencer transforms the conception of absolute ethics and turns it into [pg 158] the conduct of the perfect man in the perfect society. We have no need, he says, to picture to ourselves the ideal man except “as he would exist in ideal social surroundings.” “According to the evolution hypothesis the two mutually condition each other, and only where both are to be found, is such ideal action also possible.”
The ethic which thereby comes into consideration is produced, therefore, from outside. It is determined by the relation in which society and the individual stand to one another in their mutual state of imperfection. Into the place of the living conception of absolute ethic there steps a fiction. It is only relative standards, subject to the changes produced by time and relations with others, that the ethic of sociological utilitarianism provides for men. That means that it can only feebly rouse his will to the ethical. It even reduces him to a state of confusion because it takes from him the elementary conviction that he has to exert himself without regard to what the given relations are in a state of perfection, and must contend with circumstances from an inward compulsion, even without the certainty of any result at all.
Spencer is more biologist than moralist. Ethics are to him merely the setting in which the principle of utility comes to us after it has been worked up in the brain-cells together with the experiences it has produced, and after it has been passed on by heredity. Thus he gives up all the inward forces by which ethics live. The urge to attain to a perfecting of the personality which has to be reached through ethics and the longing for a spiritual bliss which is to be experienced within them, are deprived of their office.
The ethic of Jesus and of the religious thinkers of India withdraws itself completely from social to individual ethics. The utilitarianism which has become scientific ethics gives up individual ethics in order that social ethics may alone have currency. In the first case ethics can survive because it keeps possession of the mother-country, and has sacrificed only its foreign possessions. In the [pg 159] other it wishes to exert its authority in the foreign possessions while the mother-country belongs to it no more. Individual ethics without social ethics are imperfect, but they can be very deep and living. Social ethics without individual ethics are like a limb with a tourniquet round it, into which life no longer flows from the body. They become so impoverished that they really cease to be ethics any longer.
The reduction to impotence of scientific, biological ethics shows itself not only in the fact that it finally makes all ethical standards merely relative. Such ethics can no longer uphold the duty of humanity as they ought to.
A sinister uniformity prevails in the evolution of ethics. The ethics of antiquity began to teach humanity after they had lost in the Later Stoicism their interest in organized society as they found it existing in the ancient state. Modern utilitarianism, conversely, loses its sensitiveness to the duty of humanity in proportion to the consistency with which it develops into an ethic of organized society. It cannot be otherwise. The essence of humanity consists in this: that individuals never allow themselves to think impersonally in terms of expediency as society does, or to sacrifice individual existences in order to attain their object. The outlook which seeks the welfare of organized society cannot do anything but compromise with the sacrifice of individuals or groups of individuals. In Bentham, with whom utilitarianism is still simple and concerns itself with the conduct of individuals to the multitude of other individuals, the idea of humanity has not been tampered with. Biological, sociological utilitarianism is obliged to give it up as being sentimentality which cannot maintain itself in the face of matter-of-fact ethical reflexion. Thus sociological ethics contribute not a little to the disappearance from the modern mind of any shrinking from inhumanity. It allows individuals to adopt the mentality of society instead of keeping them in a state of tension with regard to it.
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Society cannot exist without sacrifice. The ethics which start from individuals try to distribute this in such a way that through the devotion of individuals as many as possible are voluntary sacrifices, and that the individuals who are most severely hit are relieved of their burden as far as possible by others. This is the doctrine of self-sacrifice. The sociological ethics which no longer reach back at individual ethics can only lay it down that the progress of society advances according to inexorable laws at the price of the freedom and prosperity of individuals and groups of individuals. This is the doctrine of being sacrificed by others.
If followed out consistently, biological and sociological utilitarianism arrives finally, even if with hesitation, at the conviction that in reality it no longer has for its object the greatest possible happiness of the greatest possible number. To this object, which was thus formulated by Bentham, it must now assign, as being sentimental, a place behind one which corresponds more exactly to reality. What is to be realized in the ever more complete development of the mutual relations between the individual and society is not, if one dares to admit it, an increase in the welfare either of the individual or of society but . . . the enhancing and perfecting of life as such. However much it may struggle against it, utilitarianism, as soon as it has become biological and sociological, undergoes a change in its ethical character, and enters the service of supra-ethical aims. Spencer still fights to keep it in the path of natural ethical feeling.
Developed utilitarianism, directed to the enhancing and perfecting of life, can no longer regard the claims of humanity as absolutely binding, but must make up its mind in certain cases to go outside them. Biology has become its master.
Sociological ethics and socialism. Mechanical belief in progress
If it be granted that progress in the welfare of society depends on the application of the conclusions of biology [pg 161] and scientific sociology, it is not as a matter of course necessary to leave to the good pleasure of the individual the corresponding conduct which is to be ethical. It can be imposed upon him, if by economic measures and measures of organization the relation between the individual and society is determined in such a way that it automatically functions in the most effective way. Thus by the side of social ethics socialism makes its appearance. Henri de Saint-Simon (1760-1825),_(_57_)_ Charles Fourier (1772-1837)_(_58_)_ and P. J. Proudhon (1809-1865)_(_59_)_ in France, Robert Owen, the mill-owner (1771-1858),_(_60_)_ in England, and Ferdinand Lassalle (1825-64),_(_61_)_ and others in Germany, prelude its appearance. Karl Marx (1818-1883)_(_62_)_ and Friedrich Engels (1820-1895) put forward in _Das Kapital_ its consistent programme, demanding the abolition of private property and the State-regulation both of labour and of the reward of labour.
_Das Kapital_ is a doctrinaire book which works with definitions and tables, but never goes very deeply into questions of living and the conditions of living. The great influence it exerts rests on the fact that it preaches belief in a progress which is inherent in events, and works itself out in them automatically. It undertakes to unveil the mechanism of history, and to show how the succession of different methods of social organization—slavery, feudalism, the bourgeois wage-system—tend towards the final replacement of private production by State-communistic [pg 162] production as the logical crown of completed evolution. Through Marx, Hegel’s belief in inherent progress becomes, if with a somewhat different interpretation, the conviction of the masses. His optimistic feeling for reality takes the helm.
Through the rise of socialism ethical utilitarianism loses in importance. The hopes of the crowd begins to centre no longer on what can be accomplished in the world by an ethical temper which is steadily growing stronger, and working ever more and more effectively in social matters, but on what is reached when free course is secured for the laws of progress which are assumed to be inherent in things.
It is true that ethical utilitarianism still maintains itself as an influential reforming temper among the educated. In the competition with socialism there even starts a strong movement which stirs individuals, society, and the State alike into effective action against social distress. One of its leaders is Friedrich Albert Lange (1828-1875), the author of _The History of Materialism_ (1866). In his work _The Labour Question in its Significance for the Present and the Future_ (1866) he discusses the social tasks of the time and the measures that will be effective for their accomplishment, and appeals for ethical idealism without which, he says, nothing profitable can be accomplished._(_63_)_
Christianity too supports the movement. In 1864 Bishop Ketteler, of Mainz, comes forward, demanding in his book _The Labour Question and Christianity_ the creation of a Christian-social temper._(_64_)_
In England it is the clergymen, Frederick Denison Maurice (1805-1872) and Charles Kingsley (1819-1875), who bid Christendom adopt a social temper. The latter’s [pg 163] famous sermon _The Message of the Church to Working Men_ was preached in the evening of Sunday, June 22nd, 1851, before the workers who had come to London to see the first International Exhibition. On account of the excitement it caused, the Bishop of London inhibited him from preaching [in his diocese]._(_65_)_
In Russia, Count Leo Tolstoi (1828-1910)_(_66_)_ lets loose the force of the ethical thinking of Jesus. He does not, like others, interpret his words as teaching a social idealism focused on the service of systematic purposive effort, but allows them to be the commands to the absolute, uncalculating devotion which their author meant them to be. In his _Confessions_, which in the eighties were read throughout the world, the lava of primitive Christianity pours itself into the Christianity of modern times.
The social-ethical movement produces most result in Germany, because in that country the State welcomes it in the person of the Hohenzollerns. In 1883 and 1884 the Reichstag passes, in spite of the disapproving attitude of the Social Democratic Party, laws for the protection of the worker which may be considered to be models of their kind.
In the bosom of socialism itself thoughtful spirits like Eduard Bernstein (b. 1850),_(_67_)_ and others, come to see that even the most effective measures taken for the social organization of society cannot succeed unless there is a strong [pg 164] ethical idealism behind them as their driving force. This is a return to the spirit of Lassalle.
There exists, then, an active social-ethical temper. But it is nevertheless only a trickling stream of water in a big river-bed. That the reforms called for under the guidance of ethics can be realized is no longer a general conviction, as it was in the age of rationalism. The ethical temper which wishes to work for the future of mankind becomes less and less appreciated. In the victory, so fateful for the development of civilized mankind, won by Marxian State-socialism over the social ideas of Lassalle which allow much more natural play to the forces of reality, we see an expression of the fact that in the mentality of the masses the belief-in-progress has emancipated itself from ethics and has become mechanical. Confusion in the conception of civilization and ruin of the civilized temper are the consequence of this disastrous separation. The spirit of the modern age renounces thereby the very thing which really constituted its strength.
How remarkable are the vicissitudes undergone by ethics! Utilitarianism refuses all contact with nature-philosophy. It wishes to be an ethic which is concerned only with the practical, but it does not therefore escape its fate, which is to be wrecked upon nature-philosophy. In its attempt to secure a basis for itself and to think itself out completely, it changes into biological-sociological utilitarianism. Next it loses its ethical character. Without becoming aware of it, it has, of course, at the same time got entangled with nature and natural happenings, and has given cosmic problems a place within itself. Although it pretends to be only the practical ethic of human society it has become a product of nature. It has been no good removing all the distaffs: the Sleeping Beauty pricks her finger nevertheless. No ethic can avoid coming to an understanding with nature-philosophy.
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