and the whole of ethics.
The principle of general interest leans towards disinterestedness, and
this is certainly much; but disinterestedness is the condition of
virtue, not virtue itself. We may commit an injustice with the most
entire disinterestedness. From the fact that an action does not profit
him who does it, it does not follow that it may not be in itself very
unjust, in seeking general interest before all, we escape, it is true,
that vice of soul which is called selfishness, but we may fall into a
thousand iniquities. Or, indeed, it must be felt, that general interest
is always conformed to justice. But these two ideas are not adequate to
each other. If they very often go together, they are sometimes also
separated. Themistocles proposed to the Athenians to burn the fleet of
the allies that was in the port of Athens, and thus to secure to
themselves the supremacy. The project is useful, says Aristides, but it
is unjust, and on account of this simple speech, the Athenians renounce
an advantage that must be purchased by an injustice. Observe that
Themistocles had no particular interest in that; he thought only of the
interest of his country. But, had he hazarded or given his life in order
to engage the Athenians in such an act, he would only have been
consecrating--what has often been seen--an admirable devotion to a
course in itself immoral.
To this it is replied, that if, in the example cited, justice and
interest exclude each other, it is because the interest was not
sufficiently general; and the celebrated maxim is arrived at, that one
must sacrifice himself to his family, his family to the city, the city
to country, country to humanity, that, in fine, the good is the interest
of the greatest number.[206]
When you have gone thus far, you have not yet attained even the idea of
justice. The interest of humanity, like that of the individual, may
accord in fact with justice, for in that there is certainly no
incompatibility, but the two things are none the more identical, so that
we cannot say with exactness that the interest of humanity is the
foundation of justice. A single case, even a single hypothesis, in which
the interest of humanity should not accord with the good, is sufficient
to enable us to conclude that one is not essentially the other.
We go farther: if it is the interest of humanity that constitutes and
measures justice, that only is unjust which this interest declares to be
so. But you are not able to affirm absolutely, that, in any
circumstance, the interest of humanity will not demand such or such an
action; and if it demands it, by virtue of your principle, it will be
necessary to do it, whatever it may be, and to do it inasmuch as it is
just.
You order me to sacrifice particular interest to general interest. But
in the name of what do you order me to do this? Is it in the name of
interest? If interest, as such, must touch me, evidently my interest
must also touch me, and I do not see why I should sacrifice it to that
of others.
The supreme end of human life, you say, is happiness. I hence conclude
very reasonably, that the supreme end of my life is my happiness.
In order to ask of me the sacrifice of my happiness, it must be called
for by some other principle than happiness itself.
Consider to what perplexity this famous principle of the greatest good
of the greatest number condemns me. I have already much difficulty in
discerning my true interest in the obscurity of the future; by
substituting for the infallible voice of justice the uncertain
calculations of personal interest, you have not rendered action easy for
me;[207] but it becomes impossible, if it is necessary to seek, before
acting, what is the interest not only of myself, but of my family, not
only of my family, but of my country, not only of my country, but of
humanity. What! must I embrace the entire world in my foresight? What!
is such the price of virtue? You impose upon me a knowledge that God
alone possesses. Am I in his counsels so as to adjust my actions
according to his decrees? The philosophy of history and the wisest
diplomacy are not, then, sufficient for conducting ourselves well.
Imagine, therefore, that there is no mathematical science of human life.
Chance and liberty confound the profoundest calculations, overturn the
best-established fortunes, relieve the most desperate miseries, mingle
good fortune and bad, confound all foresight.
And would you establish ethics on a foundation so mobile? How much place
you leave for sophism in that complaisant and enigmatical law of general
interest![208] It will not be very difficult always to find some remote
reason of general interest, which will excuse us from being faithful in
the present moment to our friends, when they shall be in misfortune. A
man in adversity addresses himself to my generosity. But could I not
employ my money in a way more useful to humanity? Will not the country
have need of it to-morrow? Let us virtuously keep it for the country
then. Moreover, even where the interest of all seems evident, there
still remains some chance of error; it is, therefore, better to
withhold. It will always be wisdom to withhold. Yes, when it is
necessary, in order to do well, to be sure of serving the greatest
interest of the greatest number, none but the rash and senseless will
dare to act. The principle of general interest will produce, I admit,
great devotedness, but it will also produce great crimes. Is it not in
the name of this principle that fanatics of every kind, fanatics in
religion, fanatics in liberty, fanatics in philosophy, taking it upon
themselves to understand the eternal interest of humanity, have engaged
in abominable acts, mingled often with a sublime disinterestedness?
Another error of this system is that it confounds the good itself with
one of its applications. If the good is the greatest interest of the
greatest number, the consequence is clear, that there are only public
and social ethics, and no private ethics; there is only a single class
of duties, duties towards others, and there are no duties towards
ourselves. But this is retrenching precisely those of our duties that
most surely guarantee the exercise of all the rest.[209] The most
constant relations that I sustain are with that being which is myself.
I am my own most habitual society. I bear in myself, as Plato[210] has
well said, a whole world of ideas, sentiments, desires, passions,
emotions, which claim a legislation. This necessary legislation is
suppressed.
Let us also say a word on a system that, under sublime appearances,
conceals a vicious principle.
There are persons who believe that they are magnifying God, by placing
in his will alone the foundation of the moral law, and the sovereign
motive of humanity in the punishments and rewards that it has pleased
him to attach to the respect and violation of his will.
Let us understand what we are about in a matter of such delicacy.
It is certain, and we shall establish it for the good,[211] as we have
done for the true and the beautiful,[212] it is certain that, from
explanations to explanations, we come to be convinced that God is
definitively the supreme principle of ethics, so that it may be very
truly said, that the good is the expression of his will, since his will
is itself the expression of the eternal and absolute justice that
resides in him. God wills, without doubt, that we should act according
to the law of justice that he has put in our understanding and our
heart; but it is not at all necessary to conclude that he has
arbitrarily instituted this law. Far from that, justice is in the will
of God only because it has its roots in his intelligence and wisdom,
that is to say, in his most intimate nature and essence.
While making, then, every reservation in regard to what is true in the
system that founds ethics on the will of God, we must show what there is
in this system, as it is presented to us, false, arbitrary, and
incompatible with ethics themselves.[213]
In the first place, it does not pertain to the will, whatever it may
be, to institute the good, any more than it belongs to it to institute
the true and the beautiful. I have no idea of the will of God except by
my own, to be sure with the differences that separate what is finite
from what is infinite. Now, I cannot by my will found the least truth.
Is it because my will is limited? No; were it armed with infinite power,
it would, in this respect, be equally impotent. Such is the nature of my
will that, in doing a thing, it is conscious of the power to do the
opposite; and that is not an accidental character of the will, it is its
fundamental character; if, then, it is supposed that truth, or that
first part of it which is called justice, has been established as it is
by an act of volition, human or Divine, it must be acknowledged that
another act might have established it otherwise, and made what is now
just unjust, and what is unjust just. But such mobility is contrary to
the nature of justice and truth. In fact, moral truths are as absolute
as metaphysical truths. God cannot make effects exist without a cause,
phenomena without a substance; neither can he make it evil to respect
his word, to love truth, to repress one's passions. The principles of
ethics are immutable axioms like those of geometry. Of moral laws
especially must be said what Montesquieu said of all laws in
general,--they are necessary relations that are derived from the nature
of things.
Let us suppose that the good and the just are derived from the divine
will; on the divine will obligation will also rest. But can any will
whatever be the foundation of obligation? The divine will is the will
of an omnipotent being, and I am a feeble being. This relation of a
feeble being to an omnipotent being, does not contain in itself any
moral idea. One may be forced to obey the stronger, but he is not
obligated to do it. The sovereign orders of the will of God, if his will
could for a moment be separated from his other attributes, would not
contain the least ray of justice; and, consequently, there would not
descend into my soul the least shade of obligation.
One will exclaim,--It is not the arbitrary will of God that makes the
foundation of obligation and justice; it is his just will. Very well.
Every thing changes then. It is not the pure will of God that obligates
us, it is the motive itself that determines his will, that is to say,
the justice passed into his will. The distinction between the just and
the unjust is not then the work of his will.
One of two things. Either we found ethics on the will of God alone, and
then the distinction between good and evil, just and unjust, is
gratuitous, and moral obligation does not exist; or you give authority
to the will of God by justice, which, in your hypothesis, must have
received from the will of God its authority, which is a _petitio
principii_.
Another _petitio principii_ still more evident. In the first place, you
are compelled, in order legitimately to draw justice from the will of
God, to suppose that this will is just, or I defy any one to show that
this will alone can ever form the basis of justice. Moreover, evidently
you cannot comprehend what a just will of God is, if you do not already
possess the idea of justice. This idea, then, does not come from that of
the will of God.
On the one hand, you may have, and you do have, the idea of justice,
without understanding the will of God; on the other, you cannot conceive
the justice of the divine will, without having conceived justice
elsewhere.
Are not these reasons sufficient, I pray you, to conclude that the sole
will of God is not for us the principle of the idea of the good?
And now, behold the natural consummation of the ethical system that we
are examining:--the just and the unjust are what it has pleased God to
declare such, by attaching to them the rewards and punishments of
another life. The divine will manifests itself here only by an arbitrary
order; it adds to this order promises and threats.
But to what human faculty are addressed the promise and threat of the
chastisements and the rewards of another life? To the same one that in
this life fears pain and seeks pleasure, shuns unhappiness and desires
happiness, that is to say, to sensibility animated by imagination, that
is to say, again, to what is most changing in each of us and most
different in the human species. The joys and sufferings of another life
excite in us the two most vivid but most mobile passions, hope and fear.
Every thing influences our fears and hopes,--aye, health, the passing
cloud, a ray of the sun, a cup of coffee, a thousand causes of this
kind. I have known men, even philosophers, who on certain days hoped
more, and other days less. And such a basis some would give to ethics!
Then it is doing nothing else than proposing for human conduct an
interested motive. The calculation which I obey is purer, if you will;
the happiness that one makes me hope for is greater; but I see in that
no justice that obligates me, no virtue and no vice in me, who know or
do not know how to make this calculation, not having a head as strong as
that of Pascal,[214] who yield to or resist those fears and hopes
according to the deposition of my sensibility and my imagination, over
which I have no power. Finally, the pains and pleasures of the future
life are instituted on the ground of punishments and rewards. Now, none
but actions in themselves good or bad can be rewarded and punished. If
already there is in itself no good, no law that in conscience we are
obligated to follow, there is neither merit nor demerit; recompense is
not then recompense, nor penalty penalty, since they are such only on
the condition of being the complement and the sanction of the idea of
the good. Where this idea does not pre-exist, there remain, instead of
recompense and penalty, only the attraction of pleasure and the fear of
suffering, added to a prescription deprived in itself of morality. In
that we come back to the punishments of earth invented for the purpose
of frightening popular imagination, and supported solely on the decrees
of legislators, on an abstraction of good and evil, of justice and
injustice, of merit and demerit. It is the worst human justice that is
found thus transported into heaven. We shall see that the human soul has
foundation somewhat solider.[215]
These different systems, false or incomplete, having been rejected, we
arrive at the doctrine that is to our eyes perfect truth, because it
admits only certain facts, neglects none, and maintains for all of them
their character and rank.
FOOTNOTES:
[203] _Mordre_--to bite, is the main root of _remords_--remorse.
[204] See 1st part, lecture 5, _On Mysticism_, and 2d part, lecture 6,
_On the Sentiment of the Beautiful_. See, also, 1st Series, vol. iv.,
detailed refutation of the Theories of Hutcheson and Smith.
[205] We do not grow weary of citing M. Royer-Collard. He has marked the
defects of the ethics of sentiment in a lively and powerful passage,
from which we borrow some traits. _Oeuvres de Reid_, vol. iii., p.
410, 411: "The perception of the moral qualities of human actions is
accompanied by an emotion of the soul that is called _sentiment_.
Sentiment is a support of nature that invites us to good by the
attraction of the noblest joys of which man is capable, and turns us
from evil by the contempt, the aversion, the horror with which it
inspires us. It is a fact that by the contemplation of a beautiful
action or a noble character, at the same time that we perceive these
qualities of the action and the character (perception, which is a
judgment), we feel for the person a love mingled with respect, and
sometimes an admiration that is full of tenderness. A bad action, a
loose and perfidious character, excite a contrary perception and
sentiment. The internal approbation of conscience and remorse are
sentiments attached to the perception of the moral qualities of our own
actions.... I do not weaken the part of sentiment; yet it is not true
that ethics are wholly in sentiment; if we maintain this, we annihilate
moral distinctions.... Let ethics be wholly in sentiment, and nothing is
in itself good, nothing is in itself evil; good and evil are relative;
the qualities of human actions are precisely such as each one feels them
to be. Change sentiment, and you change every thing; the same action is
at once good, indifferent, and bad, according to the affection of the
spectator. Silence sentiment, and actions are only physical phenomena;
obligation is resolved into inclinations, virtue into pleasure, honesty
into utility. Such are the ethics of Epicurus: _Dii meliora piis_!"
[206] In this formula is recognized the system of Bentham, who, for some
time, had numerous partisans in England, and even in France.
[207] See lecture 12.
[208] 1st Series, vol. iv., p. 174: "If the good is that alone which
must be the most useful to the greatest number, where can the good be
found, and who can discern it? In order to know whether such an action,
which I propose to myself to do, is good or bad, I must be sure, in
spite of its visible and direct utility in the present moment, that it
will not become injurious in a future that I do not yet know. I must
seek whether, useful to mine and those that surround me, it will not
have counter-strokes disastrous to the human race, of which I must think
before all. It is important that I should know whether the money that I
am tempted to give this unfortunate who needs it, could not be otherwise
more usefully employed, in fact, the rule is here the greatest good of
the greatest number. In order to follow it, what calculations are
imposed on me? In the obscurity of the future, in the uncertainty of the
somewhat remote consequences of every action, the surest way is to do
nothing that is not related to myself, and the last result of a prudence
so refined is indifference and egoism. Supposing you have received a
deposit from an opulent neighbor, who is old and sick, a sum of which he
has no need, and without which your numerous family runs the risk of
dying with famine. He calls on you for this sum,--what will you do? The
greatest number is on your side, and the greatest utility also; for this
sum is insignificant for your rich neighbor, whilst it will save your
family from misery, and perhaps from death. Father of a family, I should
like much to know in the name of what principle you would hesitate to
retain the sum which is necessary to you? Intrepid reasoner, placed in
the alternative of killing this sick old man, or of letting your wife
and children die of hunger, in all honesty of conscience you ought to
kill him. You have the right, it is even your duty to sacrifice the less
advantage of a single person to much the greater advantage of a greater
number; and since this principle is the expression of true justice, you
are only its minister in doing what you do. A vanquishing enemy or a
furious people threaten destruction to a whole city, if there be not
delivered up to them the head of such a man, who is, nevertheless,
innocent. In the name of the greatest good of the greatest number, this
man will be immolated without scruple. It might even be maintained that
innocent to the last, he has ceased to be so, since he is an obstacle to
the public good. It having once been declared that justice is the
interest of the greatest number, the only question is to know where this
interest is. Now, here, doubt is impossible, therefore, it is perfectly
just to offer innocence as a holocaust to public safety. This
consequence must be accepted, or the principle rejected."
[209] See lecture 15, _Private and Public Ethics_.
[210] Plato, _Republic_, vol. ix. and x. of our translation.
[211] Lecture 16.
[212] Lectures 4 and 7.
[213] This polemic is not new. The school of St. Thomas engaged in it
early against the theory of Occam, which was quite similar to that which
we combat. See our _Sketch of a General History of Philosophy_, 2d
Series, vol. ii., lect. 9, _On Scholasticism_. Here are two decisive
passages from St. Thomas, 1st book of the _Summation against the
Gentiles_, chap. lxxxvii: "Per praedicta autem excluditur error dicentiam
omnia procedere a Deo secundum simplicem voluntatem, ut de nullo
oporteat rationem reddere, nisi quia Deus vult. Quod etiam divinae
Scripturae contrariatur, quae Deum perhibet secundum ordinem sapientiae suae
omnia fecisse, secundum illud Psalm ciii.: omnia in sapientia fecisti."
_Ibid._, book ii., chap. xxiv.: "Per hoc autem excluditur quorundam
error qui dicebant omnia ex simplica divina voluntate dependere aliqua
ratione."
[214] See the famous calculus applied to the immortality of the soul,
_Des Pensees de Pascal_, vol. i. of the 4th Series, p. 229-235 and p.
289-296.
[215] Lecture 16.
LECTURE XIV.
TRUE PRINCIPLES OF ETHICS.
Description of the different facts that compose the moral
phenomena.--Analysis of each of these facts:--1st, Judgment and
idea of the good. That this judgment is absolute. Relation
between the true and the good.--2d, Obligation. Refutation of
the doctrine of Kant that draws the idea of the good from
obligation instead of founding obligation on the idea of the
good.--3d, Liberty, and the moral notions attached to the notion
of liberty.--4th, Principle of merit and demerit. Punishments
and rewards.--5th, Moral sentiments.--Harmony of all these facts
in nature and science.
Philosophic criticism is not confined to discerning the errors of
systems; it especially consists in recognizing and disengaging the
truths mixed with these errors. The truths scattered in different
systems compose the whole truth which each of these almost always
expresses on a single side. So, the systems that we have just run over
and refuted deliver up to us, in some sort, divided and opposed to each
other, all the essential elements of human morality. The only question
is to collect them, in order to restore the entire moral phenomenon. The
history of philosophy, thus understood, prepares the way for or confirms
psychological analysis, as psychological analysis receives from the
history of philosophy its light. Let us, then, interrogate ourselves in
presence of human actions, and faithfully collect, without altering them
by any preconceived system, the ideas and the sentiments of every kind
that the spectacle of these actions produce in us.
There are actions that are agreeable or disagreeable to us, that procure
us advantages or injure us, in a word, that are, in one way or another,
directly or indirectly, addressed to our interest. We are rejoiced with
actions that are useful to us, and shun those that may injure us. We
seek earnestly and with the greatest effort what seems to us our
interest.
This is an incontestable fact. Here is another fact that is not less
incontestable.
There are actions that have no relation to us, that, consequently, we
cannot estimate and judge on the ground of our interest, that we
nevertheless qualify as good or bad.
Suppose that before your eyes a man, strong and armed, falls upon
another man, feeble and disarmed, whom he maltreats and kills, in order
to take away his purse. Such an action does not reach you in any way,
and, notwithstanding, it fills you with indignation.[216] You do every
thing in your power that this murderer may be arrested and delivered up
to justice; you demand that he shall be punished, and if he is punished
in one way or another, you think that it is just; your indignation is
appeased only after a chastisement proportioned to the crime committed
has been inflicted on the culprit. I repeat that in this you neither
hope nor fear any thing for yourself. Were you placed in an inaccessible
fortress, from the top of which you might witness this scene of murder,
you would feel these sentiments none the less.
This is only a rude picture of what takes place in you at the sight of a
crime. Apply now a little reflection and analysis to the different
traits of which this picture is composed, without destroying their
nature, and you will have a complete philosophic theory.