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.
[pg 154]
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.
[pg 160]
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.
[pg 165]