In the philosophy of Thomas Hobbes God plays only a minor role. Time & Life Pictures/Getty Images
In Britain the most influential ethical thinkers of the modern period were Thomas Hobbes; the moral intuitionists Ralph Cudworth (1617–88), Henry More (1614–87), Samuel Clarke (1675–1729), Richard Price (1723–91), and Thomas Reid (1710–96); the moral sense theorists Anthony Ashley Cooper, the 3rd earl of Shaftesbury (1671–1713), Joseph Butler (1692–1752), Francis Hutcheson (1694–1746), and David Hume (1711–76); and the utilitarians, especially William Paley (1743–1805), Jeremy Bentham (1748–1832), John Stuart Mill (1806–73), and Henry Sidgwick (1838–1900).
Thomas Hobbes is an outstanding example of the independence of mind that became possible in Protestant countries after the Reformation. To be sure, God does play an honourable role in Hobbes’s philosophy, but it is a dispensable role. The philosophical edifice he constructed stands on its own foundations; God merely crowns the apex. Hobbes was the equal of the Greek philosophers in his readiness to develop an ethical position based only on the facts of human nature and the circumstances in which humans live, and he surpassed even Plato and Aristotle in the extent to which he sought to do this by systematic deduction from clearly stated premises.
Hobbes started with a severe view of human nature: all of the voluntary acts of human beings are aimed at pleasure or self-preservation. This position is known as psychological hedonism, because it asserts that the fundamental motivation of all human action is the desire for pleasure. Like later psychological hedonists, Hobbes was confronted with the objection that people often seem to act altruistically. According to a story told about him, Hobbes was once seen giving alms to a beggar outside St. Paul’s Cathedral. A clergyman sought to score a point by asking Hobbes whether he would have given the money had Christ not urged giving to the poor. Hobbes replied that he gave the money because it pleased him to see the poor man pleased. The reply reveals the dilemma that always faces those who propose startling new explanations for human actions: either the theory is flagrantly at odds with how people really behave, or else it must be broadened or diluted to such an extent that it loses much of what made it so shocking in the first place.
Hobbes’s definition of good is equally devoid of religious or metaphysical assumptions. A thing is good, according to him, if it is “the object of any man’s appetite or desire.” He insisted that the term must be used in relation to a person—nothing is simply good in itself, independently of any person who may desire it. Hobbes may therefore be considered an ethical subjectivist. Thus, if one were to say of the incident just described, “What Hobbes did was good,” one’s statement would not be objectively true or false. It would be true for the poor man, and, if Hobbes’s reply was accurate, it would also be true for Hobbes. But if a second poor person, for instance, was jealous of the success of the first, that person could quite properly say that the statement is false for him.
Remarkably, this unpromising picture of self-interested individuals who have no notion of good apart from their own desires served as the foundation of Hobbes’s account of justice and morality in his masterpiece, Leviathan (1651). Starting with the premises that humans are self-interested and that the world does not provide for all their needs, Hobbes argued that in the hypothetical state of nature, before the existence of civil society, there was competition between men for wealth, security, and glory. What would ensue in such a state is Hobbes’s famous “war of all against all,” in which there could be no industry, commerce, or civilization, and in which the human life would be “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.” The struggle would occur because each individual would rationally pursue his own interests, but the outcome would be in no one’s interests.
How can this disastrous situation be avoided? Not by an appeal to morality or justice; in the state of nature these ideas have no meaning. Yet, everyone wishes to survive, and everyone can reason. Reason leads people to seek peace if it is attainable but to continue to use all the means of war if it is not. How is peace to be obtained? Only by a means of a social contract, in which each person agrees to give up his right to attack others in return for the same concession from everyone else.
But how is the social contract to come about? Hobbes is not under the illusion that the mere making of a promise in a contract will carry any weight. Because everyone is rational and self-interested, no one will keep his promise unless it is in his interest to do so. Therefore, in order for the contract to work, there must be some means of enforcing it. To do this, everyone must hand over his powers to some other person or group of persons who will punish anyone who breaches the contract. This person or group of persons Hobbes calls the “sovereign.” The sovereign may be a monarch, an elected legislature, or almost any other form of political authority; the essence of sovereignty is only the possession of sufficient power to keep the peace by punishing those who would break it. When such a sovereign—the Leviathan—exists, justice becomes possible because agreements and promises are necessarily kept. At the same time, each person has adequate reason to behave justly, for the sovereign will ensure that those who do not keep their agreements are suitably punished.
Hobbes witnessed the turbulence and near anarchy of the English Civil Wars (1642–51) and was keenly aware of the dangers caused by disputed sovereignty. His solution was to insist that sovereignty must not be divided. Because the sovereign is appointed to enforce the social contract that is fundamental to peace, it is rational to resist the sovereign only if it directly threatens one’s life. Hobbes was, in effect, a supporter of absolute sovereignty, and this has been the focus of much political discussion of his ideas. His significance for ethics, however, lies rather in his success in dealing with the subject independently of theology and of quasi-Aristotelian doctrines, such as the view that the world is designed for the benefit of human beings. With this achievement, Hobbes brought ethics into the modern era.
There was, of course, immediate opposition to Hobbes’s views. Ralph Cudworth, one of a group of philosophers and theologians known as the Cambridge Platonists, defended a position in some respects similar to that of Plato. That is to say, Cudworth believed that the distinction between good and evil does not lie in human desires but is something objective that can be known by reason, just as the truths of mathematics can be known by reason. Cudworth was thus a forerunner of what has since come to be called ethical intuitionism, the view that there are objective moral truths that can be known by a kind of rational intuition. This view was to attract the support of a series of distinguished thinkers through the early 20th century, when it became for a time the dominant view in British academic philosophy.
Ralph Cudworth proposed the idea that good and evil are objective and knowable through reason, as are the truths of mathematics. Shutterstock.com
Henry More, another leading member of the Cambridge Platonists, attempted to give effect to the comparison between mathematics and morality by formulating moral axioms that could be recognized as self-evidently true. In marked contrast to Hobbes, More included an “axiom of benevolence”: “If it be good that one man should be supplied with the means of living well and happily, it is mathematically certain that it is doubly good that two should be so supplied, and so on.” Here, More was attempting to build on something that Hobbes himself accepted—namely, the desire of each individual to be supplied with the means of living well. More, however, wanted to enlist reason to show how one could move beyond this narrow egoism to a universal benevolence. There are traces of this line of thought in the Stoics, but it was More who introduced it into British ethical thinking, wherein it is still very much alive.
Samuel Clarke, the next major intuitionist, accepted More’s axiom of benevolence in slightly different words. He was also responsible for a “principle of equity,” which, though derived from the Golden Rule so widespread in ancient ethics, was formulated with a new precision: “Whatever I judge reasonable or unreasonable for another to do for me, that by the same judgment I declare reasonable or unreasonable that I in the like case should do for him.” As for the means by which these moral truths are known, Clarke accepted Cudworth’s and More’s analogy with truths of mathematics and added the idea that what human reason discerns is a certain “fitness or unfitness” about the relationship between circumstances and actions. The right action in a given set of circumstances is the fitting one; the wrong action is unfitting. This is something known intuitively and is self-evident.
Clarke’s notion of fitness is obscure, but intuitionism faces a still more serious problem that has always been a barrier to its acceptance. Suppose that it is possible to discern through reason that it would be wrong to deceive a person for profit. How does the discerning of this moral truth provide one with a motive sufficient to override the desire for profit? The position of the intuitionist divorces one’s moral knowledge from the psychological forces that motivate human action.
The punitive power of Hobbes’s sovereign is, of course, one way to provide sufficient motivation for obedience to the social contract and to the laws decreed by the sovereign as necessary for the peaceful functioning of society. The intuitionists, however, wanted to show that morality is objective and holds in all circumstances, whether there is a sovereign or not. Reward and punishment in the afterlife, administered by an all-powerful God, would provide a more universal motive; and some intuitionists, such as Clarke, did make use of this divine sanction. Other thinkers, however, wanted to show that it is reasonable to do what is good independently of the threats of any external power, human or divine. This desire lay behind the development of the major alternative to intuitionism in 17th- and 18th-century British moral philosophy: moral sense theory. The debate between the intuitionists and the moral sense theorists aired for the first time the major issue in what is still the central debate in moral philosophy: is morality based on reason or on feelings?
The term moral sense was first used by Anthony Ashley Cooper, better known as the 3rd earl of Shaftesbury, whose writings reflect the optimistic tone both of the school of thought he founded and of so much of the philosophy of the 18th-century Enlightenment. Shaftesbury believed that Hobbes had erred by presenting a one-sided picture of human nature. Selfishness is not the only natural passion. There are also natural feelings such as benevolence, generosity, sympathy, gratitude, and so on. These feelings give one an “affection for virtue”—what Shaftesbury called a moral sense—which creates a natural harmony between virtue and self-interest. Shaftesbury was, of course, realistic enough to acknowledge that there are also contrary desires and that not all people are virtuous all of the time. Virtue could, however, be recommended because—and here Shaftesbury drew upon a theme of Greek ethics—the pleasures of virtue are superior to the pleasures of vice.
Anthony Ashley Cooper, popularly known as the 3rd Earl Of Shaftesbury, first coined the term moral sense. Archive Photos/Getty Images
Joseph Butler, a bishop of the Church of England, developed Shaftesbury’s position in two ways. He strengthened the case for a harmony between morality and enlightened self-interest by claiming that happiness occurs as a by-product of the satisfaction of desires for things other than happiness itself. Those who aim directly at happiness do not find it; those whose goals lie elsewhere are more likely to achieve happiness as well. Butler was not doubting the reasonableness of pursuing one’s own happiness as an ultimate aim. Indeed, he went so far as to say that “when we sit down in a cool hour, we can neither justify to ourselves this or any other pursuit, till we are convinced that it will be for our happiness, or at least not contrary to it.” He held, however, that direct and simple egoism is a self-defeating strategy. Egoists will do better for themselves by adopting immediate goals other than their own interests and living their everyday lives in accordance with these more immediate goals.
Butler’s second addition to Shaftesbury’s account was the idea of conscience. This he conceived as a second natural guide to conduct, alongside enlightened self-interest. Butler believed that there is no inconsistency between the two; he admitted, however, that skeptics may doubt “the happy tendency of virtue,” and for them conscience can serve as an authoritative guide. Just what reason skeptics would have to follow conscience, if they believe its guidance to be contrary to their own happiness, is something that Butler did not adequately explain. Nevertheless, his introduction of conscience as an independent source of moral reasoning reflects an important difference between ancient and modern ethical thinking. The Greek and Roman philosophers would have had no difficulty in accepting everything Butler said about the pursuit of happiness, but they would not have understood his idea of another independent source of rational guidance. Although Butler insisted that the two operate in harmony, this was for him a fortunate fact about the world and not a necessary principle of reason. Thus, his recognition of conscience opened the way for later formulations of a universal principle of conduct at odds with the path indicated by even the most enlightened forms of self-interested reasoning.
The moral sense school reached its fullest development in the works of two Scottish philosophers, Francis Hutcheson and David Hume. Hutcheson was concerned with showing, against the intuitionists, that moral judgment cannot be based on reason and therefore must be a matter of whether an action is “amiable or disagreeable” to one’s moral sense. Like Butler’s notion of conscience, Hutcheson’s moral sense does not find pleasing only, or even predominantly, those actions that are in one’s own interest. On the contrary, Hutcheson conceived moral sense as based on a disinterested benevolence. This led him to state, as the ultimate criterion of the goodness of an action, a principle that was to serve as the basis for the utilitarian reformers: “That action is best which procures the greatest happiness for the greatest numbers.”
Hume, like Hutcheson, held that reason cannot be the basis of morality. His chief ground for this conclusion was that morality is essentially practical: there is no point in judging something good if the judgment does not incline one to act accordingly. Reason alone, however, Hume regarded as “the slave of the passions.” Reason can show people how best to achieve their ends, but it cannot determine what those ends should be; it is incapable of moving one to action except in accordance with some prior want or desire. Hence, reason cannot give rise to moral judgments.
This is an important argument that is still employed in the debate between those who believe that morality is based on reason and those who base it instead on emotion or feelings. Hume’s conclusion certainly follows from his premises. Can either premise be denied? Intuitionists such as Cudworth and Clarke maintained that reason can lead to action. Reason, they would have said, leads one to recognize a particular action as fitting in a given set of circumstances and therefore to do it. Hume would have none of this. “’Tis not contrary to reason,” he provocatively asserted, “to prefer the destruction of the whole world to the scratching of my finger.” To show that he was not embracing the view that only egoism is rational, Hume continued: “’Tis not contrary to reason to choose my total ruin, to prevent the least uneasiness of an Indian or person wholly unknown to me.” His point was simply that to have these preferences is to have certain desires or feelings; they are not matters of reason at all. The intuitionists might insist that moral and mathematical reasoning are analogous, but this analogy was not helpful. Knowing a truth of geometry need not motivate one to act in any way.
What of Hume’s other premise, that morality is essentially practical and that moral judgments must lead to action? This can be denied more easily. One could say that moral judgments merely tell one what is right or wrong. They do not lead to action unless one wants to do what is right. Then Hume’s argument would do nothing to undermine the claim that moral judgments are based on reason. But there is a price to pay: the terms right and wrong lose much of their force. It can no longer be claimed that those who know what is right but do what is wrong are in any way irrational. They are just people who do not happen to have the desire to do what is right. This desire—because it leads to action—must be acknowledged to be based on feeling rather than on reason. Denying that morality is necessarily action-guiding means abandoning the idea, so important to those defending the objectivity of morality, that some courses of action are objectively required of all rational beings.
Hume’s forceful presentation of this argument against a rational basis for morality would have been enough to earn him a place in the history of ethics, but it is by no means his only achievement in this field. In A Treatise of Human Nature (1739–40), he points, almost as an afterthought, to the fact that writers on morality regularly start by making various observations about human nature or about the existence of a god—all statements of fact about what is the case—and then suddenly switch to statements about what ought or ought not to be done. Hume says that he cannot conceive how this new relationship of “ought” can be deduced from the preceding statements that were related by “is,” and he suggests that these authors should explain how this deduction is to be achieved. The point has since been called Hume’s Law and taken as proof of the existence of a gulf between facts and values, or between “is” and “ought.” This places too much weight on Hume’s brief and ironic comment, but there is no doubt that many writers, both before and after Hume, have argued as if values could easily be deduced from facts. They can usually be found to have smuggled values in somewhere. Attention to Hume’s Law makes it easy to detect such logically illicit contraband.
Hume’s positive account of morality is in keeping with the moral sense school: “The hypothesis which we embrace is plain. It maintains that morality is determined by sentiment. It defines virtue to be whatever mental action or quality gives to a spectator the pleasing sentiment of approbation; and vice the contrary.” In other words, Hume takes moral judgments to be based on a feeling. They do not reflect any objective state of the world. Having said that, however, it may still be asked whether this feeling is one that is common to all or one that varies from individual to individual. If Hume gives the former answer, moral judgments retain a kind of objectivity. While they do not reflect anything “out there” in the universe (apart from human feelings), one’s judgments may be true or false depending on whether they capture this universal human moral sentiment. If, on the other hand, the feeling varies from one individual to the next, moral judgments become entirely subjective. People’s judgments would express their own feelings, and to reject someone else’s judgment as wrong would merely be to say that one’s own feelings were different.
Hume does not make entirely clear which of these two views he holds; but if he is to avoid breaching his own rule about not deducing an “ought” from an “is,” he cannot hold that a moral judgment can follow logically from a description of the feelings that an action gives to a particular group of spectators. From the mere existence of a feeling, one cannot draw the inference that one ought to obey it. For Hume to be consistent on this point—and consistent even with his central argument that moral judgments must move to action—the moral judgment must be based not on the fact that all people, or most people, or even the speaker, have a certain feeling; it must rather be based on the actual experience of the feeling by whoever accepts the judgment. This still leaves it open whether the feeling is common to all or limited to the person accepting the judgment, but it shows that, in either case, the “truth” of a judgment for any individual depends on whether that individual actually has the appropriate feeling. Is this “truth” at all? As will be seen below, contemporary philosophers with views broadly similar to Hume’s have suggested that moral judgments have a special kind of meaning not susceptible of truth or falsity in the ordinary way.
Powerful as they were, Hume’s arguments did not end the debate between the moral sense theorists and the intuitionists. They did, however, lead Richard Price, Thomas Reid, and later intuitionists to abandon the idea that moral truths can be established by some process of demonstrative reasoning akin to that used in mathematics. Instead, these proponents of intuitionism took the line that notions of right and wrong are simple, objective ideas that are directly perceived and not further analyzable into anything such as “fitness.” Knowledge of these ideas derives not from any moral sense based on feelings but rather from a faculty of reason or of the intellect that is capable of discerning truth. Since Hume, this has been the only plausible form of intuitionism. Yet, Price and Reid failed to explain adequately what the objective moral qualities are and how they are connected to human action.
At this point the argument over whether morality is based on reason or on feelings was temporarily exhausted, and the focus of British ethics shifted from such questions about the nature of morality as a whole to an inquiry into which actions are right and which are wrong. Today, the distinction between these two types of inquiry would be expressed by saying that, whereas the 18th-century debate between intuitionism and the moral sense school dealt with questions of metaethics, 19th-century thinkers became chiefly concerned with questions of normative ethics. Metaethical positions concerning whether ethics is objective or subjective, for example, do not tell one what one ought to do. That task is the province of normative ethics.
The impetus to the discussion of normative ethics was provided by the challenge of utilitarianism. The essential principle of utilitarianism was put forth by Hutcheson. Curiously, it was further developed by the widely read theologian William Paley, who provides a good example of the independence of metaethics and normative ethics. His position on the nature of morality was similar to that of Ockham and Luther—namely, he held that right and wrong are determined by the will of God. Yet, because he believed that God wills the happiness of his creatures, his normative ethics were utilitarian: whatever increases happiness is right; whatever diminishes it is wrong.
Notwithstanding these predecessors, Jeremy Bentham is properly considered the father of modern utilitarianism. It was he who made the utilitarian principle serve as the basis for a unified and comprehensive ethical system that applies, in theory at least, to every area of life. Never before had a complete, detailed system of ethics been so consistently constructed from a single fundamental ethical principle.
Bentham’s ethics began with the proposition that nature has placed human beings under two masters: pleasure and pain. Anything that seems good must be either directly pleasurable or thought to be a means to pleasure or to the avoidance of pain. Conversely, anything that seems bad must be either directly painful or thought to be a means to pain or to the deprivation of pleasure. From this Bentham argued that the words right and wrong can be meaningful only if they are used in accordance with the utilitarian principle, so that whatever increases the net surplus of pleasure over pain is right and whatever decreases it is wrong.
Bentham then considered how one is to weigh the consequences of an action and thereby decide whether it is right or wrong. One must, he says, take account of the pleasures and pains of everyone affected by the action, and this is to be done on an equal basis: “Each to count for one, and none for more than one.” (At a time when Britain had a major trade in slaves, this was a radical suggestion; and Bentham went farther still, explicitly extending consideration to nonhuman animals.) One must also consider how certain or uncertain the pleasures and pains are, their intensity, how long they last, and whether they tend to give rise to further feelings of the same or of the opposite kind.
Bentham did not allow for distinctions in the quality of pleasure or pain as such. Referring to a popular game, he affirmed that “quantity of pleasure being equal, pushpin is as good as poetry.” This led his opponents to characterize his philosophy as one fit for pigs. The charge is only half true. Bentham could have defended a taste for poetry on the grounds that, whereas one tires of mere games, the pleasures of a true appreciation of poetry have no limit; thus, the quantities of pleasure obtained by poetry are greater than those obtained by pushpin. All the same, one of the strengths of Bentham’s position is its honest bluntness, which it owes to his refusal to be fazed by the contrary opinions either of conventional morality or of refined society. He never thought that the aim of utilitarianism was to explain or to justify ordinary moral views—it was, rather, to reform them.
John Stuart Mill, Bentham’s successor as the leader of the utilitarians and the most influential British thinker of the 19th century, had some sympathy for the view that Bentham’s position was too narrow and crude. His essay “Utilitarianism” (1861) introduced several modifications, all aimed at a broader view of what is worthwhile in human existence and at implications less shocking to established moral convictions. Although his position was based on the maximization of happiness (and this is said to consist of pleasure and the absence of pain), he distinguished between pleasures that are higher and those that are lower in quality. This enabled him to say that it is “better to be Socrates dissatisfied than a fool satisfied.” The fool, he argued, would be of a different opinion only because he has not experienced both kinds of pleasures.
Mill sought to show that utilitarianism is compatible with moral rules and principles relating to justice, honesty, and truthfulness by arguing that utilitarians should not attempt to calculate before each action whether that particular action will maximize utility. Instead, they should be guided by the fact that an action falls under a general principle (such as the principle that people should keep their promises), and adherence to that general principle tends to increase happiness. Only under special circumstances is it necessary to consider whether an exception may have to be made.
Mill’s easily readable prose ensured a wide audience for his exposition of utilitarianism, but as a philosopher he was markedly inferior to the last of the 19th-century utilitarians, Henry Sidgwick. Sidgwick’s The Methods of Ethics (1874) is the most detailed and subtle work of utilitarian ethics yet produced. Especially noteworthy is his discussion of the various principles of what he calls common sense morality—i.e., the morality accepted, without systematic thought, by most people. Price, Reid, and some adherents of their brand of intuitionism thought that such principles (e.g., truthfulness, justice, honesty, benevolence, purity, and gratitude) were self-evident, independent moral truths. Sidgwick was himself an intuitionist as far as the basis of ethics was concerned: he believed that the principle of utilitarianism must ultimately be based on a self-evident axiom of rational benevolence. Nonetheless, he strongly rejected the view that all principles of common sense morality are self-evident. He went on to demonstrate that the allegedly self-evident principles conflict with one another and are vague in their application. They could be part of a coherent system of morality, he argued, only if they were regarded as subordinate to the utilitarian principle, which defined their application and resolved the conflicts between them.
Sidgwick was satisfied that he had reconciled common sense morality and utilitarianism by showing that whatever was sound in the former could be accounted for by the latter. He was, however, troubled by his inability to achieve any such reconciliation between utilitarianism and egoism, the third method of ethical reasoning dealt with in his book. True, Sidgwick regarded it as self-evident that “from the point of view of the universe” one’s own good is of no greater value than the like good of any other person, but what could be said to the egoist who expresses no concern for the point of view of the universe, taking his stand instead on the fact that his own good mattered more to him than anyone else’s? Bentham had apparently believed either that self-interest and the general happiness are not at odds or that it is the legislator’s task to reward or punish actions so as to see that they are not. Mill also had written of the need for sanctions but was more concerned with the role of education in shaping human nature in such a way that one finds happiness in doing what benefits all. By contrast, Sidgwick was convinced that this could lead at best to a partial overlap between what is in one’s own interest and what is in the interests of all. Hence, he searched for arguments with which to convince the egoist of the rationality of universal benevolence but failed to find any. The Methods of Ethics concludes with an honest admission of this failure and an expression of dismay at the fact that, as a result, “it would seem necessary to abandon the idea of rationalizing [morality] completely.”
