A STRIKING FEATURE of moral and political argument in the modern world is the extent to which it is innovators, radicals, and revolutionaries who revive old doctrines, while their conservative and reactionary opponents are the inventors of new ones. So the contract theorists and the believers in natural rights in the seventeenth century were reviving features of medieval doctrines, while the doctrine of the divine right of kings was essentially a sixteenth- and seventeenth-century invention. So also, at the time of the French Revolution, it is Tom Paine who revives Locke, and it is Burke who invents a quite new form of the appeal to tradition. Paine is not a source of philosophical argument in himself; his importance lies in the way in which he, and more especially, his French associates helped to force the moral traditions of the English ruling oligarchy away from the doctrine of natural rights. How did they do this?
The danger of all appeals to general principles on one’s own behalf on a particular occasion is that one renders oneself liable to have the same principles invoked against one on some subsequent occasion. Precisely this is what happened to the English ruling class; the principles of 1688 were invoked against them by the Americans in 1776 and by the revolutionaries against their French colleagues in 1789. It was this fact which underpinned Tom Paine’s appeal to the rights of man; and it was this fact that Richard Price, whom we have already noticed in his role as a believer in the rational intuition of moral first principles, emphasized in his sermon at the dissenting meetinghouse in Old Jewry in November, 1789. Price emphasized the assertion in 1689 of the right to choose and to dismiss sovereigns, and above all, of the right to frame anew the constitution, and reiterated the correctness of this assertion. In so doing, he played his part in goading both to fury and to reply Edmund Burke. Burke’s attitude to the mass of men is well conveyed by his phrase “a swinish multitude”; his attitude to the rights of man is entirely coherent with this. He denies, first as a matter of history, that the Whig Revolution of 1688 did involve the kind of assertion of rights that Price claimed. The displacement of James II was due to a fear lest his critics should weaken the throne and the hereditary principle; hence the preference for the next line in succession, even though it was the German line of Hanover, in order that that principle might not be discredited. But Burke was not merely concerned with history. Not only was 1689 not an appeal to natural rights, there are no such rights. They are metaphysical fictions.
Burke says of the writers of the French Revolution that they are “so taken up with their theories about the rights of man, that they have totally forgotten his nature.” By nature Burke does not mean a state prior to a social contract, but society as it is, and above all, as it has grown to be. Theoretically based plans for the reform of society are violations of a divinely ordained history of social growth, so that Burke can speak of social development as “the known march of the ordinary Providence of God.” Established institutions are thus rated as high by Burke as they are low by Rousseau. Both invoke “nature,” but while for Rousseau nature is contrasted with society, for Burke nature includes society. Burke however does not view nature simply as all that is; for if nature were all-inclusive, one could not war against it, as revolutionaries do. Nature is in fact equated by Burke with certain established norms and procedures, including the procedure of relying on prevailing habit rather than on argument. “Politics ought to be adjusted, not to human reasonings, but to human nature, of which the reason is but a part, and by no means the greatest part.”59 This is not just a doctrine about politics, but about the moral life in general. Hence Burke’s defense of what he calls “prejudice.” “Prejudice is of ready application in the emergency; it previously engages the mind in a steady course of wis-dom and virtue, and does not leave the man hesitating in the moment of decision, skeptical, puzzled, and unresolved. Prejudice renders a man’s virtue his habit, and not a series of unconnected acts.”60
Burke’s positions are of importance, if only because of their subsequent influence. The assessment of them confronts one initial difficulty, namely that if Burke is right, rational argument upon these topics is misplaced. Hence by even venturing to argue with him we appear to presuppose the truth of what we are trying to establish. But this difficulty is not in fact ours, but Burke’s. For to deny the possibility of rational argument playing the role of arbiter means that in advancing one’s views one cannot be appealing to any criterion by which they may be established. But if this is so, then not only can one not argue in one’s own favor, but one has made it difficult to understand what it could mean to call one’s views “true” or “false.” For the application of these predicates always involves an appeal to some criterion. Suppose, however, that at this point we look to Burke’s practice of arguing rather than to his principle of condemning argument. We shall then find in his arguments two mistakes, both diagnosed by William Godwin, the anarchist, in what is in effect a reply to Burke’s Reflections on the Revolution in France, Political Justice.
First of all, Burke confuses society and the state. He assimilates particular forms of political institution to institutions in general. From premises which assert merely the need for stable and established social arrangements he tries to derive the conclusion that Louis XVI’s head should not be cut off. The roots of this confusion are more interesting than the confusion itself. Burke understands that appeal to moral and other norms presupposes an established form of social life. He tries to picture the revolutionary theorist as a man who wishes to destroy the very social life which is necessary to give meaning to the norms in the name of which he intends to carry out his act of destruction. But in so doing, he equates the notion of an established form of social life with the notion of an established set of institutional arrangements. In fact, the institutions of a society may well be at odds with its norms. To maintain these institutions may be fatally destructive. Burke never noticed the fact that revolutions are extremely difficult to make. Theorists become revolutionaries only when their theories are able to articulate a deep dissatisfaction which the theorists did not invent. And at this point it is the refusal to destroy and recreate social institutions which is destructive of social life itself. The true nihilists in history were all kings: Charles I, Louis XVI, and Tsar Nicholas. The revolutionaries in their societies had to save social life from their rulers’ destructive maintenance of the existing order.
Secondly, Burke’s defense of prejudice and habit against reflective criticism rests on an inadequate analysis of the notion of following a rule. I may in my conduct follow and abide by rules which I have never made explicit; breaches of such rules may shame or shock me without my articulating any formula adequately expressive of the rule. But such unreflective behavior is as much rule governed as is the behavior of the man who consciously invokes an expressly formulated maxim. And it is clearly the kind of behavior which Burke wants to exalt; we use words like habit and prejudice to bring out not that such conduct is not governed by rules, but that our attitude to the rules is unreflecrive. Burke is right to suppose that the moral life would be destroyed by our reflecting upon our rules of conduct prior to each and every action. Action must for the most part rely on our habitual dispositions to do this rather than that. But if for this reason, reflection can only be occasional, the importance of such occasions is heightened, not lessened. Because we are right not to be continually re-scrutinizing our principles, it does not follow that we are wrong ever to scrutinize them. So Godwin speaks rightly of a need to articulate and examine them, “to cast away the coat of prejudice and to leave nothing but the naked reason.”
Godwin, who was married to the mother of female emancipation, Mary Wollstonecraft, and who was the father of Shelley’s second wife, was the prototype of the innovating moralist in the modern world. The kind of abuse which was later to be hurled at a Bertrand Russell or a Wilhelm Reich was showered on Godwin. De Quincey recalled in his reminiscences that “most people felt of Mr. Godwin with the same alienation and horror as of a ghoul, or a bloodless vampyre, or the monster created by Frankenstein.” Godwin in fact was a humane and sensitive man who applied himself to the classical problem of eighteenth-century moral theory. He accepted from Hume the view that we are moved to action by feelings not by reason and from Locke the view that it is reason which discerns moral distinctions. He thus has a more complex position than most eighteenth-century writers. Our feelings move us to action, but they will only move us to right action if we have a clear and rational view of the facts. Such a view includes taking into account the consequences of our actions; it must also include the application to them of principles such as that of impartiality, of not making exceptions to general rules in our own or in anyone else’s favor. Godwin’s view that there are rational moral principles of an inescapable kind is never developed with sufficient clarity. But he is as much as anyone since Aristotle the father of the notion that at the foundation of morals lies the principle that if morality is to be argued about at all, then the onus of justification lies upon those who propose to treat men differently. The very process of moral argument presupposes the principle that everyone is to be treated the same until reason to the contrary is shown. This principle is formal in the sense that it does not prescribe how in fact anyone is to be treated. But it has important practical consequences. For it forces into the open the justification of treating people differently because of their age, sex, intelligence, or color. Equality in its most minimal form is embodied in a society in which this is the case.
Godwin himself extended the scope of principles of reason far beyond this. He thought that reason showed me that there is more value in the happiness of a number of men than in that of one, and that this is true irrespective of whether that one is myself, my friend or relative, or a total stranger. Hence I ought to prefer the general happiness to my own. To the rejoinder that if I do so, it is only because I am so psychologically constituted that I will feel unhappier if I disregard the general happiness of others than if I disregard my own, Godwin’s reply is that the pain which I feel at disregarding the unhappiness of others is felt only because I recognize that I ought to be benevolent. The pain cannot be the reason for my action, for it is only because I have quite a different sort of reason for it that I am liable to feel the character-istic pain. It is only in the light of my rational principles, for example, that my own actions will inspire in me satisfaction or guilt.
If men have within themselves rational principles prescribing the general good, why do men disregard that good? Godwin’s answer is that we are corrupted by the social environment, and above all, by the influence of government. For government claims an authority which belongs only to right reason. And right reason is only grasped by individuals, assisted by the rational persuasion of other individuals. The hope for man lies in the perfectability of human nature. Godwin’s belief is that the influences of social and governmental forms can be overcome and replaced by a free community of rational beings in which it is the opinions of those who are informed and objective that will carry weight.
Godwin is a figure curiously akin to and curiously at odds with Bentham. Where Godwin is utopian in his political proposals, Bentham is the careful reformer, anxious to escape accusations of utopianism by being prepared to suggest the exact size of the beds to be used in prisons or the precise reforms needed in the laws of evidence. Where Godwin believes human nature to be committed au fond to disinterestedness, Bentham believes that private interest always needs to be weighted and guided if it is to serve public interest. Yet Bentham’s criterion of the greatest happiness of the greatest number is essentially the same as Godwin’s; both were in limited sympathy with the French Revolution; both represent the future rather than the past. It can be put like this: if one takes the stock of characteristically modern liberal clichés and banalities, one is in a world of which both Godwin and Bentham are ancestors. For both, society is nothing but a collection of individuals; for both, the good of individuals is a matter of their happiness; for both, that happiness can be summed and calculated. In Godwin the notions of good and evil still retain some of their traditional force; in Bentham they are to be redefined in terms of pleasure and pain.
Bentham’s thesis was not of course that words such as good and right were or had been used by most people to mean “productive of the greatest happiness of the greatest number” or some equivalent phrase. It is not even the case that Bentham always propounded the same thesis. Sometimes he seems to be concerned not with the meaning of terms in the moral vocabulary, but only with the statement of a moral–and political–criterion. Sometimes he does indeed offer us a definition, but in the form of a proposal rather than of an elucidation. He says in effect that we may define good and right in terms of the concept of the greatest happiness of the greatest number or we may not; but that unless we do, shall talk nonsense. And sometimes he seems not to distinguish these tasks. Nor for his purposes does he need to distinguish them. For his central proposal amounts to the contention that the only rational and consistent criterion available for the guidance of action is the assessment of the pleasurable and painful consequences of any particular action, and that the meaning of evaluative expressions can only be understood in this context. There is no alternative rational criterion for at least two kinds of reason.
The first is that theories, such as those based on a belief in natural law or natural rights, which suppose that there are rights, duties, and obligations apart from and prior to those embodied in positive law are thought by Bentham to rest on a basis of logical error. For they are, on his view, the product of a belief that words like duty and obligation are names which have a sense and a reference quite independent of their use in any particular context. Bentham’s own logical views on this point are a mixture of truth and error. On the one hand, he grasped correctly that only in the context of a sentence, does a naming, describing, or referring expression have meaning–a point that was to be made a commonplace only by Frege and Wittgenstein. On the other hand, it is in no way clear that adherents of natural-law and natural-rights theories are necessarily committed to the logical error of supposing otherwise. A more serious criticism of such theories is intimately connected with one of Bentham’s most important motives in attacking them. Suppose that anyone asserts that men possess natural rights or are bound by natural laws: invite him, then, to make a list of such rights or laws. It is notorious that adherents of such theories offer lists which differ in substance from each other. Is there, then, any criterion for the correct inclusion of an item on such a test? Bentham’s conviction that there is not was directed in the first instance at the reactionary sanctification of the legal and penal status quo that Blackstone, in his Commentaries on the Law of England, accomplished by the use of the theory of natural law. But Bentham was completely impartial in the application of his skeptical doubts, and in spite of his sympathy for the American Revolution and for at least the initial phases of the French Revolution, he is trenchant in his criticism of the revolutionary doctrine of the rights of man, a doctrine which he declares to be nonsense, and in his criticism of the doctrine of imprescriptible natural rights–“nonsense on stilts.”
If, then, a first reason for holding that only the principle of utility, the principle of the greatest happiness of the greatest number, furnishes us with a criterion for action is the alleged logical impossibility of any metaphysical theory of morals, a second is the foundation laid for the principle in human psychology. Men are made so that they are placed under the dominion of “two sovereign masters,” pain and pleasure. Bentham’s psychology, whose source is in Hartley, is mechanical and associationist. We cannot but pursue pleasure and flee pain, and the association of the prospect of either with something else will draw us to or repel us from whatever pleasure or pain is associated with. Bentham takes it for granted that pleasure and pain are correlative terms, and that both are equally simple and unitary concepts. He gives fifty-eight synonyms for pleasure, and his logical sophistication about naming on other occasions does not prevent him from behaving as if happiness, enjoyment, and pleasure all name or characterize the same sensation. Different sources of pleasure can be measured and compared in respect of the intensity and duration of the sensation derived from them, the certainty or otherwise of having the sensation, and the propinquity or remoteness of the pleasure. In choosing between alternatives, quantity of pleasure is the only criterion: “Quantity of pleasure being equal, pushpin is as good as poetry.”61 Moreover, in summing up the pleasures of a number of people everybody is to count for one and nobody as more than one.
If each individual is in fact moved by the prospects of his own pleasure or pain, what becomes of altruism? Bentham’s thought is not entirely coherent here: on the one hand, in his political and legislative proposals he recognizes the conflict between public and private interest and the need for molding human nature. His wish to construct a society in which a man’s pursuit of his private pleasure and his pursuit of the greatest happiness of the greatest number will coincide clearly rests on the assumption that society is not at present so organized. But elsewhere, and especially in the Deontology, Bentham implicitly identifies the greatest happiness of the individual with that to be found in the pursuit of the greatest happiness of the greatest number. The only motive for obeying the rules necessary to social life is the pleasure to be found in obedience or the pain resulting from disobeying them.
There is no problem which Benthamite utilitarianism raises which was not raised within the utilitarian tradition itself, and the burden of these problems fell upon John Stuart Mill. His father, James Mill, was an enthusiastic collaborator of Bentham’s, himself a psychologist in the tradition of Hartley, who once wrote that he aspired to make the human mind as plain as the road from St. Paul’s to Charing Cross. This spirit of self-confidence was scarcely inherited by his son. In late adolescence, after an education which had laid adult burdens upon him from the earliest possible age, he turned from his absorption in schemes of social reform to inquire whether, if all such projects were to be accomplished, this would render him happy. The sinking heart with which he answered, No presaged a nervous breakdown from which he was rescued to an important extent by the poetry of Wordsworth and Coleridge. But it was to be significant for more than Mill’s personal life that the coincidence between private happiness and that of the greatest number should have failed the utilitarians themselves so early. Mill’s whole tenor of thought is that of a utilitarian who cannot avoid any of the difficulties which this doctrine raises, but who cannot conceive of abandoning his doctrine either. What are the difficulties?
First, Mill abandons the view that the comparison between pleasures is or can be purely quantitative. He introduces a qualitative distinction between “higher” and “lower” pleasures. The higher pleasures are to be preferred: better Socrates dissatisfied than a fool satisfied. How can we be sure of this? Only he who has experienced both is qualified to judge, and only the wise man who prefers the Socratic classification has this experience. Yet here doubt necessarily arises: how could a Mill know what it was like to be a satisfied fool, any more than the fool could know what it was like to be Mill? The point of this question extends further than to cast doubt upon a single contention of Mill’s. For what it brings out is that Mill is still engaged, as Bentham was, in trying to bring all the objects and goals of human desire under a single concept, that of pleasure, and trying to show them as all commensurable with each other in a single scale of evaluation. Moreover, he, like Bentham, treats pleasure as a unitary concept.
He is able to do so because the concept of pleasure has tended to degenerate, just as the concept of duty has. I have already suggested that in the case of duty, a highly specific concept associated with the notion of the duties of an office holder evaporates into a generalized notion of “what a man ought to do.” So pleasure as the concept of one specific kind of goal is transformed into the concept of any goal at all. Both hedonists and puritans contribute to the history of this degeneration. Hedonists, who begin by commending pleasure, against other goals, then become defensive and insist that they are not merely commending wine, women, and song, but also the higher pleasures, such as reading the Critique of Pure Reason. Puritans insist that they are not against pleasure as such, but only low or false pleasures. They, too, are for true and lasting pleasures, such as only Zion’s children know. So concepts like “pleasure” and “happiness” are stretched and extended in all directions until they are used simply to name whatever men aim at. By this extension they become useless for evaluative and moral purposes. For in evaluation, and especially in moral evaluation, we are not only engaged in grading and in choosing between alternative objects which we already desire; we are also engaged in grading and choosing between the cultivation of alternative dispositions and desires. The injunction “Pursue happiness!” when happiness has been given the broad, undifferentiated sense which Bentham and Mill give to it is merely the injunction “Try to achieve what you desire.” But as to any question about rival objects of desire, or about alternative and competing desires, this injunction is silent and empty. And this is equally true whether the happiness which I am to cultivate is to be my own or that of the greatest number.
Mill, faced with the objection that there are many cases in which one cannot assess which out of the alternative possible courses of action will produce the greatest happiness of the greatest number, asserts that utilitarianism enjoins no more than that in cases where one can so assess the consequences of action one ought to use the principle of utility as a criterion. But this concession is more deadly than he perceives: for he is forced to allow implicitly that there are other evaluative criteria. What they are and what their relationship to the principle of utility may be he never makes clear. But we may accept Mill’s concession in the spirit in which it is offered, if we recognize that when utilitarians speak of the greatest happiness they are often in practice speaking of a quite specific goal for action rather than of the generalized concept of their theoretical appetites. This goal is that of the public welfare, and it is a goal peculiarly relevant to those areas of life in which Bentham was especially interested. Prisons and hospitals, penal codes and constitutional processes–in these areas it is possible to ask and to answer adequately, even if only crudely, the question of how many people’s lot will be bettered, how many people’s lot will be worsened, by such and such a measure. For we have obvious and established criteria for faring well or ill in these areas. Will ill-health be increased or diminished? Will the attaching of this rather than that penalty to this crime diminish or increase the frequency of its occurrence? Even in these cases there are choices to be made on which no version of the principle of utility can guide us: an example is the choice between devoting resources to health services or devoting them to penal reform. But it is necessary to emphasize that the utilitarian advocacy of the criterion of public happiness is not only a mistake. That it seems so obviously the criterion to be considered in certain areas of life is something we owe to Bentham and Mill.
The concept of happiness is, however, morally dangerous in another way; for we are by now well aware of the malleability of human beings, of the fact that they can be conditioned in a variety of ways into the acceptance of, and satisfaction with, almost anything. That men are happy with their lot never entails that their lot is what it ought to be. For the question can always be raised of how great the price is that is being paid for the happiness. So the concept of the greatest happiness of the great-est number could be used to defend any paternalistic or totalitarian society in which the price paid for happiness is the freedom of the individuals in that society to make their own choices. Freedom and happiness can in certain circumstances be radically incompatible values. We can trace one legitimate offspring of utilitarianism for whom freedom was sacrificed to happiness in the history of Fabian socialism. For Fabianism socialism was a matter of schemes of reform initiated from above by the enlightened few for the welfare of the unenlightened many. Fabianism stands at the opposite pole in the history of socialism from the revolutionary democracy of Rosa Luxemburg or the I.W.W., for whom socialism consisted in workers becoming free from the domination of others, and owners and directors of their work and their lives.
Moreover, the concept of the greatest happiness of the greatest number is only applicable with any kind of moral legitimacy in a society in which it is assumed that nonutilitarian norms of decent behavior are upheld. The concept of the public happiness has obviously legitimate application in a society where the consensus is that the public happiness consists in more and better hospitals and schools; but what application has it in a society where the public happiness is found by the public itself to consist in the mass murder of Jews? If in a society of twelve people, ten are sadists who will get great pleasure from torturing the remaining two, does the principle of utility enjoin that the two should be tortured? Nothing could have been further from the thought of Bentham and Mill. But this only makes it clearer that they are not consistent utilitarians, that they rely on an implicit appeal to other norms, which they covertly use to define the greatest happiness.
It is this sievelike nature of the utilitarian concept of pleasure or happiness which makes Mill’s proof of the principle of utility so unimpressive. Mill’s proof runs as follows. He begins by allowing that in any strict sense, proof on matters concerning ultimate ends is not to be obtained. But, nonetheless, we may adduce considerations capable of influencing the intellect. The argument then proceeds from the assertion that just as the only way to show that something is visible is to show that men can see it, so the only way to show that something is desirable is to show that men desire it. But all men desire pleasure. So pleasure is universally desirable. Mill has no problem about the transition from the desire for my own pleasure to that for the greatest happiness of the greatest number, which he makes by means of the bald assertion that the pleasure of another is naturally pleasurable to me. When Mill comes to show that only pleasure is desired his method is to take apparent alternative goals and show that originally they are desired for the pleasure which accompanies them, and only secondarily do they become desired for their own sake. This method of argument is of course necessarily ineffective. If anything, it shows that there are goals other than pleasure. But criticism of Mill has centered on that part of his argument where he passes from the assertion that pleasure is desired to the assertion that it is desirable. What Mill’s critics, beginning with G. E. Moore, have in effect said is that Mill illegitimately tries to deduce the conclusion that pleasure ought to be desired from the premise that it is in fact desired. But this, so it is alleged, is necessarily a fallacious inference. For an is cannot by itself entail an ought. One does not have to enter on any general discussion of fact and value to deal with such critics. They are of course right that the inference in question is fallacious if it is intended as an entailment. But they are simply mistaken in their reading of Mill.
For what Mill says about proof makes it clear that he does not intend to use the assertion that all men do in fact desire pleasure as a premise which entails the conclusion that they ought to desire it. What the form of his argument is, is not perhaps entirely clear. But one way of reading him, more consonant with the text of Utilitarianism, would be this. He treats the thesis that all men desire pleasure as a factual assertion which guarantees the success of an ad hominem appeal to anyone who denies his conclusion. If anyone denies that pleasure is desirable, then we can ask him, But don’t you desire it? and we know in advance that he must answer yes, and consequently must admit that pleasure is desirable. But this reading of Mill, and indeed any reading, has to interpret him as treating the assertion that all men desire pleasure as a contingent factual assertion. Now it can only be such if pleasure is being treated as the name of one possible object of desire among others; for if it is simply an expression equivalent to “whatever men desire,” then the assertion is a vacuous tautology and will not serve Mill’s argumentative purposes. Yet if pleasure is the name of one specific object of desire (the wine, women, and song sense)–as it often is–then it is certainly false that all men desire it (puritans do not) or that it is the only desired goal. It is thus on the haziness of his central concept that Mill founders and not on the transition from is to ought.
In the course of the previous discussion another difficulty has come into view. Clearly, even on the best and most charitable interpretation of the concept of the greatest happiness of the greatest number, there are occasions where its use as a criterion would lead us to recommend courses of action which conflict sharply with what ordinarily we think we ought to do. A typical case was propounded by a later critic of utiliarianism, E. F. Carritt. The hanging of an innocent man may well redound to the public happiness if certain conditions are satisfied: that he is publicly believed, although not by us, his would-be executioners, to be guilty of murder, let us say, and that his execution will act as a deterrent, preventing the deaths of sundry innocent people in the future. Surely on a utilitarian view, we ought therefore to hang him. There are two possible types of utilitarian response to this criticism. The first is simply to deny that there is anything abhorrent in the situation. Certainly, a tough-minded utilitarian might say that this is the sort of thing that we ought sometimes to do. There is nothing philosophically criticizable in this response when it is taken in isolation from the rest of the case against utilitarianism. But when this response is combined with the protean utilitarian concept of pleasure one understands its danger. For by allowing the principle of utility to override our existing principles–such as that a man ought not to be hanged for a crime which he has not committed–we remove one more barrier to using the concept of the general happiness to license any enormity. That it can be so used has been amply demonstrated in this century; in particular the high-minded are apt to use totalitarianism as a justification to excuse their responsibility for involvement in the large-scale crimes of their societies, such as Auschwitz or Hiroshima. But, it may be objected, this is surely a moral and not a philosophical objection to utilitarianism. To which the reply is plain: utilitarianism which appears under the pretext of offering a criterion, among other things, for distinguishing good and evil, is in fact offering us a revision of those concepts, such that if we accepted it, we could allow that no action, however vile, was evil in itself or prohibited as such. For all actions are to be assessed in terms of their consequences, and if the consequences of an action are going to be productive of the general happiness, then that action, whether it is the execution of the innocent or the murder or rape of children, would be justified. Thus utilitarianism is a revisionary analysis of our attitudes and concepts; and it is relevant to ask whether it would preserve what we value in those attitudes and concepts.
A second type of response, that of Mill himself, is to argue that utilitarianism, rightly understood, does not license actions which we would ordinarily abhor. So Mill argues that only the maintenance of an impartial system of justice, in which innocent and guilty receive their deserts, could serve the general happiness; and more generally, he argues that to allow exceptions to generally beneficial rules is to weaken their authority and so is always to have harmful consequences. Later utilitarians have also argued that the principle of utility is not in all cases a criterion for judging of particular actions; rather, it is often a criterion for judging of principles. This contention has been argued in its most sophisticated form in terms of a distinction between two logically distinct types of rule: summary rules, which are logically subsequent to the actions which they prescribe or prohibit; and rules of practice, which define classes of action and are logically prior to the actions in question. An example of the first type of rule would be one forbidding walking on the grass. The actions, walking or not walking on the grass, are logically prior to any rule about so walking. An example of the second type of rule would be that which specifies the ways in which a batsman may be out at cricket. The concept of “being out” and the associated actions are specifiable only in terms of the rules defining the practices which constitute the game of cricket. The first type of rule may be represented as a summary or generalization about what is enjoined or prohibited in terms of some general criterion on many particular occasions. The second type of rule cannot be so understood. Its application on particular occasions must–logically must–be subsequent to its general formulation. It has been argued that if we apply this distinction to the problem posed for utilitarianism, we see that it is only in the case of the former type of rule that the problem can arise, but that in this case it is easily soluble. If on many particular occasions we find that doing or refraining from doing some particular action is productive of the greatest happiness, then we may summarize our discovery in a general rule prescribing or prohibiting that action. If subsequently we find a case where to do what the rule enjoins would not be productive of the greatest happiness, then we need have no hesitation about abandoning the rule for this occasion, because the rule has no force or authority except that which derives from the greatest happiness principle. But this only applies to the first type of rule.
The second type of rule constitutes or partly constitutes a practice which as a whole and in the long run may be justified by appeal to the greatest happiness principle; but one cannot ask for a particular rule to be set aside because on a particular occasion its application violates that principle. For the rule is adhered to because of its connection with the practice, not because directly and in itself it promotes the greatest happiness principle. Thus it is logically inappropriate to ask whether a particular rule in a game should be waived on a particular occasion because its application violates the greatest happiness principle; and it is logically inappropriate to ask for the waiving of a particular rule of justice on a particular occasion because the application of that rule violates the greatest happiness principle. It is a whole system of justice which stands or falls at the bar of the principle of utility, and not the detail of particular cases. So the hanging of the innocent man on a particular occasion to secure a particular deterrent is not sanctioned by a utilitarian justification of justice after all. It is the whole practice of justice with its systematic protection of innocence, and nothing less than that, which receives a utilitarian justification.
Will this defense suffice? Does it succeed in showing that utilitarianism is compatible with our ordinary belief in justice? What it ignores is the fact that we often do waive, and regard ourselves as justified in waiving, principles of justice in the interests of human happiness. So someone may fail to report a crime or fail to punish a criminal because of the effects on his family. The fact that justice is a systematic body of practices, justifiable as a whole in utilitarian terms, is not incompatible with there being clashes between particular applications of the principles of justice and the application of the greatest happiness principle. We then have to decide what weight to give to the principles of justice, and we should not have to make such a decision if it were entirely a matter of applying a single ultimate principle. The value we set upon justice is not, therefore, entirely derived from our adherence to the principle of utility.
Thus the attempt to shore up utilitarianism in this way is itself a misconceived attempt to give a false unity to our values. That such an attempt should be made is easily understood. The individualism of modern society and the increasingly rapid and disruptive rate of social change brings about a situation in which for increasing numbers there is no over-all shape to the moral life but only a set of apparently arbitrary principles inherited from a variety of sources. In such circumstances the need for a public criterion for use in settling moral and evaluative disagreements and conflicts becomes ever more urgent and ever more difficult to meet. The utilitarian criterion, which appears to embody the liberal ideal of happiness, is apparently without rivals, and the fact that the concept of happiness which it embodies is so amorphous and so adaptable makes it not less but more welcome to those who look for a court of appeal on evaluative questions which they can be assured will decide in their own favor.
No philosopher expressed the moral situation of nineteenth-century England–and to some extent we are all still in the nineteenth century–better than Henry Sidgwick. Sidgwick is a touching figure whose defects are usually the defects of his age. He was preoccupied with the loss of his own Christian faith in a way that is foreign to us. His moral psychology is crude because the psychology of his time was crude. And in his moral philosophy he mirrors his age also. For Sidgwick the history of moral philosophy in the preceding century had centered on the clash between utili-tarianism and what he called intuitionism. By this he meant the doctrine that moral first principles are intuitively known, the doctrine of Price, and earlier, of Locke. Within utilitarianism further there is the argument about the relationship between the pursuit of my own happiness and the pursuit of the greatest happiness of the greatest number. Sidgwick painstakingly examined all the possible ways of assimilating intuitionism to utilitarianism, or of bridging the gap between the goals of private and public happiness. But in the end there remain three distinct sources of morality. Sidgwick’s account of the methods of ethics misses questions beyond those which he explicitly discusses. The background to his account is the moral consciousness of his day, taken as given. Philosophy appears as essentially a clarifying rather than a critical activity. In this respect Sidgwick’s is a ghost that haunts much recent writing. In his acceptance of the utilitarian consciousness of his own age he contrasts sharply with his contemporaries T. H. Green and F. H. Bradley.
Green and Bradley are often classed together as Oxford idealists; it is important however to remember that the classing of them together in this way is the work of their later critics. They themselves worked independently, and the similarities in their writings are the result of the similarity of their self-set tasks. Both were keen students of Kant and Hegel; both wish to find materials in Kant and Hegel with which to carry through a criticism of Hume and Mill. Both draw on Greek philosophy as well as on German. But Green was perhaps influenced by Rousseau as much as by any other author, while there is little trace of Rousseau in Bradley. And Green’s philosophical preoccupations were intimately related to his commitments to social and educational reform whereas Bradley was a philosophical recluse.
Both Green and Bradley break with the individualism of utilitarianism. The utilitarian picture of society is of a collection of individuals, each with his own determinate desires and his consequent goals. The shared aims and norms of society are a product of the compromises and agreements of individuals: the public good is a sum total of private goods. Both Green and Bradley break with this picture, whether in its utilitarian or its social contract forms. Both recognize that the individual discovers his aims and his desires from within a set of rule-governed relationships to others. He finds himself through, he identifies himself by means of, a set of relationships through which goals are partly specified for him. The individual then has his choices to make; he can appraise his own desires in a variety of ways. But his nature, including his desires, is not presocial.
If this argument were pursued, it would have to press the question of the relationship of morality to the social framework more seriously and in detail. Both Green and Bradley, however, place the individual not merely in a social, but in a metaphysical context. Or rather, they appear to perform social analysis in a highly metaphysical style. To make clear what this means, it is necessary to follow through the key themes of each in turn. Bradley, for example, poses the question, Why should I be moral?, a question which he uses as the title of one of his Ethical Studies, only to reply that, as it stands, the question is improper. For it suggests that there is an end beyond morality, to which the exercise of moral virtue is only a means. But from within the moral consciousness we can discern that morality does have an end, an end not beyond morality but constituted by morality itself in its highest achievement, the realization of the self as a whole. I realize my self as a whole through actions which express the stirring of the self to be something better and higher than it is already, so that the principles to which I aspire to conform come to be the principles expressed in my actual behavior. In any situation of choice between alternatives, I realize my self, first, insofar as I am aware of myself independently of the two alternatives and confronting them; and second, in self-consciously choosing one alternative and identifying myself with it, whereby I bring the whole self into being in concrete form. This Bradley calls “the concrete universal,” the judgment of universal import made concrete in the realized activity of the concrete individual.
The self develops to the point at which it realizes itself completely by identifying itself as a part in an infinite whole and so transcending its own finite bounds. “The difficulty is being limited and so not a whole, how to extend myself so as to be a whole? The answer is, be a member in a whole. Here your private self, your finitude ceases as such to exist; it becomes the function of an organism. You must be, not a mere piece of, but a member in, a whole; and as this, must know and will yourself.”
What is the whole in which the individual self must realize itself? We get, not a completely coherent answer to this question, but at least part of an answer in a later chapter of Ethical Studies, “My Station and Its Duties.” Bradley had already, in previous essays, attacked the view that the end which the moral consciousness places before us can be either pleasure or duty for its own sake. His grounds for breaking with Benthamite utilitarianism and with Kantianism are partly different and partly the same. He argues, for example, that pleasure supervenes upon a desired end, and so cannot be the end; and he argues that on the Kantian view duty is proposed as an end for a self which is constituted by desires and inclinations such that duty can have no interest for it, cannot be an end for it. But in both cases he argues that the end proposed is too general and abstract; the formulas of Kant and Bentham alike try to bring the multifarious ends which men in different circumstances and at different times pursue under a single characterization, and in so doing, they present a formula which is in effect contentless. Because it includes anything which a man might pursue, it identifies nothing which he must pursue, if he is to be true to the deliverances of his moral consciousness.
The end which Bradley lays down is that of finding my station and carrying out its duties. These duties will be specific and concrete. Bradley allows that I may have some choice of what station in life to fill; but once I have chosen some station, the question of what duties attach to it is not a matter of choice. That this is so is of some importance, for it is only insofar as the end is an objective end, and not one chosen by me, that I can hope to realize my individuality through it. What Bradley means by this is not entirely clear, but he is partly making the substantial point that any criteria by which I am to judge of my own moral progress must be criteria whose authority derives from something other than my own choices. For if my own choice is all that is authoritative, I am in the end playing an arbitrary self-enclosed game, a variety of spiritual patience in which if the cards will not come out the first time, I can, if I choose, allow myself a indefinitely large number of reshufflings. Moreover, to fill my station in life, I can utilize every part of my nature; the Kantian divide between duty and inclination is overcome.
What Bradley is presupposing rather than asserting here is that the moral vocabulary can only be given a coherent sense in the context of a form of social life with well-defined roles and functions, and one, moreover, in which men live out the substance of their lives in terms of those roles and functions. But is there such a society any more? Sociologists have often emphasized the difference between a modern individualist society in which a man’s life and status can be distinct from his various roles and functions and earlier more integrated forms of society in which a man might fill his station in life in much the way that Bradley envisages. That Bradley is able not to raise this type of question is perhaps due to his ability to pass into a metaphysical style of speech in which it is the nature of reality as such, and nothing less, that guarantees his thesis about morality.
This is less true, but it is still true, of T. H. Green. Green is more self-consciously aware that his moral views require a certain kind of society. But his metaphysical mode enables him to pass from the view that society ought to be the locus of a rational general will of a Rousseauesque kind to the view that at bottom this is what society really is. Green is more socially aware than Bradley because of his own political involvement. He came on the philosophical scene as an educator in a period when liberal young men of the ruling class, morally earnest as a result of their training in evangelical homes and by Arnoldian schoolmasters, who could not imbibe the romantic Toryism of Disraeli, were looking for a frame that would lend meaning to their lives. Green’s Balliol pupils carried into the civil service, the church, politics, into the cabinet itself–one of them was a Liberal prime minister–a belief that liberal individualism could be overcome within a liberal framework. Green was the apostle of state intervention in matters of social welfare and of education; he was able to be so because he could see in the state an embodiment of that higher self the realization of which is our moral aim.
Green’s Prolegomena to Ethics rests its argument on an extended analysis of human nature, designed to show that human existence is not wholly explicable in terms of the laws of nature. Reflection on the purposive and self-conscious character of human existence reveals to us the awareness of ourselves as intelligent beings, and members of a society of intelligent beings, whose final satisfaction cannot be anything merely physical or perishable. What, then, is the human good? We know it only in part, because our faculties for realizing it are themselves only partly realized. But the contemporary moral consciousness is a record of our highest achievement of it to date. Kant was right in thinking that the one unconditional good is the good will; but wrong in his too abstract characterization of it. The good will is manifested in the desire to transcend the existing moral consciousness in the creation of a greater good; and every expression of the good will is the creation of a form of life specifiable along the lines of “the Greek classification on the virtues.” The good will is defined as “the will to know what is true, to make what is beautiful, to endure pain and fear, to resist the allurements of pleasure, in the interest of some form of human society.”
Green’s specification of the good in terms of a form of social life, even if his own specification is a highly abstract one, enables him at least to avoid the individualist puzzles over egoism and altruism. “The idea of a true good does not admit of the distinction between good for self and good for others,” precisely because it consists of a form of social life in which different individuals play out their parts. The individual finds his good through a form of life which exists prior to himself.
Yet is Green describing at this point what actually happens? Clearly not. Is he specifying an ideal state of affairs which ought to be brought into existence? Only partly, for he believes the ideal to be implicit in the actual. Like Bradley, he makes it clear that the moral vocabulary cannot be understood except against the background of a certain kind of social life; like Bradley, his metaphysical style enables him to evade the question of the relation between that form of social life and social life as it actually is lived out in nineteenth-century western Europe. But at least Bradley and Green force these questions upon us. Their immediate twentieth-century successors were to write as if morality, and with it, moral philosophy existed apart from all specific social forms.