The Moral Economy Part 3

We have thus arrived at a very important conception, that of a higher interest possessing a certain priority in its claims. The higher interest as I have defined it is simply the greater interest, and greater in the sense that it exceeds a narrower interest through embracing it and adding to it. Your interest in the fulfilment of {53} to-day's interest _and_ to-morrow's, is demonstrably greater than your interest in the fulfilment of either exclusively, because it provides for each and more. In this perfectly definite sense your preference may be justified.

Let us now apply this principle of preference to the more complex case in which there is no available action which will fulfil both interests.

Suppose that you cannot both eat apples to-day and go to the play to-morrow. How is one to define a good action in the premises? In the first place the good act originally conceived in terms of the free play of the present impulse is proved to be illusory. There is no good act until your interests are reorganized. In other words, the higher interest, which is ent.i.tled to preference, requires some modification of the partic.i.p.ating interests. But the higher interest owes its t.i.tle to its liberality or comprehensiveness. Hence it must represent _the maximum fulfilment of both interests which the conditions allow_. Such a controlling interest may require you altogether to forego the present indulgence, or it may merely require that it be severely limited. In any case, the controlling interest will _represent_ both interests, modified, postponed, or suppressed, as is necessary for their maximum joint fulfilment. The higher interest which thus replaces the original interest, and which is ent.i.tled to do so only {54} because it incorporates them, I propose to call _moral purpose_.

There are two highly important principles which we have been brought to recognize through this a.n.a.lysis of preference, and it will be worth our while briefly to resume them.

In the first place, no interest is ent.i.tled to your exclusive regard merely because it happens at any given time to be moving you. I shall call this the principle of the objective validity of interests. I mean simply that an interest is none the less an interest because it does not coincide with an individual's momentary inclination. In reminding you of an interest overlooked, I have not sought to justify it by subsuming it under your present interest. I have not tried to prove that it is to your interest as an epicure that you should go to the play. I have simply pointed out the other interest, and allowed it to stand on its merits. In ethical theories of a certain type, and in much impromptu moralizing, it is a.s.sumed that there is no legitimate appeal except in behalf of interests that are at the instant already alive. This is as absurd as to suppose that in order to bring you to the truth in any purely theoretical matter, I must confine myself to evidence that you already recognize. In both cases your individual experience at any given time may be narrow and limited owing to causes that are in the highest {55} degree arbitrary. It may be advisable that I should solicit your attention by connecting what I have to offer with what is already familiar to you; but this is a psychological expedient. My appeal is logically supported by objects, by principles, by data which are in no wise dependent for their claims on their connection with your present stock in trade.

Chesterton refers to one who "had that rational and deliberate preference which will always to the end trouble the peace of the world, the rational and deliberate preference for a short life and a merry one." [7] I cannot regard such hedonistic opportunism as other than wantonness or wilful carelessness. It may be deliberate in the sense of being consciously persisted in, but I cannot find any rationality in it. It arises naturally enough through the greater vividness of the interests that are already adopted and proved; but all prejudices arise from such accidents, and they are none the less on that account absolutely antagonistic to the rational att.i.tude--that willingness that things should be for me even as they are.

In the second place, it has appeared that there is no demonstrable priority of one simple interest over another differing only qualitatively from it. I propose to call this the principle of _the quant.i.tative basis of preference_. I know that the term quant.i.ty has an ugly sound in this context. {56} But I believe that this is due simply to a false abstraction. Two good books are not better than one because two is better than one, but because in two of a given unit of goodness there is more of goodness than in one. Two is more than one, but not more good, unless that which is counted is itself good. Nor is two longer or heavier than one, unless the units numbered happen to be those of length or weight. To prefer two interests to one does not imply that one is a lover of quant.i.ty, but a lover of good; of that which if it be and remain good, the more the better.

At any rate it seems to me a matter of simple candor to admit that "more" is a term implying quant.i.ty, whether it be "more room," "more weight," "more goodness," or "more beauty." It seems to me to be equally evident that "more" implies commensurable magnitude; and that commensurability implies the existence of a common unit in the terms compared. Two inches are more than one inch in that they include one inch and also another like unit. Now in moral matters the unit of value is the fulfilment of the simple interest; and in consequence I see no way of demonstrating that one such simple interest is more good than another, as I see no way of demonstrating that one inch is longer than another. But I do see that if I can carry a simple interest over into a compound one, and there both {57} retain it and add to it, I shall have more--more by what I add. Such comparison is never a simple matter, perhaps in any concrete case never wholly conclusive. But I can conceive no more important and more clarifying declaration of principle. It means that any rational decision as to the precedence of social ideals, or as to historical progress from good to better, must be based on width of representation and weight of incentive.

IV

If what I have said thus far has proved convincing to you, this may be owing to the fact that you have not been called upon to adopt any interest beyond what are conventionally regarded as your own. In moral matters it is customary to attach a certain finality to personal p.r.o.nouns. But there are no terms in common use which have so rough and loose a meaning, which cover so equivocal and confused an experience; albeit the necessity and frequency of their use has made them standard currency and polished them into a sort of deceptive smoothness to the touch. There is no term so altogether handy as the term "I," nor is there any so embarra.s.sed when called on to show its credentials in the shape of clear and verifiable experience. If, then, you stand upon _your_ interests I shall not be convinced, for I shall {58} not know what you mean. There is no sense in which you are a finished and demonstrable fact. My dealings with you, and this is peculiarly true of my rational dealings with you, cannot be tested by _you_ in any absolute or fixed sense, simply because they may _make_ you, as they may make me.

Let us return to our test case. You are the epicure, and I am the proprietor; you seize my apple, and I protest. But now I no longer appeal to you merely as one who enjoys eating apples, and warn you that you are selecting the wrong means of attaining that end. I simply inform you that the apple is my property, and that I desire to retain it. I appeal to you to respect my wishes, at least to the extent of non-interference. If you reply that this is no interest that you acknowledge, then I am in a position to inform you. For on no ground can you attach finality to the set of interests which at any given time you choose to acknowledge. If I may remind you of a forgotten interest, I may inform you of a new interest. In the one case, you acknowledge that there is such an interest in that you antic.i.p.ate its revival, and realize that its mere absence is no proof of its non-existence. You recognize it as having its roots in your organism, and its opportunity for exercise in certain definable and predictable circ.u.mstances. This is what you mean when you acknowledge that _you will desire_ to go to the play {59} to-morrow. But the evidence of the existence of still another interest, in this case mine, is no less convincing. Like your own latent interest, it does not at the instant move you. But it has the specific character of an interest, and its place in the existent world through its relation to my organism.

Recognizing it as an interest, you cannot in the given case fail to observe that it qualifies your action as good or bad, through being affected by it. If your action fulfils your interest and thwarts mine, it is again mixed, both good and bad. In order to define the good act in the premises it is necessary, as in the previous case, to define a purpose which shall embrace both interests and regulate action with a view to their joint fulfilment.

It is customary to argue this principle of impartiality, according to which the merely personal consideration is declared to be irrelevant to the determination of moral value, by a critique of _egoism_. The _reductio ad absurdum_ of egoism has recently been formulated by G. E.

Moore in as thorough and conclusive a manner as could be desired.[8]

That writer a.n.a.lyzes egoism into a series of propositions all of which are equivocal, false, or, so far as true, non-egoistic in their meaning. I shall reduce Moore's propositions to two, and modify them to suit my own conception of goodness.

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As an egoist you may, in the first place, affirm that _there are no interests but yours_. This proposition, however, is manifestly false.

Accept any definition of an interest or desire that you will, and I can find indefinitely many cases answering your definition and falling outside the cla.s.s of those which you claim as your own. None of these, if it conforms fully to your definition, is any the less an interest or desire than the one that happens to be moving you at the instant.

There would be as good ground for saying that your brother was the only brother, or your book the only book. Even if you abate the rigor of the proposition, you cannot escape its essential falsity. If you affirm that there are no interests but the interests of _each_, or that _each_ man's interests are the only interests, you flatly contradict yourself. If you affirm that your interests are of superior importance, that they are exceptional, peculiar, ent.i.tled to pre-eminence--this is virtually equivalent to your original proposition. The respect in which your interests seem different from all others either enters into your definition of interest, in which case it becomes general; or it is some advent.i.tious circ.u.mstance that does not belong to your interests as such, some accident of proximity which may have psychological or instrumental importance, but cannot rightly affect your judgment of good. For goodness lies in {61} the objective bearing of your action on such things as interests; precisely as the diagonal is a line connecting the vertices of opposite angles in a square, independently of all circ.u.mstances that do not affect the generic character of the square.

In the second place, you may affirm that _for you there are no interests but your own_. But this is an equivocal proposition. It may mean that _in your opinion_ there are none, in which case you admit the probable falsity of your judgment through contrasting it with the consensus of opinion; through attributing it to your narrowness and false perspective. Your offering it as your opinion gives the proposition at best a tentative form; the question of its truth remains to be adjudicated. I need only present other interests answering your description of an interest to prove you mistaken. And if you were to generalize your proposition and say that each man thinks his own interests the only interests, you would be doubly wrong, in that the generalization would be unwarranted, and the opinion imputed to each man false.

Or, your claim that for you there are no interests but your own, might be taken to mean that in some sense you must confine your endeavors to the fulfilment of your own interests. Otherwise, you may argue, the practical situation would {62} reach a dead-lock, a state of hopeless confusion in which each individual neglected his own proper affairs for the sake of those he had neither the means nor the competence to serve.

Now this is indisputably true, but it is not egoism. The judgment that each individual must labor where he may do so most effectively, that he must a.s.sume not only a general responsibility for all interests affected by his action, but also a special responsibility for those with whose direct execution he is charged, is an impartial judgment.

It expresses a broad and intelligent view of the total situation. In the fable of the fox and the grapes, the action of the fox is due to the folly of a too fluent attention. Similarly, he who lets go his present hold of the web of interests simply because his eye happens to alight on another vantage-point, is as much the blind slave of novelty as the self-centred man is of familiarity. In both cases the fault is one of narrowness of range, of arbitrary exclusion.

Egoists, then, are guilty of a kind of stupid provinciality. They are like those closet-philosophers whom Locke describes.

The truth is, they canton out to themselves a little Goshen in the intellectual world, where light s.h.i.+nes and as they conclude, day blesses them; but the rest of that vast expansum they give up to night and darkness, and so avoid coming near it. They have a pretty traffic with known correspondents, in some little {63} creek; within that they confine themselves, and are dexterous managers enough of the wares and products of that corner with which they content themselves, but will not venture out into the great ocean of knowledge, to survey the riches that nature hath stored other parts with, no less genuine, no less solid, no less useful than what has fallen to their lot, in the admired plenty and sufficiency of their own little spot, which to them contains whatsoever is good in the universe.[9]

The impartial or judicial estimate of value is properly recognized as essential to the meaning of _justice_. I do not here refer to justice in the more narrow and familiar sense. Retributive justice, or justice in any of its special legal aspects, is a political rather than an ethical matter.[10] But political justice must be based on ethical justice. And to the definition of this fundamental principle some contribution has now been made. There is a parody of justice, a justice of condescension, that the principles already defined do discredit. For it has sometimes been thought that justice required only a deliberate estimate of interests by those best qualified to judge, as though the settlement of moral issues were a matter of connoisseurs.h.i.+p. The viciousness of this conception lies in the fact that qualitatively regarded there is no superiority or inferiority among interests. The relish of caviare is no better, no worse, than the relish of bread. Preference among interests must be based on their difference {64} of representation, or their difference of compatibility. A wide and safe interest is better than a narrow and mischievous interest, better for its liberality. It follows that no interest can be condemned except upon grounds that recognize its claims, and aim so far as possible to provide for it among the rest.

No interest can rationally be rejected as having no value, but only as involving too great a cost.

But though these considerations are sufficient to expose moral sn.o.bbery, they do not fully define justice. For justice imputes a certain inviolability to the claims of that unit of life which we term loosely a human, personal, moral, free, or rational being. There is some sense in which you are a finality; making it improper for me simply to dispose of you, even if it be my sincere intention to promote thereby the well-being of humanity. You are not merely one interest among the rest, to be counted, adjusted, or suppressed by some court of moral apprais.e.m.e.nt. I think I may safely a.s.sume that there is to-day an established conscience supporting Kant's dictum, "So act as to treat humanity, whether in thine own person or in that of any other, in every case as an end withal, never as means only." [11]

Let me state briefly what appears to me to be the proper basis of this judgment. I have said that I am not ent.i.tled simply to suppress your {65} action as may be approved by my own judgment. Now, did I propose to do so, what justification should I offer? I should present, no doubt, the facts in the case. I should show you the incompatibility of your presently adopted course with the general good. But let us suppose that you defend your action on the same grounds. In that case your endors.e.m.e.nt of your action has precisely the same formal justification as my condemnation of it. Our equality lies in the fact that we are both claiming candidly to represent the truth. In the last a.n.a.lysis our equality is based on the ident.i.ty of the objective content to which we appeal. As witnesses of a specific truth within the range of both, the meanest mortal alive and the omniscient intelligence are equal; and simply because the identical truth is as valid in the mouth of one as in the mouth of the other. Where it is a matter of disagreement between you and me, our equality lies in the fact that neither can do more than appeal to the object. Neither has any authority; there _is_ no authority in matters of truth, but only evidence. The only rational solution of disagreement is agreement; that is, the coalescence of opinions in the common object to which they refer and toward which they converge. The method of approximating agreement is discussion; which is the attempt of each of two knowers to avail himself of all the organs {66} and instruments of knowledge possessed by the other. Discussion involves mutual respect, in which each party acknowledges the finality of the other as a vehicle of truth. This, I believe, is that moral equality, that dignity and ultimate responsibility attaching to all rational beings alike, without which justice cannot be fulfilled.

Justice, then, embraces these two ideas. In the first place, in estimating the goodness or evil of action, merely personal or party connections must not be admitted in evidence. In the second place, the deliberate judgment of any rationally minded individual is ent.i.tled to respect as a source of truth. Conflict must in the last a.n.a.lysis be overcome by the congruence of impartial minds. Hence the justification of reciprocal respect among persons who think honestly; and of a public forum to which all shall have access, and where business shall be transacted under the vigilant eye of him who is most concerned. A candid mind is the last court of jurisdiction. So long as the procedure of society is questioned or resented by one honest conscience, it is lacking in complete verification, and its findings are open to doubt.

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V

Enough has already been said to show that the goodness of action must be determined with reference to nothing less than the totality of all affected interests. For this highest principle I have reserved the honored term, _good-will_. Neither you nor I can reasonably decline to consider the bearing of our actions on any interest whatsoever. Right conduct, since it is inconsistent with the least ruthlessness, must inevitably in the end a.s.sume the form of humanity and piety.

I know that it is not customary to suppose that devotion to the service of mankind is rational; it is taken to be gratuitous, if not quixotic.

But once let it be granted that goodness accrues to action in proportion to its fruitfulness, it follows that that action is most blessed that is dedicated without reservation to the general life.

There is only one course which can recommend itself to that fair and open mind to which I conceive myself to be addressing this appeal: namely, so to act in fulfilment of the interest in hand, as either to promote or make room for all other interests.

And this is true not only of such interests as may be a.s.sumed to exist, as const.i.tute one's present neighborhood, near and remote; it is also true of interests that are as yet only potentialities, defined by the capacity of living things {68} to grow. If it be unreasonable to neglect the bearing of one's action on interests which one happens not to be familiar with, it is unreasonable to neglect its bearing on interests not yet a.s.serted, wherever there is a presumption that such may come to be. In other words, one's moral account cannot be made up without a provision for entries that have yet to be made. Such a provision will take the form of a purpose to grow, an ardent spirit of liberality, an eagerness for novelty. Good-will builds better than it knows; it is open toward the future; committed to a task which requires foresight and also faith. But such devotion, with all its extravagance, with its very reverence for what is not known but must nevertheless be accounted best, is only, after all, the part of fearless good sense. If anything be good, and if it be reasonable to pursue it, then is the maximum of that thing the _best_, and the pursuit of it _wholly_ reasonable.

It may even be said that thrift is only a lesser form of piety, and piety the whole of thrift. For, first and last, goodness lies in the saving and increase of life. The justification of any act lies in its being provident; in its yield of immediate fulfilment and its generous allowance for the other interest, the remote interest, and the interest that is as yet only surmised. The good will is the will to partic.i.p.ate productively, permissively, {69} and formally in the total undertaking of life. Only when this intention controls one's decisions can one act without fear of one's own critical reflection.

VI

Let me add a word concerning the part played by the imagination in enforcing the logic of morality. An enlightened conscience, or a rational conviction of duty, will consist essentially in the viewing of life with a certain remove from its local incidents. In conduct, as in all matters where validity or truth is concerned, the critical consciousness must disengage itself and view the course of things in its due proportions, allowing one's dearest interests to lie where they lie among the rest. I have read so admirable a representation of the moral function of the logical imagination in a recent paper by H. G.

Lord, that I beg leave to quote it here in full:

As between one's self and another "the image of an impartial outsider who acts as our judge" is none other than this rational insight into the relation existing between two who are cognitively to each other just this and not anything else. It is the vision of the actual reciprocity of the two. From this comes the Golden Rule in its various forms: "Love thy neighbor as thyself," "Do unto others as ye would be done by," "Put yourself in his place." But, furthermore, even this simpler justice necessitates the power not only to "see yourself as others see {70} you," but even more adequately, and as we say more justly, to put yourself where you belong in a system of many, in which you not only count for one and no more than one, but in which you count for just that sort of one, fulfilling just that sort of function which your place in the rationally conceived system involves or necessitates.

And this gives us a form of justice much more profound and complex than that of the Golden Rule, and requiring constructive imagination and rational insight of the very highest order. And with this insight goes necessarily an inevitableness, an inexorableness, and, as we say metaphorically, an imperativeness, which no amount of twisting and intellectual thimble-rigging can avoid. The logic of the system cannot be avoided any more than a step in a mathematical demonstration. . . .

So long as it stands, its parts, elements, or members are _placed_, and there is set over each of them the imperative of the system in which they are members.[12]

It has sometimes been thought that a fair view of life will inhibit action through discrediting party zeal. John Davidson describes what he calls "the apathy of intelligence."

To be strong to the end, it is necessary to shut many windows, to be deaf on either side of the head at will, to fetter the mind. . . . The perfect intelligence cannot fight, cannot compete. Intelligence, fully awake, is doomed to understand, and can no more take part in the disputes of men than in the disputes of other male creatures.[13]

Now it is true that intelligence inhibits wantonness; for intelligence, fully awake, knows how unreasonable it is that one who loves life should {71} destroy it. But because intelligence affirms the motive of each combatant, it must move action to the saving of both. Where intelligence is directed to the inner impulse of life, it is not apathetic, but sympathetic. Its span is widened, while its incentive is not divided but multiplied.

Nor does it follow that when duty is interpreted as enlightenment, life must lose its romantic flavor and cease to require the old high-spirited virtues. It is this very linking of life to life, this abandonment of one's self to the prodigious of the whole, that provides the true object of reverence, and permits the sense of mystery to remain even after the light has come. Although the way of morality is evident and well-proved in direction, being plain to whomever will look at life with a fair and commanding eye, achievement is difficult, the great victories hard won, and the certain prospect bounded by a near horizon. Even though life be rationalized, it will none the less call for intrepid faith; for what Maeterlinck calls "the heroic, cloud-tipped, indefatigable energy of our conscience." [14]

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CHAPTER III

THE ORDER OF VIRTUE