Utilitarianism

130. Hedonism.

Hedonism (hedone = pleasure), or moral sensualism (genietingsmoraal), says: happiness is the sum of pleasures. Good is in sensual pleasure, evil in pain. The supreme good is the greatest present pleasure of the body, and any pleasure whatever is good, even if it is obtained by a most shameful action. Hence the supreme norm is: pleasure is to be sought, pain is to be fled; nature impels to this. Hence actions are good which bring more pleasure than pain; and therefore virtue is good only as a means to pleasure.

Against this system it can be objected:

1. Hedonism is founded upon the system of moral positivism: for pleasure varies and depends much on circumstances, custom, the laws of times and places, and the character of individuals, and corresponds to particular tendencies: each one is drawn by his own pleasure.

2. It falsely supposes that the ultimate end is in the greatest delight of this life.

3. The delectable good is not the first object of appetite, for delight follows from appetition and operation, which naturally precedes it and generates it. Hence delight will be good or evil according to the nature of the operation itself. Therefore it is not the principle or norm of morality.

4. Hedonism denies the classic distinction among the honorable, useful, and delectable good; yet historically and really there is a difference between what is sensibly pleasurable and what is fitting to man. Hence the system is opposed to man's natural conscience; and, reduced to the state of the present life, it justifies all crimes.

5. It considers only one element of man: but man is spirit and heart, not heart alone.

6. The delectable good is relative to individuals, and consequently subjective and variable; therefore it does not constitute a criterion of the objective and intrinsic distinction between good and evil.

7. Delight sought without restriction and discretion destroys itself: experience shows that it brings pain and is transformed into pain. But if delight as such is good, it will never be excessive; and nevertheless delight can be excessive: for its quantity displeases in such a way that it is no longer delight.

They object: 1) Natural inclinations are true; therefore the delight to which nature inclines is the true end and the true good. Resp. Those inclinations are true, not because they tend to delight, but because they show the internal nature of man. Hence it is not absolutely good to follow them, but insofar as they agree with human nature as such and with reason itself, to which all other inclinations must be subordinated, as lower things to higher.

2. Not every pleasure is good or an end, but pleasure of a certain character or quality, which is discerned by reason. Resp. Then pleasure itself as such is already not the ultimate norm, but a determined quality or condition of pleasure. This is already the negation of the system.

There is nevertheless something true in it: namely, the connection between virtue and happiness and delight, not indeed the baser delight of sense, but the nobler delight of the mind. The exercise of virtue alone can procure true happiness: it can cause imperfect happiness in the present life and merit perfect happiness in the other life. But an act will not be good because it renders us happy; it renders us happy because it is good.

131. Utilitarianism (nuttigheidsmoraal; Nutzlichkeitsmoral; Erfolgsmoral).

Utilitarianism in general places the end not precisely in pleasure alone, but in the sum of goods; and moral good in any useful good whatever for the earthly happiness either of the individual or of society, even in pleasure which reason approves as truly useful. Thus pleasure remains a secondary criterion of morality.

Now the aforesaid norm, besides falsely supposing that a created good is the end of man:

1. Is not sufficient, as not universal: for several honorable or dishonorable acts exist without respect to private or social good; for example, pledged faith is preserved against utility. Social utilitarianism denies man's duties toward God and toward himself, except insofar as they are ordered to the social good; individual utilitarianism does not prove duties toward God or toward others. But if they say that individual good is connected with social good, resp.: perhaps this may pass in the abstract; in the concrete, I deny it, for in fact they are often opposed and in conflict.

2. It is practically impossible: for all the consequences, of advantage or disadvantage, present and future, would have to be adequately seen and compared with one another, so that it could be established what is truly useful.

3. It is not immutable: for earthly happiness appears subjective and relative, and therefore it is not conceived in the same way by all, but is understood in a diverse way according to various times and regions and individuals, so that nothing is more changeable than a rule of this kind; hence it would render morality subjective and changeable.

4. It is false: for acts held by all as dishonorable can be useful to man, for example, theft and homicide, or can be ordered to the social good, for example, perjury, homicide, lying; and conversely, acts certainly honorable can be useless. Hence the norm of happiness in life is vague and indeterminate, because it can legitimate everything; and at the same time so restricted that it cannot legitimate many duties, as was already said under 1).

5. It is incomplete and maimed: it considers the empirical and affective aspect, egoism or altruism, more than the rational aspect, to which it assigns a second place and which it places after inclination and tendency; although the rational has the first part in morality, as directing and regulating.

In particular:

A. Individual, private, or egoistic utilitarianism (welbegrepen eigenbelang) places morality in any good whatever which each one, according to his pursuit of happiness, has proposed to himself to obtain. Hence it is not pleasure alone, but that which according to itself and according to its effects and circumstances offers greater utility, even future utility, for the whole life.

Against individual utilitarianism many things can be brought forward which are opposed to hedonism, namely:

1. It is founded upon moral positivism: utility depends upon many circumstances, laws, custom, and personal character.

2. It falsely supposes that the ultimate end is in the happiness of this life.

3. It denies the classic distinction among honorable, useful, and delectable good. And yet the useful as such is not the end but the means. Hence the end must be either delectable good, which is hedonism, or good considered in order to the end of nature, which is rational ethics. Therefore utility is not the first criterion. Hence the system is opposed to the moral conscience of all times, which refuses to admit pursuit of gain as moral perfection, just as it refuses pleasure.

4. It considers only one aspect of man; but man per se is an individual and per se from his nature is social. Hence individual utility alone is not the end of the moral order.

5. The useful good is not a universal criterion: for it is relative and variable, hence it is not a criterion of objective and intrinsic distinction; indeed it can lead to the greatest crimes. On the contrary, the best acts, such as to shed blood for God, for virtue, for the defense of one's country, can be useless.

6. Hence individual utility must be ruled by education and legislation.

7. Whence proposition 58 of the Syllabus is condemned: "All moral discipline and honesty must be placed in heaping up and increasing riches by any manner whatever and in satisfying pleasures."

B. Social or altruistic utilitarianism establishes common happiness as the norm of morality. Actions, therefore, are good or evil according as they promote or impede common happiness, and the more an action contributes to the common good, the better it is; the more it impedes it, the worse.

Against this form especially it can be objected:

1. In order that the happiness of others be the end, it is necessary to know in what that happiness consists. Hence the system does not hand down the ultimate answer, nor does it definitively solve the question, but leads it back again. The useful, namely, is not the measure, because it is a means, not an end. Therefore it is not the supreme criterion.

2. It is not a universal criterion. Ethics precedes the organization of society. Conscience testifies that, even apart from the social good, there are good and evil actions, such as intemperance, blasphemy, parricide, which are evil even in individual or family life. Moreover, the individual and society remain distinct, although they are not disjoined or separated. Moreover, man is directly referred to society only through external acts; and yet internal acts are moral, indeed morality is first in them.

3. It is not the first criterion. For the end of society is the end of individuals. Hence the distinction between social good and evil is subordinated to the distinction between individual good and evil; and if the good of one is not moral, neither is the good of many. It is natural to man to enter society because it is good, that is, conformable to reason. That is properly the end where there is properly operation. Society is not one per se, but has only a unity of order; and therefore as such it is not apt for attaining happiness.

4. It places the end in the present life and legitimates all crimes, for example, those of powerful nations against weaker ones.

5. According to the very principles of empiricism and utilitarianism, egoism equals altruism; and in a case of conflict between social good and individual happiness, from the principles of utilitarianism the conflict cannot be solved.

Since Christian ethics, in our times indeed, is much attacked, and since modern prejudices against it, on account of the wider diffusion of culture and literature, are now carried about everywhere, it seems not useless to set forth succinctly the principal systems of adversaries. Yet we in no way intend to hand down a complete history of ethics, but to note certain things useful for the use of priests.

I. Hedonism practically exists among many in all times; but theoretically and scientifically it does not have many defenders. Protagoras (c. 480-410) and Gorgias (c. 480-375) taught moral positivism and relativism. From the fact that there is no objective difference and norm discriminating good and evil, their disciples concluded that a norm must be established relative to the subject. Whence the principle of discrimination is sensible pleasure; to procure this by all means is good. Thus the sophist Callicles first taught, and after him Thrasymachus and Polus. Aristippus the Cyrenaic (435-354) perfected the system, whose disciples led it to its ultimate evil consequences.

1. Though the name utilitarian is an English growth of this century, the philosophy so called probably takes its origin from the days when man first began to speculate on moral matters. Bentham and the two Mills, Austin, and George Grote, have repeated in England the substance of what Protagoras and Epicurus taught in Greece, two thousand years before. It is the system of Ethics to which all must incline, who ignore the spiritual side of man's nature and his hopes of a better world. It is a morality of the earth, earthy.

2. Utilitarianism has not been formulated like the Athanasian Creed. It is impossible to state it and combat it in a form to which all Utilitarians will subscribe. Indeed, it is an amiable weakness of theirs, when confronted with the grosser consequences that flow from their theories, to run off to some explanation, true enough, but quite out of keeping with the primary tenets of their school. We will take what may be called a "mean reading" of the indications which various Utilitarian thinkers afford of their mind and philosophy. These authorities, then, teach two main heads of doctrine:—

(1) That the last end and final good of man lies in this world, and consists in the greatest happiness of the greatest number of mankind, happiness being taken to mean pleasure as well of the senses as of the understanding, such pleasure as can be had in this world, along with immunity from pain. (Mill's Utilitarianism, 2nd Ed., pp. 9, seq.)

(2) That human acts are right or wrong, according as they are useful or hurtful, that is, according as their consequences make for or against the above-mentioned end of social happiness.

3. Consequences, as Utilitarians very properly point out, are either general or particular. They add that, in pronouncing an action to be good or evil according to its consequences, they mean the general and not the particular consequences. In other words, they bid us consider, not the immediate results of this action, but what would be the result to society, if this sort of action were generally allowed. This point is well put by Paley (Moral Philosophy, bk. ii., c. vii.: all three chapters, vi., vii., viii., should be read, as the best explanation of the Principle of General Consequences):

"You cannot permit one action and forbid another, without showing a difference between them. Consequently the same sort of actions must be generally permitted or generally forbidden. Where, therefore, the general permission of them would be pernicious, it becomes necessary to lay down and support the rule which generally forbids them…. The assassin knocked the rich villain on the head, because he thought him better out of the way than in it. If you allow this excuse in the present instance, you must allow it to all who act in the same manner, and from the same motive; that is, you must allow every man to kill any one he meets, whom he thinks noxious or useless: … a disposition of affairs which would soon fill the world with misery and confusion, and ere long put an end to human society."

My contention is, not with the Principle of General Consequences, which has a certain value in Ethics, and is used by many writers other than Utilitarian, but with the two stated above, n. 2, which are called the Greatest Happiness Principle and the Principle of Utility.

4. Against the Greatest Happiness Principle I have these complaints:

(1) Utilitarians from Paley to John Stuart Mill aver that their teaching is no bar to any man hoping for and striving after the happiness of the world to come. They say that such happiness cannot be better attained than by making it your principal aim to improve all temporal goods and dissipate all temporal evil. Their maxim in fact is: "Take care of the things of earth, and the things of heaven will take care of themselves." Whereas it was the very contrary teaching of Him, whom moderns, who see in Him no higher character, still love to call the greatest of moral teachers: "That which fell among thorns are they who have heard, and going their way, are choked with the cares and riches and pleasures of this life, and yield no fruit." (St. Luke viii. 14.)

(2) It will be said that these thorns grow of selfishness, and that these cares are the cares of individual interest, whereas the Utilitarian's delight and glory is to live, not for himself, but for the commonwealth. But how can a man, who takes pleasure to be his highest good and happiness, live otherwise than for himself? Here we come upon the unobserved fault and flaw, which entirely vitiates the Utilitarian structure. It is an union of two opposite and incompatible elements. An old poet has said:

Vinegar and oil in one same vessel pour,
They stand apart, unfriendly, all the more.

(Aeschylus, Agam., 330, 331.)

Utilitarianism consists of a still more unfriendly and unwholesome mixture of two elements, both of them bad, and unable to stand together, Hedonism and Altruism. Hedonism is the doctrine that the main object and end of life is pleasure: which is the position laid down in so many words by Mill (1. c.), that "actions are right in proportion as they tend to promote happiness;" and "by happiness is intended pleasure and the absence of pain." If Hedonism were sound doctrine, the Pleasant and the Good would be identical, and the most pleasant pleasure would ever be the best pleasure. That would take away all distinction of kind or quality among pleasures, and differentiate them only by intensity and duration. This was Paley's doctrine, a fundamental point of Hedonism, and therefore also of the Utilitarian philosophy. John Mill, very honourably to himself, but very fatally to the system that he was writing to defend, parted company with Paley. We have argued against Paley (c. iv., s. iii., nn. 3-5, p. 55), that there is a better and a worse in pleasures, quite distinct from the more or less pleasurable, even if that more be taken in the long run in this world.

Again it may be considered that pleasure, even the best and highest, is a sort of efflorescence from activity, and is for activity, not activity for it; and better is the activity, whatever it be, than the pleasure which comes thereof; wherefore no pleasure, as pleasure, can be the highest good and happiness of man.

Hedonism then is an error. But errors may be opposed to one another as well as to the truth. Hedonism is opposed to Altruism in this way. A man may take pleasure in seeing other people enjoy themselves. Nothing is more common, except the pleasure taken in enjoying one's own self. But if a man only feeds the hungry that he may have the satisfaction of seeing them eat, is it the hungry or himself that he finally seeks to gratify? Clearly, himself. That is the behaviour of the Hedonist, he acts for his own pleasure even in his benevolence. The Altruist, on the contrary, professes never to act for self, but for society. So that society flourish, he is ready to be crushed and ruined, not in the matter of his pleasure only, but even in that of his own good. Selfishness, by which he means all manner of regard to self, is, upon his conscience, the unforgiven sin. But Hedonism is selfishness in the grossest form, being the mere pursuit in all things of pleasurable feeling—feeling being always particular and limited to self, in contradistinction to good, which is universal and diffuses itself all round. The Hedonist seeks his own pleasure, where the Altruist forbids him to take thought, let alone for his gratification, but even for his good. Thus an Hedonist cannot be Altruist to boot; and, trying to combine the two characters, the Utilitarian is committed to a self-contradiction.

If he relinquishes Hedonism, and holds to Altruism, pure and simple, his position is not much improved. Altruism overlooks the fact, that man, as compared with other men, is a person, the centre of his own acts, not a thing, to be entirely referred to others. He is in relation with others, as child, father, husband, master, citizen; but these relations do not take up the whole man. There is a residue within,—an inner being and life, which is not referable to any creature outside himself, but only to the Creator. For this inner being, man is responsible to God alone. The good of this, the "inner man of the heart," is each individual's proper and primary care. Altruism, and Utilitarianism with it, ignore the interior life of the soul, and substitute human society, that is, ultimately, the democratic State, in place of God.

(3) Another confusion that the Greatest Happiness Principle involves, is the mistaking the political for the ethical end of life. The political end, which it is the statesman's business to aim at, and the citizen's duty to subserve, is "the natural happiness of the commonwealth, and of individuals as members of the commonwealth, that they may live in it in peace and justice, and with a sufficiency of goods for the preservation and comfort of bodily life, and with that amount of moral rectitude which is necessary for this outward peace and preservation of the commonwealth, and the perpetuity of the human race." (Suarez, De Legibus, III., xi., 7.) This is all the good that the Utilitarian contemplates. He is satisfied to make a good citizen, a good husband, a good father, for the transactions of this life. He has no concern to make a good man up to the ethical standard, which supposes the observance of the whole natural law, duties to God, and duties within himself, as well as duties to human society, and by this observance the compassing of the everlasting happiness of the man's own individual soul.

Against the Principle of Utility I find these charges:

(1) It takes the sign and indication of moral evil for the evil itself, as if the physician should take the symptom for the disease. It places the wickedness of an act in the physical misery and suffering that are its consequences. This is, I say, a taking of the indication for the thing indicated. An act is bad in itself and by itself, as being a violation of the rational nature of the doer (c. vi., s. i.), and being bad, it breeds bad consequences. But the badness of the act is moral; the badness of the consequences, physical. There is an evident intrinsic irrationality, and thereby moral evil, in such sins as intemperance, peevishness, and vanity. But let us take an instance of an act, apparently harmless in itself, and evil solely because of the consequences. Supposing one insists upon playing the piano for his own amusement, to the disturbance of an invalid who is lying in a critical state in the next room. Do the mere consequences make this otherwise innocent amusement evil? Yes, if you consider the amusement in the abstract: but if you take it as this human act, the act is inordinate and evil in itself, or as it is elicited in the mind of the agent. The volition amounts to this: "I prefer my amusement to my neighbour's recovery," which is an act unseemly and unreasonable in the mind of a social being. Utilitarians fall into the capital error of ignoring the intrinsic value of an act, and estimating it wholly by extrinsic results, because they commonly follow the phenomenalist philosophy, which breaks away from all such ideas as substance and nature, and regards nothing but sequences and coexistences of phenomena. To a phenomenalist the precept, Live up to thy nature, can have no meaning.

(2) Aristotle (Ethics, II., iv., 3) draws this distinction between virtue and art, that "the products of art have their excellence in themselves: it suffices therefore that they are of this or that quality: but acts of virtue are not done virtuously according to the quality of the thing done, but according to the state of mind of the doer; first, according to his knowledge of what he was about; then, according to his volition, as that was guided or not guided by the proper motives of the virtue; thirdly, according to the steadiness and fixedness of his will; whereas all these considerations are of no account in a work of art, except the single one of the artist being aware of what he was about." Elsewhere (Ethics, VI., iv., 2), he says that virtue is distinguished from art as being action, not production. The Principle of Utility confounds virtue with art, or perhaps I should say, with manufactures. It judges conduct, as one would shoemaking, by trial of the product, or net result. So far from being solicitous, with Aristotle, that volition should be "guided by the proper motives of the virtue" which there is question of practising (c. v., s. viii., n. 4, p. 96: Ar. Eth., III., viii.), Mill (Utilitarianism, p. 26) tells us that "utilitarian moralists have gone beyond almost all others in affirming that the motive has nothing to do with the morality of the action." By motive he understands what we have called the end in view. (c. iii., s. ii., n. 2, p. 31.) So that, if one man waits on the sick for the love of God, and another in hope of a legacy, the morality of these two acts is the same, just as it makes no difference to the usefulness of a pair of boots, what motive it was that set the shoemaker to work. True, Mill admits that the motive has "much to do with the worth of the agent:" but that, he hastens to explain, is inasmuch as "it indicates … a bent of character from which useful, or from which hurtful actions are likely to arise." Even so,—the shoemaker who works to earn money for a carousal, is not likely to go on producing useful articles so long as another, who labours to support his family. Such is the moral difference that Mill places between the two men; one instrument of production is longer available than the other.

(3) Another well established distinction is that between harm and injury, injury being wilful and unjust harm. The housemaid, who in arranging the room has burned your manuscript of "sugared sonnets," has done you no injury, for she meant none, but how vast the harm to the author and to mankind! Harm is visible in the effects: but injury only upon examination of the mind of the agent. Not so, however, the Utilitarian thinks: harm being equal, he can make no difference between a tyrant and a man-eating tiger. Thus George Grote says of a certain murderous usurper of the kingdom of Macedon: "You discover nothing while your eye is fixed on Archelaus himself…. But when you turn to the persons whom he has killed, banished, or ruined—to the mass of suffering that he has inflicted—and to the widespread insecurity which such acts of iniquity spread through all societies where they become known—there is no lack of argument which prompts a reflecting spectator to brand him as [a most dangerous and destructive animal, no] a disgraceful man." (Grote's Plato, ii., p. 108.) Why Archelaus is described in terms of the tiger, and then branded as a disgraceful man, we are at a loss to conceive, except in this way, that the writer's philosophy forsook him at the end of the sentence, and he reverted to the common sense of mankind. But he should have either ended the sentence as suggested in the parenthesis, or have been willing to call the man-eater of the Indian jungle, who has "learned to make widows, and to lay waste their cities," a disgraceful tiger; or lastly, he should have looked back, where he declared it was vain to look, upon Archelaus himself, and discerned in him that moral deformity, and contradiction of reason, whereof a brute beast is incapable, but which is a disgrace and a stain upon humanity.

A later writer, who presses Utilitarianism into the service of Socialism, is plainer-spoken than Grote, and says bluntly: "To be honestly mistaken avails nothing. Thus Herbert Spencer—who is under the delusion that we have come into this world each for the sake of himself, and who opposes, as far as he can, the evolution of society—is verily an immoral man…. Right is every conduct which tends to the welfare of society; wrong, what obstructs that welfare." (Gronlund, Co-operative Commonwealth, pp. 226, 227.) Thus is overlaid the difference between harm and injury, between physical and moral evil: thus is the meaning of a human act ignored: in this abyss of chaos and confusion, which Utilitarianism has opened out, Moral Philosophy finds her grave.

(4) The Principle of Utility sees in virtue a habit of self-sacrifice, useful to the community, but not naturally pleasant, and therefore not naturally good and desirable, to him that practises it, but made pleasurable and good and desirable to him by practice. (Mill, pp. 53-57.) In this way virtue becomes naturally a very good thing for every one else but its possessor, but to him it is a natural evil, inasmuch as it deprives him of pleasure, which natural evil by habit is gradually converted into a factitious and artificial good, the man becoming accustomed to it, as the proverb says, "like eels to skinning." This theory is the resuscitation of one current among the Sophists at Athens, and described by Plato thus.—The natural good of man is to afford himself every indulgence, even at the expense of his neighbours. He follows his natural good accordingly: so do his neighbours follow theirs, and try to gratify themselves at his expense. Fights ensue, till mankind, worried and wearied with fighting, make a compact, each to give up so much of his natural good as interferes with that of his neighbour. Human society, formed on this understanding, enforces the compact in the interest of society. Thus the interest of society is opposed to the interest of the individual, in this that it keeps him out of his best natural good, which is to do as his appetite of pleasure bids him in all things, though it compensates him with a second-class good, by preventing his neighbours from pleasure-hunting at his expense. If then his neighbours could be restrained, and he left free to gratify himself, that would be perfect bliss. But only a despot here or there has attained to it. The ordinary man must pay his tax of virtue to the community, a loss to him, but a gain to all the rest: while he is compensated by the losses which their virtue entails upon them.

Such was the old Athenian theory, which John Mill, the Principle of Utility in his hand, completes by saying that by-and-bye, and little by little (as the prisoner of Chillon came to love his dungeon), the hampered individual comes to love, and to find an artificial happiness in, those restrictions of his liberty, which are called Virtue.

It was against this theory that Plato wrote his Republic, and, to compare a little thing to a great, the whole account of moral good being in consonance with nature, and of moral obligation rising out of the nature of the individual man, as has been set forth in this brief Text-book, may serve for a refutation of the perverse doctrine of Utilitarianism.

Readings.—Plato, Republic, pp. 338 E, 339 A, 343 C, D, E, 344 A, B, C, 358 E, 359 A, B, 580 B, C.