Recent Tendencies in Ethics / Three Lectures to Clergy Given at Cambridge

may say, by its regard for the importance of the facts with which it had to deal. The thought of the period was certainly not without controversy; it was indeed controversial almost t

occupied with inherited topics of debate. They gave precision to the questions under discussion; and their controversies defined th

h accompany or follow sense-perception. All the facts of our moral consciousness, therefore,-the knowledge of right and wrong, the judgments of conscience, the recognition of duty and responsibility, the feelings of reverence, remorse, and moral i

g depended upon the consequences of an action in the way of pleasure and pain. That action was right which on the whole and in the long run would bring pleasure o

s on the question of the standard of value, or the criterion of morality, that it claimed, and that it received, the name Utilitarian

here was at the time a bruit and a sound about universal benevolence, philanthropy, utility, and all the other disguises with which an infidel philosophy appropriated to itself the charity, brotherly love, and well-doing inculcated by our holy religion, I set myself to task upon these heads.... With well-doing, however, I went more roundly to work. I told my people that I thought they had more sense than to secede from Christianity to become Utilitarians, for that it would be a confession of ignorance of the faith they deserted, seeing that it was the main duty inculcated by our religion to do all in m

spiritual, although they might be called into definite consciousness by the experience of the facts to which they could be applied. Experience might call them forth into the light of day; but it was held that they belonged, in nature and origin

h the Utilitarians emphasised. On the contrary, moral ideas themselves had an independent validity; they had a worth and authority for conduct which could not be accou

and his spiritual nature as determining the part which it was his to play in the world. They suggested, if they did not always raise, the question whether man is entirely a product of nature or whether he has a spiritual essence to which nature may be subdued. But the larger issues suggested were no

which have been accepted by the common tradition of ages as the expression of man's moral consciousness. The Intuitionists no doubt were sometimes regarded-they may indeed have sometimes regarded themselves-as in a peculiar way the guardians of the traditional morality, and as interested more than their opponents in defending a view in harmony with man's spiritual essence and inheritance. But we do not find any attack upon the main content of morality by the Utilitarian writers. On t

litarianism, 9th

s point-the modifiability of the ordinary moral code-as a sort of test question distinguishing his own system from that of the intuitional moralists; and in one place he says that "the contest between the morality which appeals to an external standard, and that which grounds itself on internal conviction, is the contest of progressive

1: Ibid.

Dissertatio

nised and, if possible, its limits defined; and if the principle of utility is good for anything, it must be good for weighing these conflicting utilities against one another, and marking out the region within which one or the other preponderates[1]." He holds that there are such limits to veracity. He even thinks-though here he is not quite correct-that such limits have been acknowledged by all moralists[2]. He would have been correct if he had said that they had been acknowledged by moralists of all schools: the admission of these limits is not peculiar to Utilitarians. But he vigorously defends the validity of the general rule, and maintains that, in considering any possible exception, we have to take account not merely of the present utility of the falsehood, but of its effect upon the sanctity of the general principle in the minds of men. The Utilitarian doctrine is expressly used by him to confirm the ordinary general laws of the moral consciousness. Nay, these rules-such as the duties of being temperate and just and benevolent-were, according to Mill, themselves

Utilitarian

2: Ibid.

no longer the same common basis of agreement to rely upon that our predecessors had a generation ago. There are many indications in recent literature that the suggestion is now made more readily than it was twenty or thirty years ago that the scale of moral values may have to be revised; and it seems to me that the ethical controversies of the coming generation will not be restricted to academic opponents whose disputes concern nothing more than

not merely that many modern writers assert some general doctrine as to the relativity of right and wrong. So much was implied, though it was not much laid stress upon, in the utilitarian doctrine. For the utilitarian conduct is right according to the amount of happiness it produces: goodness is relative to its tendency to p

othing less than a revision of the whole traditional morality, and in whose minds that demand i

as the Utilitarians did, if we regard the conception of egoism as having to do with one's own personal happiness, and that of altruism as describing the general happiness, the happiness of others rather than of oneself, then obviously the questions arise whether the conduct which produces the greatest happiness of o

ance of the claims of the community at large, that is, roughly speaking, to take the altruistic standpoint. Recent and more careful investigators have brought out more exactly the extent and significance of the divergence. In particular this was done with perfect clearness and precision by the late Professor Sidgwick. He showed that the difference-although it might be easily exaggerated-was yet real and important, that the two systems

who hold that the edifice of physical science is really constructed of conclusions logically inferred from self-evident premises, may reasonably demand that any practical judgments claiming philosophic certainty should be based on an equally firm foundation. If, on the other hand, we find that in our supposed knowledge of the world of nature propositions are commonly taken

life of prudence, honour, and justice." It is only in quite recent days that a thoroughgoing attempt has been made to revalue all the old standards of morality. And the attempt is made from a point of view which is certainly not altruistic. The Utilitarian writers of last generation, if they admitted the conflict of egoism and altruism, weighted every consideration on the

are closely akin to the insanity which clouded his later years. Yet it is impossible to read his writings without recognising his penetrating insight as well as his abundance of virile passion. Besides, in spite of all his extravagances-or, perhaps, because of them-he is sy

lth for a long period. His first book was published in 1871; the preface to the last was dated "on the 30th of September 1888, the day on which the first book of the Transvaluation of all Values was completed." He became ho

qualities typical of the noble morality, for they are the qualities which tend to make the man who possesses them a master over others, to give him a prominent and powerful place in the world, and to help him to subjugate to his will both nature and his fellow-men. On the other hand, there are the qualities which form

pe of morality which is to be overcome and which he calls the servile morality. He deliberately sets in antithesis to one another what he calls Christian and what he calls noble virtues: meaning by the latter the qualities allied to courage

nd a new morality substituted for the old. And with this claim for revision is connected his idea that the egoistic principle which underlies the Pagan virtues preferred to the Christian, and the higher develop

on the confidence which others have in his veracity. And on this one point only Nietzsche has to confess himself a child of the older morality. "This book," he says in the preface to one of the least paradoxical of his works, 'Dawn of Day,' "This book ... implies a contradiction and is not afraid of it: in it we break with the faith in morals-why? In obedience to morality! Or what name shall we give to that which passes therein? We should prefer more modest names. But it is past all doubt that even to us a 'thou shalt' is still speaking, even we still obey a stern law above us-and this is the last moral precept which impresses itself even upon us, which even we obey: in this respect, if in any, we are still conscientious people-viz., we do not wish to return to that which we consider outlived and decayed, to something 'not worthy of belief,' be it called God, virtue, truth, justice, charity; we do not approve of any deceptive bridges to old ideals, we are radically

the sort do not affect the printer only. Nietzsche's sneer at 'Femininism' is deftly turned aside by Miss Volz, by the simple device of substituting for it the word Pessimism. And Dr Tille, the translator of his best-known work, 'Thus spake Zarathustra' (1896, p. xix), has been bemused in an even more wonderful manner. He enumer

he always overstates his case,-his colossal egoism leads him to exaggerate any doctrine,-and while I do not think that the actual doctrines of Nietzsche in the way he puts them will ever gain any general acceptance, while his system of morality may not have any chance of being the moral code of the next generation or even of being regarded as the serious alternati

ting, though the latter is almost entirely absent in some cases. The incoherence of popular opinions about morality is a potent stimulus to reflexion, and may of itself give rise to systematic ethical enquiry. This is more particularly the case when a change of social conditions, or contact with alien modes of life, force into light the inadequacy of the conventional morality. In such a case the new ethical reflexion may have a disintegrating effect

speculation is by no means exclusively due to the thinkers who attempt to arrive at a consistent interpretation of the nature of reality;

der the control of a cool intelligence. And in the competition of nations it is not surprising that there should be an imperious demand for the most alert and well-trained minds to utilise these resources in war and in industry. It is not surprising; nor would it be a fit subject for regret,

ical Economy, Book

nce. The weak nations of the world in arms and commerce have contributed their full share to the higher life of the race; and the triumphs of a country on the battlefield or in business give no security for the presence among its people of the ideals which illumine or of the righteousness which exalts. The history of Germany herself might point the moral. A century ago, when she lay crush

s age like others-perhaps more than most-is strewn with the victims of the struggle. But it can also boast a product largely its own-the new race of victors who have emerged triumphant, with wealth beyond the dreams of avarice of the past generation. Their interests make them cosmopolitan; they are unrestrained by the traditional obligations of ancient lineage; and the world seems to lie before the

wn used to a presentment of human life such as Ibsen's in which the customary morality is regarded as a thin veneer of convention which hardly covers the selfishness in grain, or to the description of life as a tangled mass of animal passions,-a description which, in spite of the genius of Zola, does not fail to weary and disgust,-or perhaps as only a spectacle in which w

e conceptions arrived at in science or philosophy. But there are certain periods of history in which conceptions regarding the truth of things-whether arrived at by scientific methods or not-have had a profound influence upon men's views of good and evil. At the beginning of our era, for instance, the view of God and man introduced by Christianity, resulted in

the last generation has been reformed under the, influence of the group of ideas which constitute the theory of evolution. There is hardly a department of thought which this new doctrine has not touched; and upon mor

ne another that each must be the result of a distinct creative act. It is also an assertion that human life must be treated as a part in the larger whole of organic being, that the mind of man is continuous with animal perception, that m

positive sound and suggests a process of active choice. But Darwin was fully aware that the process to which he gave this name was a negative and not a positive operation; and as such it was clearly recognised by him. The name was, no doubt, chosen simply to bring out the fact that the same kind of results as those which man

for life is the goal of evolution-is a question which brings us at once to the consideration of the ethical significance of the t