The ethics of Hercules

One of the most revolutionary changes which the scientific study of psychology has wrought consists in the demolition of all the barriers which formerly divided the body from the mind. The intellect, once securely enthroned as the highest faculty in the mental hierarchy; the reason, erstwhile religiously devoted to the contemplation of pure truth; and the will, which formerly completed this trio of sublime, unitary faculties, have, in the unbiased and careful scrutiny of laboratory science, been shown to be not only highly complicated processes, but products of experience as well; and not only products of experience, but functions of brain and gland. Furthermore, they have been revealed to be not solely functions of a biological mechanism controlled by external stimuli, but also in a larger sense they are now regarded as means by which the body of a man adjusts itself to and gains control of its physical and social environments. No longer do we ask the old question: “Why has the mind a body?” but rather, “Why does the body have a mind?” And the answer is: The body has a mind to enable the body to experiment with its environment so that when it gets what it seems to want, it can know that it has really wanted what it has gotten.

Some results of this highly reconstructive iconoclasm upon ethical thought have already been depicted in the preceding chapters. Here we are soon to see what effect such a doctrine has upon the last two ethical concepts we shall analyze, namely, duty and freedom.

As may have already been divined, a mechanistic ethics on its constructive side does not maintain a pension list for the outworn conceptions of an earlier day. Consequently, in this place we shall not ask what used to be thought of the “Freedom of the Will,” nor shall we quote Wordsworth’s “Ode to Duty” as a prologue to our theme. For while only a hundred years ago no ethical teacher could have safely omitted giving great emphasis to the theological setting of these two concepts, today such a treatment would not arouse the slightest “problematic thrill.” What used to be called “the Will” is now an obsolete expression;—indeed, ever since Spinoza wrote, it has been regarded as a myth. In its stead, we speak of the individual or particular volitions of men, and we discuss their value in reducing the gap between our liquid matter and its good. Likewise, what was once called the lump-sum of our Duty has now become separated and analyzed into claims, interests, other-regarding sentiments, and the like, each one of which has a history and a real meaning for our flesh-and-blood personality.

All such changes, while perhaps highly disconcerting to those persons who feel that they cannot get along without their “guiding fictions,” are really signs of a salutary advance along ethical lines. Once it is realized that what is popularly termed “will-power” is after all only skill-power, and that “moral obligation” should be translated into pragmatic urgency, it will be plain that only clearly-prevised action-tendencies can properly be called either right or virtuous. It may be true that many a successful action has been performed in the name of a fetichistic belief, but who will doubt that an even more profitable action could have been motivated with less waste of the body’s energies, had there been correct insight and a frank facing of the facts. As long as people are afraid of life, so long are they bound to allege some false cause of their actions. Conversely, as soon as they realize that they are what they do, and whenever they learn that their ethical books cannot be balanced by drawing on a phantom bank account, they begin to pile up ethical assets, and to reduce their ethical liabilities.

From our earlier remark that the science of ethics is primarily concerned with what is rather than what ought to be, it may be difficult to imagine what place the concept of human freedom can have in a mechanistic treatment of the problems of conduct. It might seem easier to foreshadow what will be the fate of the concept of obligation, especially when we realize that oughting is always hypothetical, rather than categorical. For every obligation is specific and particular,—it depends upon conditions, places, times, and persons, just as does every signification of good and bad, and right and wrong. There is no general Ought, as our recent discussion of Kant’s categorical imperative clearly implied. When, then, we ask from whom or from what obligation arises, what answer does a mechanistic ethics provide? Some may expect us to make the traditional answer, namely, that it comes from the group, and that the feeling of obligation is a variation of the elemental type of conscience. This sort of an answer is not to be given here. Although the group largely determines how we shall feel with regard to what ought to be done, yet the final education of an ethically adult person leaves him with a different mind on this point. Indeed, it is our purpose here not only to show that the concept of ethical freedom is a valid concept for a mechanistic ethics, but also and more particularly that a true conception of ethical obligation depends upon the discovery of what ethical freedom implies. That this involves no paradox will be understood as soon as we comprehend what it means to say that a man is free. Herewith we shall state five conditions under which freedom of action is guaranteed.

The first meaning of free action is action that is physically possible. I am not now, I never was, and I never shall be free (that is, able) to walk backward and forward at the same time, or to be in Boston and New York simultaneously. Neither can I, while kissing Jennie at her fireside, be also kissing Kate at her doorway a mile from Jennie’s house. On the other hand, the man who is sound of limb, sensorially acute, and otherwise endowed with natural capacities, can be said to be free to employ these capacities whenever and wherever the conditions provide the opportunity.

Right here we ask whether this first meaning of freedom does not have an important bearing on the question of ethical obligation. Is it, indeed, not plain that just as we cannot do what is physically impossible, so there is no valid obligation under these conditions? This, however, is something which the intuitionists and the idealists have persistently ignored, regarding it often as somehow the very acme of virtue to declare as an ideal of conduct something which is totally impossible of realization, and thereby fostering the neurotic temperament instead of ethical enlightenment. Yet it is plain that if, while being unable to do the impossible, I still am pathologically anxious about it, I shall succeed only in accumulating impatience and turmoil, and be forced to get what sour consolation I can from Schopenhauer, or else to “gnaw the file” in some other fashion. Moreover, according to a mechanistic ethics, I am an evil person as long as I waste energy in this fashion, or in demanding consolation for my erroneous sentiment. Not only am I bound to fail, and thereby to create discord rather than relieve it, but I am also losing time and energy which might have gone into more profitable pursuits. On the other hand, while we do not yet say that we are under obligation to perform every physically possible action, yet every valid urgency still lies in that direction.

The second meaning of the word “freedom” is absence of external restraints imposed by physical obstacles or generated by human beings. No man is free to act when external hindrances are too great for him to overcome. Thus while it is possible for a sound man to walk either forward or backward, he cannot keep on walking in a straight line if his path is intercepted by the sheer wall of a hundred-foot cliff, or if some one stronger than himself obstructs his going. Excellent examples of such thwarting occur in the Greek mythology of Hades. Tantalus was forever hindered by the gusts of wind from plucking the fruit from the tree; Sisyphus could not force the stone over the brow of the hill; and the daughters of Danaus lost all the water they carried in their sieves. They were not, therefore, free to perform these actions. They may, it is true, have everlastingly wished them, but they could not will them.

Nevertheless, while many similar hindrances to human action exist, such as the friction-hindrance to perpetual motion, and the wall which kept Pyramus from Thisbe, yet, on the whole, most of the so-called external restraints are far less serious barriers to freedom than we realize. This is not only attested by the magnificent conquests of nature recently made by applied science, but it might also be deduced from the properties of man’s protoplasm as modified in his muscular architecture. For protoplasm is liquid, and liquids flow; and man’s stream of thought as a derivative of his liquid protoplasm acquires its labile character as a sort of natural right. Just as a liquid under pressure transmits that pressure in all directions, so a man who is made of good protoplasm tends, when confronted by such obstacles as we have just described, to think, and plan, and experiment, that is, TO FLOW, out of the difficulty. His neuro-muscular equipment also singularly facilitates the turning of his wish into a will. Our muscles do not only contract and relax to produce lever movements in one plane, but they also combine their movements into pronation, supination, and rotation, and these synergic actions enable us to explore the obstacle and almost literally to flow around it. This is also the mechanism by which we puzzle out any problem. The all-or-none principle makes mental analysis always possible and often accurate. Applied to Pyramus, this means that the wall that separates him from Thisbe stimulates him with her aid so variously that he not only rebels and laments, but also starts to explore its surface and its possibilities, with the final result that he vaults it and descends “until he can come at Thisbe’s lips more directly.” There has always been an abundance of old saws to encourage the bold and the faint-hearted to regard obstacles as merely stepping-stones to future success, but the physiological basis of such maxims we are only beginning to comprehend. In fine, then, when we speak of a permanent obstacle to our actions, we mean it only in so far as we do not also imply some serious deficiency in the quality of our protoplasm.

The relation between this second type of freedom and obligation is very obviously hinted at by the popular maxims on the theme of perseverance. Moreover, it is historically demonstrable that pragmatic urgency usually increases in direct ratio to the ease with which external restraints can be surmounted. On the other hand, it is gradually becoming recognized that “there are hundreds of thousands of human beings who can by no possibility ever do what is expected of them by society. Society must give over expecting such things.”[22] Those who have no power to plan, scheme, or supervise, are consequently not educated enough to appreciate the obligations which such abilities involve.

We may now consider a third meaning of the concept “freedom.” It is exhibited in those actions which we have been so well trained to perform that they occur without any conscious effort whatever. Accordingly, the man with training and skill is more free than the man who lacks these abilities. If the oboist of a symphony orchestra is too sick to play, only another oboist is free to sit as a substitute at his desk. A plumber will not do. It will be perceived at once that many sorts of skill, even though they be the exclusive possession of one person, may yet be turned to the equal advantage of a great number of people, making them all co-sharers in his freedom. By using the skill of the substitute oboist, for example, both the managers and the patrons of the concert are free to carry out their wishes. The enormous social advantages of most forms of skilful technique require only a passing comment. Indeed, what we call business and trade are ultimately the bargains we make for each other’s skill. And here again the pragmatic urgency implicated by this form of freedom is apparent, not only in the sharing of socially profitable skill, but also in the acquisition of it.

A fourth empirical characterization of freedom may now be considered. For free actions, in addition to those which are physically possible, externally unhindered, and within the range of our skill, are especially those which some mechanism of the body actually carries out in the manner in which it was originally set to do it. In popular speech this form of freedom is exemplified by such expressions as, “I was successful,” “I was determined to do it, and I did it,” or, “The clerk tried to palm off a substitute, but I persevered in getting the original.” Such freedom emphatically implies a continuity in behavior which is absent in cases where the desire is thwarted or suppressed. The physiological processes which guarantee this form of freedom are interesting to contemplate. As the wish passes over into will, not only are more and more muscle fibers involved in the action-scheme stimulated to their maximum contraction, but also wider and wider synergies of muscular groups are brought into play, until all the available kinetic energy of the body is released along the channel of one final common motor pathway. Moreover, each and every muscle involved in such an action-scheme stimulates, upon its contraction, a receptor nerve embedded within it, and these circular reflex stimulations automatically reinforce the contractions already begun. This is nature’s own contribution to the unification of our personality in the performance of this type of free activity. The whole neuro-muscular architecture involved in such behavior becomes an automatic mechanism for reinforcing the centrifugal bodily posture, and for providing against the wilting of any motor discharge in any single muscle due to its prolonged contraction. Such actions, then, which involve the steady and uninhibited output of energy that we have described we call free. They are equally manifested by the cat who springs upon and catches the mouse she has been warily watching, and by the violoncello virtuoso who scurries safely through the cadenza and arrives at the tutti without having either produced a “wolf tone” or dropped his bow. It is such action which is connoted by the popular phrase “free will.”

The final touch to our delineation of freedom may be added by saying that only when a man’s actions result in enlarging his environment, and in providing him with increasing opportunities for turning his wishes into wills, is he in the highest sense ethically free. The preceding characterizations of the free man were derived from simply watching him in the midst of any of a thousand activities. This last part of the picture is obtained by reckoning the permanent ethical assets which his efforts have provided. These assets are, moreover, defined in terms of a continuing freedom. For while we are all in a sense free to do anything within our ability, and for which there is the time, the place, and the opportunity, yet only under certain conditions can we follow such an action with another of our own choosing. The liar, the thief, and the slanderer know very well to what an extent their putative freedoms produce antagonists of their own making with whom they must ever thereafter wage a dismal conflict. On the other hand, the man of frankness and a truthful tongue, the man who makes fair bargains with the universe, and the man who can solve his problems without the loss of his own temper or the respect of other persons, is ipso facto equipped with the ability to synergize his muscles repeatedly into freely willed activities. Moreover, while this fifth type of freedom is dependent upon the presence of the other four, its effect upon them is reflexively beneficial, in making more actions physically possible, reducing the external hindrances to them, increasing the skill by which they are performed, and insuring the continuity with which they are carried out. Indeed, we may now identify virtue with the attainment of this last type of freedom, and vice with its loss or decline. Such activity is also right, and its stimulus is a dependable good.

In thus defining the conditions under which human freedom exists, we have, I surmise, also discovered the secret of ethical obligation, of pragmatic urgency. That is to say, whenever an action is possible, when it is not opposed by restraints beyond a man’s power to overcome, when he has the skill with which to perform it, and when he can will it as well as wish it, and when also the performance of this action increases the range of his effectiveness, then, but not till then, can it be said that he ought to perform it. The expressions, “I ought,” or “I should,” henceforth mean: “I imagine that there would be greater freedom if this course of action which I contemplate were to be carried out.” Under this new conception of pragmatic urgency, oughting is neither a vis a tergo, nor a vis a fronte, nor yet Somebody’s fiat superadded to the data of ethics, but it is simply the logical resultant of the conditions of such human activity as produces dependable goods. We recognize no valid obligations imposed upon men from above; obligations are rather implicit in any activity which employs a man’s skill to satisfy his needs at the same time that it educates his desires.

It is thus plain that there is no fundamental difference between ethics and any other science. Just as the business of physical science is to describe the conditions under which any phenomenon occurs, so the business of ethical science is to ascertain, by a study of the mechanisms of human behavior, the conditions which underlie all of our ethical values. Wisely indeed did Protagoras remark that “Man is the measure of all things,” but it was not until many centuries after this statement had been made that a positively constructive interpretation, could be put upon it.