Regarding the sum of pleasures the following from Sidgwick (Op. cit., p. 382; see also p. 114) gives the hedonistic statement. "The assumption is involved that all pleasures are capable of being compared qualitatively with one another and with all pains; that every feeling has a certain intensive quality, positive or negative (or perhaps zero) in respect to its desirableness and that the quantity may be known, so that each may be weighed in ethical scales against any other. This assumption is involved in the very motion of maximum happiness," as the attempt to make "as great as possible a sum of elements not quantitatively commensurable would be a mathematical absurdity."
I. Sum of pleasures as the moral end. This, first, taken as criterion, comes into conflict with the hedonistic psychology of pleasure as the motive of acts; and, secondly, it requires some objective standard by means of which pleasure is to be summed, and is, in so far, a surrender of the whole hedonistic position.
1. If the object of desire is pleasure or a state of feeling which exists only as it is felt, it is impossible that we should desire a greatest sum of pleasures. We can desire a pleasure and that only. It is not even possible that we should ever desire a continuous series of pleasures. We can desire one pleasure and when that is gone, another, but we can not unify our desires enough to aim at even a sum of pleasures.
This is well put by Green (Op. cit, p. 236). "For the feeling of a pleased person, or in relation to his sense of enjoyment, pleasure cannot form a sum. However numerous the sources of a state of pleasant feeling, it is one and is over before another can be enjoyed. It and its successors can be added together in thought, but not in enjoyment or in imagination of an enjoyment. If the desire is only for pleasure, i. e., for an enjoyment or feeling of pleasure, we are simply victims of words when we talk of desire for a sum of pleasures, much more when we take the greatest imaginable sum to be the most desirable." See the whole passage, pp. 235-246.
2. But the phrase "sum of pleasures" undoubtedly has a meaning—though the fact that it has a meaning shows the untruth of the hedonistic psychology. Surrendering this psychology, what shall we say of the maximum possibility of pleasure as the criterion of the morality of acts? It must be conceded that this conception does afford some basis—although a rather slippery one—for the unification of conduct. Each act is considered now not in its isolation merely, but in its connection with other acts, according as its relation to them may increase or decrease the possible sum of future happiness. But this very fact that some universal, or element of relation, albeit a quantitative one, has been introduced, arouses this inquiry: Whence do we derive it? How do we get the thought of a sum of pleasure, and of a maximum sum? Only by taking into account the objective conditions upon which pleasures depend, and by judging the pleasures from the standpoint of these objective conditions. When we imagine we are thinking of a sum of pleasures, we are really thinking of that totality of conditions which will come nearest affording us self-satisfaction—we are thinking of a comprehensive and continuous activity whose various parts are adjusted to one another. Because it is complete activity, it is necessarily conceived as giving the greatest possible pleasure, but apart from reference to complete activity and apart from the objects in which this is realized, the phrase 'greatest sum of happiness' is a mere phrase. Pleasures must be measured by a standard, by a yard stick, before they can be summed in thought, and the yard stick we use is the activity in which the pleasure comes. We do not measure conduct by pleasure, but we compare and sum up pleasures on the basis of the objects which occasion them. To add feelings, mere transitory consequences, without first reducing those feelings to a common denominator by their relation to one objective standard, is an impossibility. Pleasure is a sort of sign or symbol of the object which satisfies, and we may carry on our judgment, if we will, in terms of the sign, without reference to the standard, but to argue as if the sign were the thing, as if the sum of pleasure were the activity, is suicidal.
Thus Green says (Op. cit., p. 244): "In truth a man's reference to his own true happiness is a reference to the objects which chiefly interest him, and has its controlling power on that account. More strictly, it is a reference to an ideal state of well-being, a state in which he shall be satisfied; but the objects of the man's chief interests supply the filling of that ideal state." See the argument as put by Alexander (Moral Order and Progress, pp. 199-200). Alexander has also brought out (Ibid., pp. 207-210) that even if we are going to use a quantitative standard, the idea of a sum is not a very happy one. It is not so much a sum of pleasures we want, as a certain proportionate distribution and combination of pleasures. "To regard the greatest sum of pleasures as the test of conduct, supposing that we could express it in units of pleasure, would be like declaring that when you had an atomic weight of 98 you had sulphuric acid. The numerical test would be useless unless we knew what elements were to be combined, and in what proportion. Similarly till we know what kinds of activities (and therefore what kinds of pleasures) go with one another to form the end, the greatest sum of pleasures will give us only the equivalent of the end, but will not tell us what the composition of the end is, still less how to get at it; or, to put the matter more simply, when we know what the characters of persons are, and how they are combined in morality, we then estimate the corresponding sum of pleasures." (p. 209.)
II. A certain quality of pleasure the end. Some moralists, notably John Stuart Mill, introduce considerations regarding the quality of pleasure into the conception of the end. "It is quite compatible," says Mill, "with the principle of utility to recognize the fact that some kinds of pleasure are more desirable and more valuable than others." (p. 310.) Is it compatible? Is kind of pleasure the same thing as pleasure? does not strict hedonism demand that all kinds of pleasure equally present as to intensity in consciousness shall be of the same value? To say otherwise is to give up pleasure as such as the standard and to hold that we have means for discriminating the respective values of pleasures which simply, as feelings, are the same. It is to hold, that is to say, that there is some standard of value external to the pleasures as such, by means of which their moral quality may be judged. In this case, this independent standard is the real moral criterion which we are employing. Hedonism is surrendered.
Kant's position on this point seems impregnable. "It is surprising," he says, "that men otherwise astute can think it possible to distinguish between higher and lower desires, according as the ideas which are connected with the feeling of pleasure have their origin in the senses or in the understanding; for when we inquire what are the determining grounds of desire, and place them in some expected pleasantness, it is of no consequence whence the idea of this pleasing object is derived, but only how much it pleases.... The only thing that concerns one, in order to decide choice, is how great, how long continued, how easily obtained and how often repeated, this agreeableness is. For as to the man who wants money to spend, it is all the same whether the gold was dug out of the mountain or washed out of the sand, provided it is every-where accepted at the same value; so the man who cares only for the enjoyment of life does not ask whether the ideas are of the understanding or the senses, but only how much and how great pleasure they will give for the longest time."
See also Bradley, Op. cit., pp. 105-110.
When we ask how the differences in quality are established and how we translate this qualitative difference into moral difference, the surrender of pleasure as the standard becomes even more evident. We must know not only the fact of different qualities, but how to decide which is 'higher' than any other. We must bring the qualities before a tribunal of judgment which applies to them some standard of measurement. In themselves qualities may be different, but they are not higher and lower. What is the tribunal and what is the law of judgment? According to Mill the tribunal is the preference of those who are acquainted with both kinds of pleasure.
"Of two pleasures, if there be one to which all, or almost all who have experience of both, give a decided preference, irrespective of any feeling of moral obligation to prefer it, that is the more desirable pleasure." It is an unquestionable fact that such differences exist. "Few human creatures would consent to be changed into any of the lower animals for a promise of the fullest allowance of a beast's pleasures. No intelligent person would consent to be a fool; no instructed person would be an ignoramus; no person of feeling and conscience would be selfish and base, even though they should be persuaded that the fool, the dunce or the rascal is better satisfied with his lot than they are with theirs.... It is better to be a human being dissatisfied, than a pig satisfied; better to be a Socrates dissatisfied, than a fool satisfied. And if the fool or the pig are of a different opinion, it is because they only know their own side of the question. The other party to the comparison knows both sides."—Mill, Op. cit., pp. 311-313. And in an omitted portion Mill says the reason that one of the higher faculty would prefer a suffering which goes along with that higher capacity, to more pleasure on a lower plane, is something of which "the most appropriate appellation is a sense of dignity, which all human beings possess in one form or another."
A question immediately arises regarding this standard of preferability. Is it the mere historical fact that some man, who has experienced both, prefers A to B that makes A more desirable? Surely I might say that if that person prefers A, A is more desirable to him, but that I for my part prefer B, and that I do not intend to give up my preference. And why should I, even though thousands of other men happened to prefer A? B is the greater pleasure, none the less, to me, and as a hedonist I must cling to the only standard that I have. The hedonists, in a word, have appealed to feeling, and to feeling they must go for judgment. And feeling exists only as it is felt and only to him who feels it.
On the other hand, perhaps it is not the bare act that some men prefer one pleasure to another that makes it more desirable, but something in the character of the men who prefer. And this is what Mill implies. It is a "sense of dignity" belonging to man which makes his judgment of pleasure better than that of animals; it is the human being against the pig, Socrates against the fool, the good man against the rascal. This is the complete surrender of hedonism, and the all but explicit assertion that human character, goodness, wisdom, are the criteria of pleasure, instead of pleasure the criterion of character and goodness. Mill's "sense of dignity," which is to be considered in all estimates of pleasures, is just the sense of a moral (or active) capacity and destiny belonging to man. To refer pleasures to this is to make it the standard, and with this standard the anti-hedonist may well be content, while asking, however, for its further analysis.
To sum up our long discussion of pleasure as a criterion of conduct in respect of its unity, we may say: Pleasure, as it actually exists in man, may be taken as a criterion, although not the really primary one, of action. But this is not hedonism; for pleasure as it exists is something more than pleasurable feeling; it is qualified through and through by the kind of action which it accompanies, by the kind of objects which the activity comprehends. And thus it is always a secondary criterion. The moment we begin to analyze we must ask what kind of activity, what kind of object it is which the pleasure accompanies and of which it is a symbol. We may, if we will, calculate a man's wealth in terms of dollars and cents; but this is only because we can translate the money, the symbol, into goods, the reality. To desire pleasure instead of an activity of self, is to substitute symbol for fact, and a symbol cut off from fact ceases to be a symbol. Pleasure, as the hedonist treats it, mere agreeable feeling without active and thus objective relationships, is wholly an abstraction. Since an abstraction, to make it the end of desire results in self-contradiction; while to make it the standard of conduct is to deprive life of all unity, all system, in a word—of all standard.
Thus far our examination of the hedonistic criterion has been devoted to showing that it will not make a system out of individual conduct. We have now to recognize the fact that pleasure is not a common good, and therefore fails to give a social unity to conduct—that is, it does not offer an end for which men may coöperate, or a good which reached by one must be shared by another. No argument is needed to show, theoretically, that any proposed moral criterion must, in order to be valid, harmonize the interests and activities of different men, or to show, practically, that the whole tendency of the modern democratic and philanthropic movement has been to discover and realize a good in which men shall share on the basis of an equal principle. It is contended that hedonism fails to satisfy these needs. According to it, the end for each man is his own pleasure. Pleasure is nothing objective in which men may equally participate. It is purely individual in the most exclusive sense of that term. It is a state of feeling and can be enjoyed only while felt, and only by the one who feels it. To set it up for the ideal of conduct is to turn life into an exclusive and excluding struggle for possession of the means of personal enjoyment; it is to erect into a principle the idea of the war of all against all. No end more thoroughly disintegrating than individual agreeable sensation could well be imagined.
Says Kant, (page 116 of Abbott's Trans., entitled Kant's Theory of Ethics) on the basis of the desire of happiness "there results a harmony like that which a certain satirical poem depicts as existing between a married couple bent on going to ruin: O, marvellous harmony, what he wishes, she wishes also; or like what is said of the pledge of Francis I to the emperor Charles V, what my brother Charles wishes that I wish also (viz., Milan)."
Almost all modern moralists who take pleasure as the end conceive it to be not individual pleasure, but the happiness of all men or even of all sentient creatures. Thus we are brought to the consideration of Utilitarianism.
Says Mill (Op. cit., p. 323), "The happiness which forms the Utilitarian standard of what is right in conduct is not the agent's own happiness, but that of all concerned; as between his own happiness and that of others, Utilitarianism requires him to be as strictly impartial as a disinterested and benevolent spectator." And (page 315) the Utilitarian standard is "not the agent's own greatest happiness, but the greatest amount of happiness altogether." See also Sidgwick (Op. cit., p. 379), "By Utilitarianism is here meant the ethical theory, first distinctly formulated by Bentham, that the conduct which, under any given circumstances is externally or objectively right is that which will produce the greatest amount of happiness on the whole; that is, taking into account all whose happiness is affected by the conduct. It would tend to clearness if we might call this principle, and the method based upon it, by some such name as Universalistic hedonism." As popularly put, the utilitarian standard is the "greatest happiness of the greatest number." While in its calculation "each is to count for one and only one." (Bentham). And finally Bain (Emotions and Mill, p. 303), "Utility is opposed to the selfish theory, for, as propounded, it always implies the good of society generally, and the subordination of individual interests to the general good."
The utilitarian theory certainly does away entirely with one of the two main objections to hedonism—its failure to provide a general, as distinct from a private end. The question which we have to meet, however, is whether this extension of the end from the individual to society is consistent with the fundamental principles of hedonism. How do we get from individual pleasure to the happiness of all?
An intuitional utilitarian, like Sidgwick, has ready an answer which is not open to the empirical utilitarians, like Bentham, Mill and Bain. Methods of Ethics, Bk. III, ch. 13-14, p. 355. "We may obtain the self-evident principle that the good of any one individual is of no more importance, as a part of universal good, than the good of any other. The abstract principle of the duty of benevolence, so far as it is cognizable by direct intuition" is, "that one is morally bound to regard the good of any other individual as much as one's own"—and page 364, "the principles, so far as they are immediately known by abstract intuition, can only be stated as precepts to seek (1) one's own good on the whole, and (2) the good of any other no less than one's own, in so far as it is no less an element of universal good." Sidgwick, that is, differs in two important points from most utilitarians. He holds that pleasure is not the sole, or even the usual object of desire. And he holds that we have an immediate faculty of rational intuition which informs us that the good of others is as desirable an end of our conduct as is our own happiness. Our former arguments against pleasure as the end, bear, of course, equally against this theory, but not the following arguments. Criticisms of this position of Sidgwick's will be found in Green (Op. cit., pp. 406-415); Bradley (Op. cit., pp. 114-117).
The popular answer to the question how we get from individual to general happiness, misses the entire point of the question. This answer simply says that happiness is 'intrinsically desirable'. Let it be so; but 'happiness' in this general way is a mere abstraction. Happiness is always a particular condition of one particular person. Whose happiness is desirable and to whom? Because my happiness is intrinsically desirable to me, does it follow that your happiness is intrinsically desirable to me? Indeed, in the hedonistic psychology, is it not nonsense to say that a state of your feeling is desirable to me? Mill's amplified version of the popular answer brings out the ambiguity all the more plainly. He says (Utilitarianism, p. 349), "No reason can be given why the general happiness is desirable, except that each person, so far as he believes it to be obtainable, desires his own happiness. This, however, being a fact, we have not only all the proof which the case admits of, but all which it is possible to require, that happiness is a good; that each person's happiness is a good to that person; and the general happiness, therefore, a good to the aggregate of all persons." But does it follow that because the happiness of A is an end to A, the happiness of B an end to B, and the happiness of C an end to C, that, therefore, the happiness of B and C is an end to A? There is obviously no connection between the premises and the supposed conclusion. And there appears to be, as Mill puts it, only an account of the ambiguity of his last clause, "the general happiness a good to the aggregate of all persons." The good of A and B and C may be a good to the aggregate (A + B + C), but what universalistic hedonism requires is that the aggregate good of A + B + C, be a good to A and to B and to C taken separately—a very different proposition. Mill is guilty of the fallacy known logically as the fallacy of division—arguing from a collective whole to the distributed units. Because all men want to be happy, it hardly follows that every man wants all to be happy. There is, accordingly, no direct road from individualistic hedonism—private pleasure—to universalistic—general pleasure. Moreover, if we adopt the usual psychology of hedonism and say that pleasure is the motive of acting, it is absolutely absurd to say that general pleasure can be a motive. How can I be moved by the happiness which exists in some one else? I may feel a pleasure resembling his, and be moved by it, but that is quite a different matter.
Is there any indirect method of going from the pleasure of one to the pleasure of all? Upon the whole, the utilitarians do not claim that there is any natural and immediate connection between the desire for private and for general happiness, but suppose that there are certain means which are instrumental in bringing about an identity. Of these means the sympathetic emotions and the influence of law and of education are the chief. Each of these, moreover, coöperates with the other.
We are so constituted by nature that we take pleasure in the happiness of others and feel pain in their misery. A proper regard for our own welfare must lead us, therefore, to take an interest in the pleasure of others. Our own feelings, moreover, are largely influenced by the feelings of others toward us. If we act in a certain way we shall incur the disapprobation of others, and this, independently of any overt punishment it may lead them to inflict upon us, arouses feelings of shame, of inferiority, of being under the displeasure of others, feelings all of which are decidedly painful. The more enlightened our judgment, the more we see how our pleasures are bound up in those of others.
"The Dictates of Utility" (Bentham, Op. cit., p. 56) "are neither more nor less than the dictates of the most extensive and enlightened (that is, well advised) benevolence," and (p. 18), "The pleasures of benevolence are the pleasures resulting from the view of any pleasures supposed to be possessed by the beings who may be the objects of benevolence.... These may also be called the pleasures of good will, the pleasures of sympathy, or the pleasures of the benevolent or social affections"; and (p. 144), "What motives (independent of such as legislation and religion may choose to furnish) can one man have to consult the happiness of another?... In answer to this, it cannot but be admitted that the only interests which a man at all times and upon all occasions is sure to find adequate motives for consulting, are his own. Notwithstanding this, there are no occasions in which a man has not some motives for consulting the happiness of other men. In the first place he has, on all occasions, the purely social motive of sympathy and benevolence; in the next place he has, on most occasions, the semi-social motives of love of amity and love of reputation." And so in the Deontology, which, however, was not published by Bentham himself, page 203, "The more enlightened one is, the more one forms the habit of general benevolence, because it is seen that the interests of men combine with each other in more points than they conflict in."
Education, working directly and internally upon the feelings, and government, appealing to them from without through commands and penalties, are constantly effecting an increasing identity of self-interest and regard for others. These means supplement the action of sympathy and the more instinctive emotions. They stimulate and even induce a proper interest in the pleasures of others. In governmental law, with its punishments, we have an express instrument for making the pleasures of one harmonize with (or at least not conflict with) the pleasures of others.
Thus Bentham, after stating that an enlightened mind perceives the identity of self-interest and that of others (or of egoism and altruism, as these interests are now commonly called), goes on (Deontology, p. 201): "The majority do not have sufficient enlightenment, nor enough moral feeling so that their character goes beyond the aid of laws, and so the legislator should supplement the frailty of this natural interest, in adding to it an artificial interest more appreciable and more continuous. Thus the government augments and extends the connexion which exists between prudence and benevolence." Mill says (Op. cit., p. 323): "To do as you would be done by, and to love your neighbor as yourself, constitute the ideal perfection of utilitarian morality. As the means of making the nearest approach to this ideal, utility would enjoin, first, that laws and social arrangements should place the happiness or the interest of every individual as nearly as possible in harmony with the interest of the whole; and, secondly, that education and opinion, which have so vast a power over human character, should so use that power as to establish in the mind of every individual an indissoluble association between his own happiness and the good of the whole."
In criticism of these indirect methods of establishing the identity of 'egoism' and 'altruism,' it may be said:
1. That the supposed relation between the private and the general happiness is extrinsic, and hence always accidental and open to exception.
It is not contended that there is any order which morally demands that there be an identity of interests. It is simply argued that there are certain physical and psychological forces which operate, as matter of fact, to bring about such a result. Now we may admit, if we like, that such forces exist and that they are capable of accomplishing all that Bentham and Mill claim for them. But all that is established is, at most, a certain state of facts which is interesting as a state of facts, but which has no especial moral bearing. It is not pretended that there is in the very order of things any necessary and intrinsic connection between the happiness of one and of another. Such identity as exists, therefore, must be a mere external result of the action of certain forces. It is accidental. This being the case, how can it constitute the universal ideal of action? Why is it not open for an agent, under exceptional circumstances, to act for his own pleasure, to the exclusion of that of others? We may admit that, upon the whole (or that always, though this is wholly impossible to prove) in past experience, personal pleasure has been best attained by a certain regard for the pleasures of others; but the connection being wholly empirical (that is, of past instances and not of an intrinsic law), we may ask how it can be claimed that the same connection is certain to hold in this new case? Nor is it probable that any one would claim that the connection between individual pleasure and general pleasure had been so universal and invariable in past experience.
Intrinsic moral considerations (that is, those based on the very nature of human action) being put aside, a pretty strong case could be made out for the statement that individual happiness is best attained by ignoring the happiness of others. Probably the most that can be established on the other side is that a due prudence dictates that some attention be paid to the pleasures of others, in calculating one's own pleasures.
And this suggests:
2. That the end is still private pleasure, general pleasure being simply a means. Granting all that the hedonists urge, what their arguments prove is not that the general pleasure is the end of action, but that, private pleasure being the end, regard for the pleasures of others is one of the most efficient means of reaching it. If private pleasure is a selfish end, the end is not less selfish because the road to it happens to bring pleasure to others also.
See Royce, Religious Aspect of Philosophy, pp. 61-74.
3. The use of education and law to bring about this identity, presupposes that we already have the ideal of the identity as something desirable to realize—it takes for granted the very thing to be proved. Why should it occur to men to use the private influence of opinion and education, and the public influences of law and penalty to identify private welfare with public, unless they were already convinced that general welfare was the end of conduct, the one desirable thing? What the hedonist has to do is to show how, from the end of private happiness, we may get to the end of general happiness. What Bentham and Mill do show is, that if we take general happiness as the end, we may and do use education and law to bring about an identity of personal and general pleasures. This may go undoubted, but the question how we get the general happiness as the end, the good, remains unanswered.
Nor is this all. The conception of general happiness, taken by itself, has all the abstractness, vagueness and uncertainty of that of personal happiness, multiplied indefinitely by the greater number of persons introduced. To calculate the effects of actions upon the general happiness—when happiness is interpreted as a state of feeling—is an impossibility. And thus it is that when one is speaking of pleasures one is really thinking of welfare, or well-being, or satisfied and progressive human lives. Happiness is considered as it would be, if determined by certain active and well defined interests, and thus the hedonistic theory, while contradicting itself, gets apparently all the support of an opposed theory. Universalistic hedonism thus, more or less expressly, takes for granted a social order, or community of persons, of which the agent is simply one member like any other. This is the ideal which it proposes to realize. In this way—although at the cost of logical suicide—the ideal gets a content and a definiteness upon which it is possible to base judgments.
That this social organization of persons is the ideal which Mill is actually thinking of, rather than any succession of states of agreeable sensation, is evident by his treatment of the whole subject. Mill is quite clear that education and opinion may produce any sort of feeling, as well as truly benevolent motives to actions. For example, in his critique of Whewell, he says, (Op. cit., p. 154): "All experience shows that the moral feelings are preëminently artificial, and the products of culture; that even when reasonable, they are no more spontaneous than the growth of corn and wine (which are quite as natural), and that the most senseless and pernicious feeling can as easily be raised to the utmost intensity by inculcation, as hemlock and thistles could be reared to luxuriant growth by sowing them instead of wheat." It is certainly implied here that legislation, education and public opinion must have as a presupposed standard the identity of general and private interests or else they may produce anything whatever. That is to say, Mill instead of arriving at his result of general happiness simply takes it for granted.
This fact and the further fact that he virtually defines happiness through certain objective interests and ends (thus reversing the true hedonistic position) is obvious from the following, (Mill, Op. cit., pp. 343-347): After again stating that the moral feelings are capable of cultivation in almost any direction, and stating that moral associations that are of artificial construction dissolve through the force of intellectual analysis (cf. his Autobiography, p. 136), and that the association of pleasure with the feeling of duty would similarly dissolve unless it had a natural basis of sentiment, he goes on. "But there is this basis of powerful natural sentiment. This firm foundation is that of the social feelings of mankind; the desire to be in unity with our fellow-creatures. The social state is at once so natural, so necessary, and so habitual to man that except in some unusual circumstances, or by an effort of voluntary abstraction he never conceives of himself otherwise than as a member of a body. Any condition, therefore, which is essential to a state of society becomes more and more an inseparable part of every person's conception of the state of things which he is born into, and which is the destiny of a human being." Mill then goes on to describe some of the ways in which the social unity manifests itself and influences the individual's conduct. Then the latter "comes, as though instinctively, to be conscious of himself as a being who of course pays regard to others. The good of others becomes to him a thing naturally and necessarily to be attended to, like any of the physical conditions of our existence. The deeply-rooted conception which every individual even now has of himself as a social being tends to make him feel it as one of his natural wants, that there should be harmony between his feelings and aims and those of his fellow-creatures. This conviction is the ultimate sanction of the greatest happiness morality."
It is to be noticed that there is involved in this account three ideas, any one of which involves such a reconstruction of the pleasure theory as to be a surrender of hedonism.
1. There is, in one instance, a natural (or intrinsic) connection between the end of conduct and the feelings, and not simply an external or artificial bond. This is in the case of the social feelings. In other words, in one case the ideal, that is, happiness, is intrinsically, or necessarily connected with a certain kind of conduct, that flowing from the social impulses. This, of course, reverses hedonism for it makes happiness dependent upon a certain kind of conduct, instead of determining the nature of conduct according as it happens to result in pleasure or pain.
2. Man conceives of himself, of his end or of his destiny as a member of a social body, and this conception determines the nature of his wants and aims. That is to say, it is not mere happiness that a man wants, but a certain kind of happiness, that which would satisfy a man who conceived of himself as social, or having ends and interests in common with others.
3. Finally, it is not mere general "happiness" which is the end, at all. It is social unity; "harmony of feelings and aims," a beneficial condition for one's self in which the benefits of all are included. Instead of the essentially vague idea of states of pleasurable sensation we have the conception of a community of interests and ends, in securing which alone is true happiness to be found. This conception of the moral ideal we regard as essentially true, but it is not hedonism. It gives up wholly the notion that pleasure is the desired, and, since it sets up a standard by which it determines pleasure, it gives up equally the notion that pleasure as such is the desirable.
In addition to the works already referred to, the following will give fuller ideas of hedonism and utilitarianism: For historical treatment see Sidgwick, History of Ethics; Jodl, Geschichte der Ethik, Vol. II., pp. 482-468; Bain, Moral Science, Historical Mention; Guyau, La Morale Anglaise Contemporaine; Wallace, Epicureanism; Pater, Marius, the Epicurean; Paley, Moral and Political Philosophy; Grote, Examination of the Utilitarian Philosophy (especially fair and valuable criticism); Lecky, History of European Morals, Vol. I, ch. I; Birks, Utilitarianism (hostile); Blackie, Four Phases of Morals: Essay on Utilitarianism (hostile); Gizycki, Students' Manual of Ethical Philosophy, (Coit's trans., favorable); Calderwood, Hand-Book of Moral Philosophy (opposed); Laurie, Ethica (e. g., p. 10). "The object of will is not pleasure, not yet happiness, but reason-given law—the law of harmony; but this necessarily ascertained through feeling, and, therefore, through happiness."
Wilson and Fowler, Principles of Morals, Vol. I, pp. 98-112; Vol. II, pp. 262-273. Paulsen, System der Ethik, pp. 195-210.
There has lately been an attempt to combine utilitarian morality with the theory of evolution. This position, chiefly as occupied by Herbert Spencer and Leslie Stephen, we shall now examine.
Alexander, also, Moral Order and Progress, makes large use of the theory of evolution, but does not attempt to unite it with any form of hedonism.
For the combination, at least three decided advantages are claimed over ordinary utilitarianism.
1. It transforms 'empirical rules' into 'rational laws.' The evolutionary hedonists regard pleasure as the good, but hold that the theory of evolution enables them to judge of the relation of acts to pleasure much better than the ordinary theory. As Mr. Spencer puts it, the ordinary theory is not scientific, because it does not fully recognize the principle of causation as existing between certain acts as causes, and pleasures (or pains) as effects. It undoubtedly recognizes that some acts do result in pain or pleasure, but does not show how or why they so result. By the aid of the theory of evolution we can demonstrate that certain acts must be beneficial because furthering evolution, and others painful because retarding it.
Spencer, Data of Ethics, pp. 5758. "Morality properly so-called—the science of right conduct—has for its object to determine how and why certain rules of conduct are detrimental, and certain other rules beneficial. Those good and bad results cannot be accidental, but must be necessary consequences of the constitution of things; and I conceive it to be the business of moral science to deduce, from the laws of life and the conditions of existence, what kinds of action necessarily tend to produce happiness, and what kinds to produce unhappiness. Having done this, its deductions are to be recognized as laws of conduct; and are to be conformed to irrespective of a direct estimation of happiness or misery.... The objection which I have to the current utilitarianism is, that it recognizes no more developed form of utility—does not see that it has reached but the initial stage of moral science.... It is supposed that in future, as now, utility is to be determined only by observation of results; and that there is no possibility of knowing by deduction from fundamental principles what conduct must be detrimental and what conduct must be beneficial." Cf. also ch. IX, and Stephen, Science of Ethics, ch. IX.
It is contended, then, that by the use of the evolutionary theory, we may substitute certain conditions, which in the very nature of things tend to produce happiness, for a calculation, based upon observation of more or less varying cases in the past, of the probable results of the specific action. Thus we get a fixed objective standard and do away with all the objections based upon the uncertainty, vagueness and liability to exceptions, of the ordinary utilitarian morality.
Spencer, Op. cit., p. 162: "When alleging that empirical utilitarianism is but introductory to rational utilitarianism I pointed out that the last does not take welfare for its immediate object of pursuit, but takes for its immediate object of pursuit conformity to certain principles which, in the nature of things, causally determine welfare."
2. It reconciles 'intuitionalism' with 'empiricism.' The theory of evolution not only gives us an objective standard on which happiness necessarily depends, and from which we may derive our laws of conduct, instead of deriving them from observation of particular cases, but it enables us to recognize that there are certain moral ideas now innate or intuitive. The whole human race, the whole animal race, has for an indefinite time been undergoing experiences of what leads to pleasure and of what leads to pain, until finally the results of these experiences have become organized into our very physical and mental make-up. The first point was that we could substitute for consideration of results consideration of the causes which determine these results; the present point is that so far as we have to use results, we can use those of the race, instead of the short span of the individual's life.
Spencer, Op. cit., pp. 123-124. "The experiences of utility organized and consolidated through all past generations of the human race have been producing corresponding nervous modifications, which, by continued transmission and accumulation, have become in us certain faculties of moral intuition—certain emotions corresponding to right and wrong conduct, which have no apparent basis in the individual experiences of utility.... The evolution hypothesis thus enables us to reconcile opposed moral theories.... The doctrine of innate powers of moral perception become congruous with the utilitarian doctrine, when it is seen that preferences and aversions are rendered organic by inheritance of the effects of pleasurable and painful experiences in progenitors."
3. It reconciles 'egoism' with 'altruism.' As we have seen, the relation of personal pleasure to general happiness presents very serious difficulties to hedonism. It is claimed, however, that the very process of evolution necessitates a certain identity. The being which survives must be the being which has properly adapted himself to his environment, which is largely social, and there is assurance that the conduct will be adapted to the environment just in the degree in which pleasure is taken in acts which concern the welfare of others. If an agent has no pleasure in such acts he will either not perform them, or perform them only occasionally, and thus will not meet the conditions of surviving. If surrounding conditions demand constantly certain actions, those actions in time must come to be pleasurable. The conditions of survival demand altruistic action, and hence such action must become pleasurable to the agent (and in that sense egotistic).
"From the laws of life (Spencer Op. cit., p. 205) it must be concluded that unceasing social discipline will so mould human action, that eventually sympathetic pleasures will be pursued to the fullest extent advantageous to each and all.... Though pleasure may be gained by giving pleasure, yet the thought of the sympathetic pleasure to be gained will not occupy consciousness, but only the thought of the pleasure given."
Regarding the whole foregoing scheme, it may be said so far as it is true, or suggestive of truth, it is not hedonistic. It does not judge actions from their effects in the way of pleasure or pain, but it judges pleasures from the basis of an independent standard 'in the nature of things.' It is expressly declared that happiness is not to be so much the end, as the test of conduct, and it is not happiness in general, of every sort and kind, but a certain kind of happiness, happiness conditioned by certain modes of activity, that is the test. Spencer's hedonism in its final result hardly comes to more than saying that in the case of a perfect individual in a perfect society, every action whatever would be accompanied by pleasure, and that, therefore, in such a society, pleasure would be an infallible sign and test of the morality of action—a position which is not denied by any ethical writer whatever, unless a few extreme ascetics. Such a position simply determines the value of pleasure by an independent criterion, and then goes on to say of pleasure so determined, that it is the test of the morality of action. This may be true, but, true or not, it is not hedonistic.
Furthermore, this standard by which the nature of pleasure is determined is itself an ethical (that is, active) standard. We have already seen that Spencer conceives that the modes of producing happiness are to be deduced from the "laws of life and the conditions of existence". This might be, of course, a deduction from physical laws and conditions. But when we find that the laws and conditions which Spencer employs are mainly those of social life, it is difficult to see why he is not employing a strictly ethical standard. To deduce not right actions directly from happiness, but the kinds of actions which will produce happiness from a consideration of a certain ideal of social relationships seems like a reversal of hedonism; but this is what Mr. Spencer does.