Hands that can grasp, eyes
that can dilate, hair that can rise
if it must, these things are important not because a
high-sounding interpretation can be put upon them, but because they are
useful.—Marianne Moore.
The method then by which any attempt to analyse ‘good’ has been condemned is itself objectionable, and yields no sound reason why a purely psychological account of the differences between good, bad, and indifferent experiences should not be given. The data for the inquiry are in part supplied by anthropology. It has become clear that the disparity among the states of mind recognised as good by persons of different races, habits and civilisations is overwhelming. Any observant child, it is true, might discover in the home circle how widely people disagree, but the effect of education is to suppress these scientific efforts. It has needed the vast accumulations of anthropological evidence now available to establish the fact that as the organisation of life and affairs alters very different experiences are perceived to be good or bad, are favoured or condemned. The Bakairi of Central Brazil and the Tahitians, among others, are reported, for example, to look upon eating with the same feelings which we reserve for quite different physiological performances, and to regard the public consumption of food as a grave breach of decency. In many parts of the world feelings of forgiveness towards enemies, for example, are looked upon as low and ignoble. The experiences which one person values are thought vicious by another. We must allow, it is true, for widespread confusion between intrinsic and instrumental values, and for the difficulty of identifying experiences. Many states of mind in other people which we judge to be bad or indifferent are no doubt unlike what we imagine them to be, or contain elements which we overlook, so that with fuller knowledge we might discover them to be good. In this manner it may be possible to reduce the reported disparity of value intuitions, but few people acquainted with the varying moral judgments of mankind will doubt that circumstances and necessities, present and past, explain our approval and disapproval. We start, then, with a hearty scepticism of all immediate intuitions, and inquire how it is that individuals in different conditions, and at different stages of their development, esteem things so differently.
With the exception of some parents and nursemaids we have lately all been aghast at revelations of the value judgments of infants. Their impulses, their desires, their preferences, the things which they esteem, as displayed by the psycho-analysts, strike even those whose attitude towards humanity is not idealistic with some dismay. Even when the stories are duly discounted, enough which is verifiable remains for infans polypervers to present a truly impressive figure dominating all future psychological inquiry into value.
There is no need here to examine in detail how these early impulses are diverted and disguised by social pressures. The rough outlines are familiar of the ways in which by growth, by the appearance of fresh instinctive tendencies, by increase of knowledge and of command over the world, under the control of custom, magical beliefs, public opinion, inculcation and example, the primitive new-born animal may be gradually transformed into a bishop. At every stage in the astonishing metamorphosis, the impulses, desires, and propensities of the individual take on a new form, or, it may be, a further degree of systematisation. This systematisation is never complete. Always some impulse, or set of impulses, can be found which in one way or another interferes, or conflicts, with others. It may do so in two ways, directly or indirectly. Some impulses are in themselves psychologically incompatible, some are incompatible only indirectly, through producing contrary effects in the world outside. The difficulty some people have in smoking and writing at the same time is a typical instance of the first kind of incompatibility; the two activities get in each other’s way by a psychological accident as it were. Interference of this kind can be overcome by practice to an unexpected degree, as the feats of jugglers show; some, however, are insurmountable; and these incompatibilities are often, as we shall see, of supreme consequence in moral development. Indirect incompatibilities arising through the consequences of our acts are more easy to find. Our whole existence is one long study of them, from the infant’s first choice whether he shall use his mouth for screaming or for sucking, to the last codicil to his Will.
These are simple instances, but the conduct of life is throughout an attempt to organise impulses so that success is obtained for the greater number or mass of them, for the most important and the weightiest set. And here we come face to face again with the problem of value. How shall we decide which among these are more important than: others, and how shall we distinguish different organisations as yielding more or less value one than another? At this point we need to be on our guard not to smuggle in any peculiar ethical, non-psychological, idea under some disguise, under ‘important’ or ‘fundamental’, for example.
Among those who reject any metaphysical view of value it has become usual to define value as capacity for satisfying feeling and desire in various intricate ways.* For the purpose of tracing in detail the very subtle and varied modes in which people actually value things, a highly intricate treatment is indispensable, but here a simpler definition will suffice.
We may start from the fact that impulses may be divided into appetencies and aversions, and begin by saying that anything is valuable which satisfies an appetency or ‘seeking after.’ The term ‘desire’ would do as well if we could avoid the implication of accompanying conscious beliefs as to what is sought and a further restriction to felt and recognised longings. The term ‘want’ used so much by economists has the same disadvantages. Appetencies may be, and for the most part are, unconscious, and to leave out those which we cannot discover by introspection would involve extensive errors. For the same reason it is wiser not to start from feeling. Appetencies then, rather than felt appetencies or desires, shall be our starting-point.
The next step is to agree that apart from consequences anyone will actually prefer to satisfy a greater number of equal appetencies rather than a less. Observation of people’s behaviour, including our own, is probably sufficient to establish this agreement. If now we look to see what consequences can intervene to upset this simple principle, we shall find that only interferences, immediate or remote, direct: or indirect, with other appetencies, need to be considered. The only psychological restraints upon appetencies are other appetencies.*
We can now extend our definition. Anything is valuable which will satisfy an appetency without involving the frustration of some equal or more important appetency; in other words, the only reason which can be given for not satisfying a desire is that more important desires will thereby be thwarted. Thus morals become purely prudential, and ethical codes merely the expression of the mast general scheme of expediency* to which an individual or a race has attained. But we have still to say what ‘important’ stands for in this formulation. (Cf. p. 51).
There are certain evident priorities among impulses, some of which have been studied in various ways by economists under the headings of primary wants and secondary wants. Some needs or impulses must be satisfied in order that others may be possible. We must eat, drink, sleep, breathe, protect ourselves and carry on an immense physiological business as a condition for any further activities. Some of these impulses, breathing, for example, can be satisfied directly, but most of them involve us in complicated cycles of instrumental labour. Man for the most part must exert himself half his life to satisfy even the primitive needs, and these activities, failing other means of reaching the same ends, share their priority. In their turn they involve as conditions a group of impulses, whose satisfaction becomes only second in importance to physiological necessities, those, namely, upon which communication and the ability to co-operate depend. But these, since man is a social creature, also become more directly necessary to his well-being.
The very impulses which enable him to co-operate in gaining his dinner would themselves, if not satisfied, wreck by their mere frustration all his activities. This happens all through the hierarchy. Impulses, whose exercise may have been originally only important as means, and which might once have been replaced by quite different sets, become in time necessary conditions for innumerable quite different performances. Objects, again, originally valued because they satisfy one need, are found later to be also capable of satisfying others. Dress, for example, appears to have originated in magical, ‘life-giving,’ ornaments†, but so many other interests derive satisfaction from it that controversy can still arise as to its primitive uses.
The instances of priorities given must only be taken as examples. It is hardly necessary to remind the reader that for a civilised man, activities originally valuable as means only, often become so important through their connections with the rest of his activities, that life without them is regarded as intolerable. Thus acts which will debar him from his normal relations with his fellows are often avoided, even at the cost of death. Total cessation of all activities is preferred to the dreadful thwarting and privation which would ensue. The case of the soldier, or of the conscientious objector, is thus no exception to the principle. Life deprived of all but the barest physiological necessities, for example, prison life, is for many people worse than non-existence. Those who even so incur it in defence of some ‘moral ideal’ do so because they are so organised, either permanently or temporarily, that only in this way can their dominant impulses secure satisfaction. The self-regarding impulses form only a part of the total activities of social man, and the impulse of the martyr to bear witness at any cost to what he regards as truth, is only one extreme instance of the degree to which other impulses often assume supremacy.
For another reason any priorities mentioned must be taken only as illustrations. We do not know enough yet about the precedences, the hierarchies, the modes of systematisation, actual and possible, in that unimaginable organisation, the mind, to say what order in any case actually exists, or between what the order holds. We only know that a growing order is the principle of the mind, that its function is to co-ordinate, and we can detect that in some of its forms the precedence is different from that in others. This we could do by observation, by comparing the drunken man with the sober, but from our own experience of our own activity we can go much further. We can feel differences between clear coherent thinking and confusion or stupidity, between free, controlled emotional response and dull or clogged impassivity, between moments when we do with our bodies more delicate and dexterous things than seem possible, and moments of clumsiness, when we are ‘all thumbs’, have no ‘balance’ or ‘timing’, and nothing ‘comes off’. These differences are differences in momentary organisation, differences in precedence between rival possible systematisations. The more permanent and more specifically ‘moral’ differences between individuals grow out of differences such as these and correspond to similar precedences between larger systems.
The complications possible in the systematisation of impulses might be illustrated indefinitely. The plasticity of special appetencies and activities varies enormously. Some impulses can be diverted more easily than others. Sex has a wider range of satisfactions than hunger, for example; some are weaker than others; some (not the same necessarily) can be suppressed in the long run with less difficulty. Some can be modified; some obey the ‘all or none’ rule—they must either be satisfied specifically or completely inhibited—well-established habits may have this peculiarity. In judging the importance of any impulse all these considerations must be taken into account. The affiliations of impulses, at present often inexplicable, need especially to be considered. Within the whole partially systematised organisation, numerous sub-systems can be found, and what would be expected to be quite trivial impulses are often discovered to be important, because they belong to powerful groups. Thus there are reasonable persons who, without a high polish on their shoes, are almost incapacitated.
The importance of an impulse, it will be seen, can be defined for our purposes as the extent of the disturbance of other impulses in the individual’s activities which the thwarting of the impulse involves. A vague definition, it is true, but therefore suitable to our at present incomplete and hazy knowledge of how impulses are related. It will be observed that no special ethical idea is introduced. We can now take our next step forward and inquire into the relative merits of different systematisations.
No individual can live one minute without a very intricate and, so far as it goes, very perfect co-ordination of impulses. It is only when we pass from the activities which from second to second maintain life to those which from hour to hour determine what kind of life it shall be, that we find wide differences. Fortunately for psychology we can each find wide enough differences in ourselves from hour to hour. Most people in the same day are Bonaparte and Oblomov by turns. Before breakfast Diogenes, after dinner Petronius or Bishop Usher. But throughout these mutations certain dispositions usually remain much the same, those which govern public behaviour in a limited number of affairs varying very greatly from one society or civilisation to another. Every systematisation in the degree to which it is stable involves a degree of sacrifice, but for some the price to be paid in opportunities foregone is greater than for others. By the extent of the loss, the range of impulses thwarted or starved, and their degree of importance, the merit of a systematisation is judged. That organisation which is least wasteful of human possibilities is, in short, the best. Some individuals, hag-ridden by their vices, or their virtues, to a point at which the law of diminishing returns has deprived even these of their appropriate satisfactions, are still unable to reorganise; they go through life incapacitated for most of its possible enjoyments.* Others, paralysed with their conflicts, are unable to do anything freely; whatever they attempt some implicated but baffled impulse is still fitfully and fretfully stirring. The debauchee and the victim of conscience alike have achieved organisations whose price in sacrifice is excessive. Both their individual satisfactions, and those for which they are dependent upon sympathetic relations with their fellows, an almost equal group, are unduly restricted. Upon grounds of prudence alone they have been injudicious, and they may be condemned without any appeal to peculiarly ‘ethical’ standards. The muddle in which they are forced to live is itself sufficient ground for reprobation.
At the other extreme are those fortunate people who have achieved an ordered life, whose systems have developed clearing-houses by which the varying claims of different impulses are adjusted. Their free, untrammelled activity gains for them a maximum of varied satisfactions and involves a minimum of suppression and sacrifice. Particularly is this so with regard to those satisfactions which require humane, sympathetic, and friendly relations between individuals. The charge of egoism, or selfishness, can be brought against a naturalistic or utilitarian morality such as this only by overlooking the importance of these satisfactions in any well-balanced life. Unfair or aggressive behaviour, and preoccupation with self-regarding interests to the exclusion of due sensitiveness to the reciprocal claims of human intercourse, lead to a form of organisation which deprives the person so organised of whole ranges of important values. No mere loss of social pleasures is in question, but a twist or restriction of impulses, whose normal satisfaction is involved in almost all the greatest goods of life. The two senses in which a man may ‘take advantage’ of his fellows can be observed in practice to conflict. Swindling and bullying, whether in business matters or in personal relations, have their cost; which the best judges agree to be excessive. And the greater part of the cost lies of in the consequences of being found out, in the loss of social esteem and so forth, but in actual systematic disability to attain important values.
Although the person who habitually disregards the claims of his fellows to fair treatment and sympathetic understanding may be condemned, in most cases, upon the ground of his own actual loss of values in such behaviour, this of course is not the reason for the steps which may have to be taken against him. It may very well be the case that a person’s own interests are such that, if he understood them, were well organised in other words, he would be a useful and charming member of his community; but, so long as people are about who are not well organised, communities must protect themselves. They can defend their action on the ground that the general loss of value which would follow if they did not protect themselves far outweighs such losses as are incurred by the people whom they suppress or deport.
To extend this individual morality to communal affairs is not difficult. Probably the best brief statement upon the point is the following note by Bentham, if we interpret ‘happiness’ in his formula not as pleasure but as the satisfaction of impulses.
June 29, 1827.
1. Constantly actual end of action on the part of every individual at the moment of action, his greatest happiness, according to his view of it at that moment.
2. Constantly proper end of action on the part of every individual at the moment of action, his real greatest happiness from that moment to the end of life.
3. Constantly proper end of action on the part of every individual considered as trustee for the community, of which he is considered as a member, the greatest happiness of that same community, in so far as it depends upon the interest which forms the bond of union between its members.†
But communities, as is well known, tend to behave in the same way to people who are better organised as well as to people who are worse organised than the standard of the group. They deal with Socrates or Bruno as severely as with Turpin or Bottomley. Thus mere interference with ordinary activities is not by itself a sufficient justification for excluding from the group people who are different and therefore nuisances. The precise nature of the difference must be considered, and whether and to what degree it is the group, not the exceptional member, which ought to be condemned. The extent to which alteration is practicable is also relevant, and the problem in particular cases becomes very intricate.
But the final court of appeal concerns itself in such cases with questions, not of the wishes of majorities, but of the actual range and degree of satisfaction which different possible systematisations of impulse yield. Resentment at interference and gratitude for support and assistance are to be distinguished from disapproval and approval. The esteem and respect accorded to persons with the social* virtues well developed is only in a small degree due to the use which we find we can make of them. It is much more a sense that their lives are rich and full.
When any desire is denied for the sake of another, the approved and accepted activity takes on additional value; it is coveted and pursued all the more for what it has cost. Thus the spectacle of other people enjoying both activities without difficulty, thanks to some not very obvious adjustment, is peculiarly distressing, and such people are usually regarded as especially depraved. In different circumstances this view may or may not be justified. The element of sacrifice exacted by any stable system explains to a large extent the tenacity with which custom is clung to, the intolerance directed sea innovations, the fanaticism of converts, the hypocrisy of teachers, and many other lamentable phenomena of the moral attitudes. However much an individual may privately find his personality varying from hour to hour, he is compelled to join in maintaining a public facade of some rigidity and buttressed with every contrivance which can be invented. The Wills of Gods, the Conscience, the Catechism, Taboos, Immediate Intuitions, Penal Laws, Public Opinion, Good Form, are all more or less ingenious and efficient devices with the same aim—to secure the uniformity which social life requires. By their means and by Custom, Convention, and Superstition, the underlying basis of morality, the effort to attain maximum satisfaction through coherent systematisation, is a veiled and disguised to an extraordinary degree. Whence arise great difficulties and many disasters. It is so necessary and so difficult to secure a stable and general system of public behaviour that any means whatever are justifiable, failing the discovery of better. All societies hitherto achieved, however, involve waste and misery of appalling extent.
Any public code of behaviour must, it is generally agreed, represent a cruder and more costly systematisation than those attained to by many of the individuals who live under the code, a point obviously to be remembered in connection with censorship problems. Customs change more slowly than conditions, and every change in conditions brings with it new possibilities of systematisation. None of the afflictions of humanity are worse than its obsolete moral principles. Consider the effects of the obsolete virtues of nationalism under modern conditions, or the absurdity of the religious attitude to birth control. The present lack of plasticity in such things involves a growing danger. Human conditions and possibilities have altered more in a hundred years than they had in the previous ten thousand, and the next fifty may overwhelm us, unless we can devise a more adaptable morality. The view that what we need in this tempestuous turmoil of change is a Rock to shelter under or to cling to, pane than an efficient aeroplane in which to ride it, is comprehensible but mistaken.
To guard against a possible misunderstanding it may be added that the organisation and systematisation of which I have been speaking in this chapter are not primarily an affair of conscious planning or arrangement, as this is understood, for example, by a great business house or by a railway. (Cf. p. 202.) We pass as a rule from a chaotic to a better organised state by ways which we know nothing about. Typically through the influence of other minds. Literature and the arts are the chief means by which these influences are diffused. It should be unnecessary to insist upon the degree to which high civilisation, in other words, free, varied and unwasteful life, depends upon them in a numerous society.