Problems of Conduct: An Introductory Survey of Ethics Part 7

(3) Moreover, pleasure-seeking is cursed with the specter of aimlessness; it entirely misses the deepest and most satisfying joys of life, the joy of healthy, unspent forces and desires, the joy of purpose and achievement, the joy of the pure, disciplined, loyal life.

It renders these joys unattainable; we cannot serve G.o.d and sense, ideals and l.u.s.ts of the flesh. The parting of the ways lies before every man; and it is the perennial tragedy of life that so many, misled by impulse and blinded by desire, fail to see the beauty of holiness and choose the lesser good.

(4) Especially as we grow older does it matter less and less what evanescent enjoyments we have had, and more and more what we have accomplished. Our happiness lies increasingly with the years in the memory, subconscious most of the time but constantly potent in its influence, of our past. To have gratified the senses, to have tasted the superficial delights of life, to have yielded to the tug of desire, leaves little in the way of satisfaction behind; but to have done something worthy, to have lived n.o.bly, even to have fought and failed, is a lasting honor and joy.

What are the evils in undue self-repression?

Asceticism, like self-indulgence, is selfish. It asks, "What shall I do to be saved?" rather than "What shall I do to serve?" Endlessly preoccupied with the endeavor not to do wrong, the ascetics have failed to do the positive good they ought. The grime that comes through loving service is better than the stainlessness of inactivity; as the poet Spenser puts it, "Entire affection hateth nicer hands." And the emphasis upon freedom from taint of sin tends to produce a scorn of others who do not thus deny themselves, a self-righteousness and Pharisaism, a callousness to others, which distorts the judgment as well as dries up the sympathies.

But apart from these dangers, and from a purely personal point of view, asceticism has its evil side.

(1) An overemphasis upon self-denial sacrifices unnecessarily the sweetness and richness of life, stunts it, distorts it, robs it of its natural fruition. The denial of any satisfaction is cruel except as it is necessary. Purity, carried to a needless extreme, became celibacy; the virtue of frugality became the vice of a starvation diet, producing the emaciated and weakened saints; the unworldliness which can be in the world but not of it was transformed into the morbidly lonely and futile isolation of the hermits. These are abnormal and undesirable perversions of human nature.

(2) A reaction from needless repression is almost inevitable. The attempt radically to alter and repress human nature is nearly always disastrous. Most of the ascetics had to pa.s.s their days in constant struggles against their temptations, and many of them recurrently lapsed into wild orgies of sin, the result of pent-up impulses denied their natural channels. Morality should be rather directive than repressive, using all of our energies for wise and n.o.ble ends, and overcoming evil with good. A merely negative morality implies the continual dwelling of attention upon sin and the continual rebellion of desire. It keeps the soul in a state of unstable equilibrium, and defeats its own ends.

R. B. Perry, Moral Economy, chap, II, secs, II, III; chap, III, secs, II, III, IV. F. Paulsen, System of Ethics, book III, chap. II. S. E.

Mezes, Ethics, chap, X, XI, Dewey and Tufts, Ethics, chap, XVIII, secs.

1, 2, 4; chap, XIX, sees. 1, 2, 4. Matthew Arnold, Culture and Anarchy, chap. IV. H. C. King, Rational Living, pp. 93-102. W. dew. Hyde, The Five Great Philosophies of Life, chaps, I-IV. H. Bashdall, Theory of Good and Evil, book II, chap. III.

CHAPTER XI

THE SOLUTION OP SOCIAL PROBLEMS

DUTY, like charity, begins at home; and we need to take the motes out of our own eyes before we can see clearly how to help our fellows.

To keep physically well, pure, and prudent, following worthy purposes and smothering unruly desires, is our first business; and there would be much less to do for one another if every one did his duty by himself.

But even with our best endeavors we need a helping hand now and then, and, indeed, are continuously dependent upon the work and kindness of others for all that makes life tolerable, or even possible. And the other side to this truth is that we are never free from the obligation of doing our duty squarely by those whose welfare is in some degree dependent upon us. No man can, if he would, live to himself alone; life is necessarily and essentially social. Personal and social duties are so inextricably interwoven that it is impossible except by an artificial abstraction to separate them. The cultivation of one's own health, for example, is a boon to the community; and to care for the community's health is to safeguard one's own. Every advance in personal purity, culture, or self-control increases the individual's value and diminishes his menace to his fellows; while every step in social amelioration makes life freer and more comfortable for him.

So close- knit is society today that an indifference to sanitation in Asia or a religious persecution in Russia may produce disastrous results to some innocent and utterly indifferent individual in Ma.s.sachusetts or California. On the other hand, there is no vice so solitary and so can widespread social results. [Footnote: Cf. George Eliot in Adam Bede: "There is no sort of wrong deed of which a man can bear the punishment alone. Men's lives are as thoroughly blended as the air they breathe; evil spreads as necessarily as disease."]

Society has a vital interest in the personal life of its members, and every member, however self- contained he may be, has a vital interest in the general standards of morality. For purposes of a.n.a.lysis, however, it is convenient to make the distinction between the two aspects of morality, the governance of intra-human and of inter-human relations; the ordering of the single life and the ordering of the community life.

Of the two the latter is even more imperative than the former, the arbitration of clashes between individuals even more difficult than the governing of the impulses within a single heart. We turn, therefore, to consider the problems involved in the general conception of social morality, which we may define as the direction of the action of each toward the greatest attainable welfare of all. Why should we be altruistic? That altruism (action directed toward others' welfare) is best for the community as a whole is obvious. In order to maintain his life in the face of the many obstacles that thwart and dangers that threaten him, man must present a solid front to the universe.

All clashes of interest, friction, and civil strife, all withholding of help, means a weakening of his united forces, an invitation to disaster. And even where life becomes relatively secure and individualism possible, the greatest good for the greatest number is attainable only by continual cooperation and mutual sacrifice. So vital is it to each member of the community that selfishness and cruelty in others be repressed, that society cannot afford to leave at least the grosser forms of egoism unpunished. Men must enforce upon one another that mutual regard which individuals are constantly tempted to ignore, but without which no man's life can find its adequate fulfillment or security. No man, then, can be called moral, can be said to have found a comprehensive solution of life, however self-controlled and pure he may be, if he is cruel, or even lacking in consideration for others.

This is the most glaring defect in both Epicureanism and asceticism; both are fundamentally selfish. For the proper adjustment of life to its needs we must turn rather to Christianity, or to Buddhism, with their ideals of service; to the patriotic ideals of the n.o.blest Greeks; to Kant, with his "So act as to treat humanity, whether in their own person or in that of any other, as an end, never as a means only"; or to the British utilitarians with their "Every one to count for one, and only one." The question, however, persistently recurs, Why should the INDIVIDUAL be altruistic? What does HE get out of it? To this we may reply:

(1) The life of service is, in normal cases, a happier life in itself than the life that is preoccupied with self. It is richer, fuller in potentialities of joy; it is freer from regrets and the eventual emptiness of the self-centered life. [Footnote: Cf. Mill, Utilitarianism, chap. 2: "When people who are tolerably fortunate in their outward lot do not find in life sufficient enjoyment to make it valuable to them, the cause generally is, caring for n.o.body but themselves."] It is saner, less likely to be veered off on some tangent of morbid and ultimately disastrous indulgence

(2) The altruistic life earns the grat.i.tude and love of others, while the selfish life remains isolated, unloved, without their stimulus and help. Ingrat.i.tude there is, of course, and the returning of evil for good; on the other hand, the selfish man may hope for undeserved forgiveness and even love from his fellows. But in the long run it pays to be good to others; bread cast upon the waters does return after many days; normally unkindness provokes dislike, contempt, open hostility, retaliation, while kindness finds a natural and proper reward in return favors, esteem, and affection. No man can tell when he will be in need of sympathy or of aid; it is folly so to live as to forfeit our fellows' good will. And finally, selfishness carried beyond a certain point brings the penalty not only of the unfavorable opinion and private retaliations of others, but of the publicly enforced law. "In normal cases," we have said. And we must add that there are cases though they are less common than we are apt to suppose in which the good of the individual is hopelessly at variance with that of the community. If our fellows could be counted on for a fair reciprocity of self-denial and service, we should not begrudge these necessary sacrifices. The sting lies not so much in the loss of personal pleasures as in the lack of appreciation and return; to do our part when others are not doing theirs takes, indeed, a touch of saintliness.

Socrates drinking the hemlock, Jesus dying in agony on the cross, Regulus returning to be tortured at Carthage, were deliberately sacrificing their personal welfare for the good of other men. And in numberless ways a host of heroic men and women have practiced and are daily practicing unrewarded self-denial in the name of love and service, self-denial which by no means always brings a joy commensurate with the pain. These are the abnormal cases; but the abnormal is, after all, not so very uncommon. And for these men and women we must grieve, while we honor and admire them and hold them up for imitation. Society must insist on just such sacrifices when they are necessary for the good of the whole, and must so train its youth that they will be willing to make them when needful.

What is the exact meaning of selfishness and unselfishness?

Selfishness is the pursuance of one's own good at the expense of others. A mistaken idea, which it is necessary to guard against, is that selfishness must be conscious, deliberate. It is not uncommon for a person accused of selfishness to say, or think, "This is an unjust accusation; I have not had a selfish thought!" But unconscious selfishness is by far the commoner sort; millions of essentially good- hearted people are guilty of selfish acts through thoughtlessness and stagnant sympathy. Conscious cruelty is rare compared with moral insensibility. It cannot be too often repeated that selfishness is not a way of feeling about people, it is a way of acting toward them.

To be wholly free from selfish conduct necessitates insight into the needs and feelings of others as well as a vague good will toward them.

The girl who allows her mother to drudge that she may have immaculate clothes, the mother who keeps her son at home when he ought to be given the opportunity of a wider life, is conscious only of love; but she is really putting her own happiness before that of the loved one. The owner of the vilest tenement houses is sometimes a generous and benevolent-minded man, the luxuriously rich are often honest and glad to confer favors, the political boss is full of the milk of human kindness; but the superficial or advent.i.tious altruism of such men should not blind us to their fundamental, though often entirely unrealized, selfishness. A complementary fallacy is that which denies the epithet "unselfish" to a man who enjoys helping others. Who has not heard the cynical remark, "There's nothing unselfish about So-and-So's benevolence that is his enjoyment in life!" Such a comment ignores the fact that the goal of moral progress lies precisely at the point where we shall all enjoy doing what it is our duty to do.

Altruistic impulses are our own impulses, as well as egoistic ones; the distinction between them lies not in the pleasure they may give to their possessor, or the sacrifice they may demand, but in the objective results they tend to attain. Happy is the man whose DELIGHT is in the law of the Lord! Unselfish action is, in the broader sense, all action that is not selfish; in the narrower and positive sense, it is all action that tends to the welfare of others at the expense of the narrower interests of the individual.

Are altruistic impulses always right?

It would be an easy solution for our problems if we could say, "In every case follow the altruistic impulse." But this simplification is impossible; the ideal of service is not such an Open Sesame to our duty. And this for several reasons:

(1) There are frequently clashes between altruistic impulses. In fact, almost all moral errors have some unselfish impulse on their side which helps to justify them in the eyes of the sinner and his friends. The politician who gets the best jobs for his supporters, the legislator who puts through a special statute to favor his const.i.tuents, the jingo who helps push his country into war for its "honor" or "glory"-these and a host of other wrongdoers are conscious of a genuine altruistic glow. They ignore the fact that they are doing, on the whole, more harm than good to others, because the smaller group that is apparently benefited looms larger to the eye than the more widely distributed and less directly affected sufferers.

All of our most vexing moral problems are those in which benefit to some must be weighed against benefit to others. Shall a man who is needed by his family risk his life to save a ne'er-do-well? Shall we insist that people unhappily married shall endure their wretchedness and forego the possibility of a happier union in order that heedlessness and license may not be encouraged in the lives of others?

Life is full of such two- sided problems; it is not enough that an act may bring good to some, it must be the act that brings most good to most.

(2) An apparently altruistic act, dictated by sympathy, and productive of happiness, may not be for the ultimate good of the very person made happy. To give everything they want to children is inevitably to "spoil" them, as we rightly say; to spoil their own happiness in the long run as well as their usefulness to others. To condone another's sin and save him the unpleasantness of rebuke or the inflicting of a penalty is often the worst thing that could be done to him. To give alms to a beggar may mean to a.s.sist his moral degeneration and in the long run increase his misery.

(3) Even when an act superficially egoistic conflicts with one that seems altruistic, the greatest good of the community often dictates the former. There is, as Trumbull used to put it, a "duty of refusing to do good." A man who can best serve the common good by concentrating his strength on that work where his particular ability or training makes him most effective, may be justified in refusing other calls upon his energies, however intrinsically worthy. An Edison would be doing wrong to spend his afternoons in social service, a Burbank has no right to diminish his resources by giving a public library. Emerson deserves our commendation for refusing to be inveigled into the various causes that would have drafted his time and strength. Even to the anti-slavery agitation he refused his services, saying, "I have quite other slaves to free than those Negroes, to wit, imprisoned thoughts far back in the brain of man, which have no watchman or lover or defender but me." This brings us to the question how far a man may legitimately live a self- contained life. Certainly there is a measure of truth in Goethe's saying, "No man can he isolates himself"; in Ibsen's "The most powerful man is he who is most alone"; and in Matthew Arnold's

"Alone the sun rises, and alone Spring the great streams."

A multiplicity of interests distracts the soul and often confuses our ideals. By keeping free from social burdens some men, like Kant, have accomplished tasks of unusual magnitude.

On the other hand, we can match Goethe's a.s.sertion with another of his own: "A talent forms itself in solitude, a character in the stream of the world." Isolation tends almost inevitably to narrowness, to an abnormal and cramped outlook, to willfulness or Pharisaism, and usually to loneliness and depression. The only pervasively happy life for man is the life of cooperation and loyalty. We may well "withdraw into the silence," take our daily communion with G.o.d in our closets, or our forty days in the wilderness, to win clearer vision and steadier purpose. But solitude should, in normal cases, be only an interlude of rest, or a quiet maturing for service. The ideal is perhaps expressed in Wordsworth's sonnet on Milton:

"Thy soul was like a star and dwelt apart. .... And yet thy heart The lowliest duties on herself did lay."

The organization of life implies a criticism of and control over altruistic as well as egoistic impulses. There is nothing inherent in the fact of a good being OTHERS' good to make it necessarily the greatest good in a given situation. The ultimate criterion must always be the greatest good of the greatest number; but an altruistic as well as an egoistic impulse may stand in the way of that end. Our altruistic inclinations are often perverted, non-representative, a matter of instinctive and irrational sympathy or shortsighted impulse. And so, while one of the great tasks of moral education is to make men unselfish, that alone is not enough; unselfishness must be directed by reason and tact, rendered far-sighted and intelligent.

What mental and moral obstacles hinder altruistic action?

Although an altruistic impulse is not necessarily a right impulse to follow, there are a great many altruistic duties which are clear and summoning; and it is a never ending disappointment to the man of social conscience to behold the apathy wherewith obvious social duties are regarded. It will be worthwhile to pause and note the chief mental and moral obstacles that prevent a more general devotion to social betterment.

(1) The most formidable obstacle, perhaps, is the selfishness of those who are themselves .well enough off. Our cities, and even, to some extent, our small towns, grow up in "quarters"; the rich living in one district and the poor in another. This permits the suffering of the latter to go unknown or only half-realized by the former. The well-to- do have many interests and many pleasant uses for their money; the call of the unfortunate-"Come over and help us!"- rings faint and far away in their ears. Or they may excuse their callousness by the a.s.sertion that the poor are used to their evil living conditions, do not mind them, and are as contented, on the whole, as the rich; complacently ignoring the fact that being used to conditions is not the same as enjoying or profiting by them, and that contentment by no means implies a useful or desirable life. It is true that the needy are often but dimly conscious of their needs; in that very fact lies a reason why the favored cla.s.ses should rouse them out of their dullness, save them from the physical and moral degeneration into which they so unconsciously and helplessly drift. The indifference of the fortunate comes not so often from a deliberate hardening of the heart as from a lack of contact with the needy or imagination to picture their dest.i.tution. But blame must rest upon all comfortable citizens who do not bestir themselves to help in social betterment because it is too much trouble or requires a sacrifice they are not willing to make.

(2) Another serious obstacle lies in the distrust with which many people regard any duty which they have not been accustomed to regard as a duty. This may take the form of an overdeveloped loyalty, that bows before the sacredness of existing inst.i.tutions and labels any reform as "unconst.i.tutional," a departure from the ways that were good enough for our fathers. It may wear the guise of a lazy piety that would leave everything with G.o.d, accepting social ills as manifestations of his will, and interference as a sort of arrogant presumption! It may be a mere mental apathy, an inertia of habit, that sees no call for a better water supply or bothersome laws about the purity of milk.

Or it may defend itself by pointing out the uncertainties that attend untried ways and warning against the danger of experimentation. To these warnings we may reply that our altruistic zeal must, indeed, be coupled with accurate thinking; unless we have based our proposals on wide observation and cautious inference we may find unexpected and baneful results in the place of our sanguine expectations. But we may point out that it is "nothing venture nothing have"; we cannot work out our social salvation without experimenting; and, after all, ways that do not work well can readily be discontinued. What is vital is to keep alive an intolerance of apathy and contentment, to realize that we are hardly more than on the threshold of a rational civilization, to recognize evils, cherish ideals, and maintain our determination in some way to actualize them.

(3) A further steady damper upon our altruistic zeal is the dread of raising the taxes. Humanitarian movements are well enough, but they cost so much! What is needful is to point out that poverty, unemployment, disease, and the other social ills are also costly; indeed, they cost the public in the long run far more than the expenditure necessary for their abolition or alleviation. It pays in dollars and cents, within a generation or two at least, to make and keep the social organism sound. A wise altruism is not merely a matter of philanthropy; it is also a matter of economy; a means of saving individuals from suffering, but at the same time a means of safeguarding the public treasury. If the community does not pay for the curing of these evils it will have to pay for their results. "It seems to me essentially fallacious to look upon such expenditures as indulgences to be allowed rather sparingly to such communities as are rich enough to afford them. They are literally a husbanding of resources, a safeguard against later unprofitable but compulsory expenditure, a repair in the social organism which, like the repair of a leaky roof, may avert disaster." [Footnote: E. T. Devine, Misery and its Causes, p. 272.] The public must be educated to see the wisdom of investing heavily in long-neglected social repairs and reconstruction, which in the end will far more than pay for itself in the lowering of expenses for police, courts, prisons, hospitals, asylums, and almshouses, in the lowered death-rate, immunity from costly disease, and increased working capacity of the people.

(4) Finally, a hopelessness of accomplishing anything often paralyzes our zeal. This sometimes takes the form of a more or less honest conviction that poverty, unemployment, and other maladjustments are simply the result of moral degeneration-of the laziness, extravagance, drinking, or other wrongdoing of the poor; their suffering is their own fault, and they must be left to endure it. Of course such factors often-though by no means always-enter in. One may well say, "Who are we of the upper cla.s.ses to throw the first stone?" Under like conditions most of us would have become as discouraged or demoralized, yielded to the consolation of some vice, or balked at the monotonous grind of factory labor. But however that may be, in so far as social evils are due to these faults, the faults must be attacked, not accepted as inevitable and incurable. The pressure that pushes men into them must be eased, the ignorance and foolishness that foster them must be dissipated by education and moral training. And for all the social maladjustments that are NOT due to vice and sin, other remedies must be found. The road to social salvation is long and beset with many difficulties, but the goal is not hopeless of attainment; and every step toward the goal is so much gain. Because we cannot now see how to remedy all evils must not be a pretext for refusing to lend a hand to movements that are of proved value.

How can we reconcile egoism and altruism?

Although altruism is usually wise from the individual's own standpoint, it does not always seem so. The commonest moral clash is between the individual's apparent good and that of others; the cases in which one man's position, wealth, success precludes another's are everyday occurrences. Must this conflict be eternal? Is there any way of reconciling these opposing interests except by an unhappy and regrettable sacrifice? Must life be a perpetual compromise, a "social contract," a treaty to make reciprocal concessions, with every one's real interests at war with every one else's? Certainly the altruistic summons cannot be ignored; we cannot all follow our egoistic impulses; in the common disaster we should be individually involved. And, indeed, the altruistic impulses have become so deeply rooted in our natures that, turn away from them as we might, they would yet persist in the form of an undercurrent of dissatisfaction and remorse. The only possible solution of the deadlock lies in the killing-off of the selfish impulses.

This is not a fantastic dream. We see in the ideal mother, father, husband, wife, in the ardent patriot and religious devotee, this sloughing-off of the egoistic nature already accomplished. Love, and joy in service, are not alien to us; they are as instinctive as self- seeking; the hope of ultimate peace lies in the strengthening of these impulses till they so dominate us that we no longer care for the selfish and narrow aims. We must cultivate the masculine aspect of unselfishness, the loyalty of the Greeks, the impulse to stand by and fight for others; and we must cultivate its more feminine side, the caritas of I Corinthians XIII, the love that suffereth long and is kind, the sympathy and tenderness infused into a rough and rugged world by Christianity. In this highest developed life there will then be no dualism of motive; at the top of the ladder of moral progress individual and social goods coincide. It is joy to the righteous to do righteousness; it is the keenest delight in life for the lover of men to serve.

The unselfish impulse has thus a double value; it blesseth him that gives and him that takes. It is more blessed to give than to receive, when the giver has reached the moral level where giving is his greatest joy. The development of sympathy and the spirit of service in modern times gives great hope that the time will come when men will universally find a rich and satisfying life in ways which bring no harm but only good to others.

H. Spencer, Data of Ethics, chaps, XI-XIV. R. B. Perry, Moral Economy, chap, II, secs, IV, V.; chap, III, secs, V, VI. F. Paulsen, System of Ethics, book II, chap. I, sec. 6; chap, VI; book III, chap, X, sec.

1. Dewey and Tufts, Ethics, chap, XVIII, sec. e. W. K. Clifford, Right and Wrong, On the Scientific Basis of Morals, in Lectures and Essays, vol. II. R. M. McConnell, Duty of Altruism. B. Russell, Philosophical Essays, chap. I, sec. V. J. Royce, Problem of Christianity, vol. I, chap. III.

CHAPTER XII