Recent Tendencies in Ethics Part 3

[Footnote 1: Ibid., -- 171, p. 179.]

By itself, therefore, the a.s.sertion that the moral agent 'finds rest'

in the 'true good' does not enable us to distinguish the moral agent or the moral action from the immoral. For we are unable to define the 'true good.' It is not a part of experience; it is an ideal: and Green allows that we can give no complete account of it; he even says that we can give no positive account of it. At the same time this consideration leads to another and connected method for distinguishing good from evil.

"Of a life of completed development," Green holds, "of activity with the end attained, we can only speak or think in negatives, and thus only can we speak or think of that state of being in which, according to our theory, the ultimate moral good must consist."[1] But the development is a real process which manifests itself in habits and social inst.i.tutions; and from these its actual achievements we can to a certain extent see what the moral capability of man "has in it to become," and thus "know enough of ultimate moral good to guide our conduct." One of the most valuable portions of Green's own work is his description of the gradual widening and purifying of human conceptions regarding goodness in character and conduct. But all this implies some standard of discrimination and selection between what is good and what is evil in human achievement. Which developments are truly realisations of "the moral capability of man," and so tend to the attainment of ultimate good, and which developments are expressions of those capacities which seek an apparent good only and are to be cla.s.sed as evil, as impediments to the realisation of the good,--these have to be discriminated; and is it so clear that from the mere record of human deeds we are able to draw the distinction? Do we not need some criterion of goodness to guide our judgment? and does not Green himself use such a criterion when he appeals to the tendency of certain inst.i.tutions and habits to "make the welfare of all the welfare of each," and of certain arts to make nature "the friend of man"?[2] Common welfare and the utilisation of nature in the service of man seem to be taken as tests of the true development of moral capabilities. The criteria themselves may be excellent; but they are not got out of the mere record: they are brought by us to its contemplation. To this special question I can find no answer in Green.

He is indeed aware that there is a difficulty; or rather he admits that something has been "taken for granted." He has a.s.sumed that there is "some best state of being for man"; that this best state is eternally present to a divine consciousness; and further, that this "eternal mind" is reproducing itself as the self of man.[3] On this supposition only, he says, can our moral activity be explained; and he holds that the supposition can be justified metaphysically and has been so justified by himself in the earlier part of his treatise.

[Footnote 1: Prolegomena to Ethics, -- 172, p. 180.]

[Footnote 2: Prolegomena, -- 172, p. 180.]

[Footnote 3: Ibid., ---- 173, 174, p. 181.]

Now I am willing to admit that Green showed a correct instinct in examining the nature of man before entering upon his properly ethical enquiry. One must know what man is before one can say what his 'good' or his duty is; and it is only because man's nature cannot be accounted for as a merely natural or animal product that the way is open for an idealist ethics such as Green's. But perhaps Green laid too much stress on the problem of historical causation. What matters it how we came by our knowledge, provided it is the case that we can know ourselves and the world? If we can now distinguish right and wrong, can ally ourselves with the good, and follow a moral ideal, of what great importance are the steps by which the moral consciousness was attained? And the question here is whether the special results reached by Green in his metaphysical enquiry into human nature have brought us any nearer to a solution of the present ethical difficulty.

As we have seen, the metaphysical view which Green arrives at is that the consciousness which is in man and which raises him above nature is the manifestation of--the "reproduction" of itself by--an eternal self-consciousness. Man's own self-consciousness in knowledge and volition is simply G.o.d's self--consciousness "reproduced" (to use Green's term) in man's animal nature: so that the animal body and its temporal activities become in some unexplained (and no doubt inexplicable) way "organic" (to use Green's terminology once more, where no terminology seems adequate) to a spiritual reality which is eternal and infinite.

I am far from denying the greatness of this conception or its practical value. There is no stronger support to moral endeavour than the conviction that the moral life is a realisation of the divine purpose, that in all goodness the spirit of G.o.d is manifest, that the good man is the servant of G.o.d or even His fellow-worker. By whatever metaphor this may be expressed--and Green's statement that the divine self--consciousness 'reproduces' itself in human morality is also a metaphor--it betrays the a.s.surance that moral achievement is permanent, and that (in spite of all apparent failures) goodness will prevail. He who fights for the good may be confident of victory.

This is the practical value of the conception; but in order that it may have this practical value, the distinction of good from evil must be first of all made clear. Green's appeal to an eternal self-consciousness does nothing of itself to elucidate this distinction. Tendencies to exalt selfish interest over common welfare, and to prefer sensual to what are called higher gratifications, enter into the nature of man, and have fashioned his history. Green does not even ask the question whether these also are not to be considered manifestations or 'reproductions' of the eternal self-consciousness.

But his metaphysical view does not exclude them; and if they are included, morality disappears for lack of any criterion between good and evil. If good is to be discriminated from evil, it must be by some other means than by describing the whole conscious activity of man as a reproduction of the divine. Instead of doing anything to solve the problem of the meaning of goodness, Green simply brings forward a new difficulty--that of understanding how the temporal process in which human morality is developed can be related to a reality which is defined as out of time or eternal. This difficulty cannot be avoided in a metaphysical theory of morality. And it does not stand alone.

Green's own dialectics were directed against the Sensationalist and Hedonist theories which used to be regarded as typical of English thought; and on them they acted as a powerful solvent. His own views of the spiritual nature of man and its relation to the eternal self-consciousness were worked out with the confidence and enthusiasm of a reformer rather than with the caution of a critic. But criticism has followed, and not only from the representatives of opposed schools. Writers whose intellectual affinities are on the whole the same as his have let their dialectic play around his fundamental conceptions with a result very different from that which he contemplated. Mr Bradley, like Green, has faith in an eternal Reality, which might be called spiritual, inasmuch as it is not material; like Green, he looks upon man's moral activity as an appearance--what Green calls a reproduction--of this eternal reality. But under this general agreement there lies a world of difference. He refuses, by the use of the term self-consciousness, to liken his Absolute to the personality of man, and he brings out the consequence, which in Green is more or less concealed, that the evil equally with the good in man and in the world are appearances of the Absolute.

Mr Bradley's whole work is ruled by the distinction between "Appearance" and "Reality," which gives his book a t.i.tle. On the one hand there is the Absolute Reality, spoken of as perfect, and described as all--comprehensive and harmonious throughout. Neither change nor time nor any relation can belong to it. But intelligence works by discrimination and comparison; knowledge implies relations; it is, therefore, excluded from reality. Truth is mere appearance. The same judgment must be pa.s.sed on our moral activity. We strive after and perhaps reach an ideal, or, as Mr Bradley says, we aim at satisfying a desire; and this, too, is a process far removed from reality.[1] Goodness, like truth, is mere appearance.

[Footnote 1: Appearance and Reality, pp. 402, 410.]

This needs no elaboration. If all predication involves relation, and relation is excluded from reality,[1] then no predicate--not even truth or goodness--can be a.s.serted of the real. Nay more, to be consistent, we ought not even to say that reality or the Absolute (for the two terms are here interchangeable) is perfect, or one, or all-comprehensive, or harmonious: for all these are predicates. _Ens realissimum_ is the only _ens reale_; all else is mere appearance.

[Footnote 1: Ibid., pp. 32-34.]

Just here, however, lies an indication of another line of thought. For what is an appearance, and what is it that appears? It can only be reality that thus appears; the 'mere' appearance is yet an 'appearance of reality.' It might seem that this is to catch, not at a straw, but at the shadow of a straw. For if we say that 'reality appears,' are we not thereby predicating something of reality, making it enter into relation? But let that pa.s.s. Among these appearances we may be able to distinguish degrees of significance or of adequacy, nay--strange as it may seem to the reader who has followed Mr Bradley's first line of thought--"degrees of reality." Relations are excluded from reality; and degree is a relation; but reality has degrees. The logic is unsatisfactory, but the conclusion may perhaps have a value of its own.

Here, then, is another view of the universe--not an unchanging, relationless, eternal reality, but varying degrees of reality manifested in that complex process which we call sometimes the world and sometimes 'experience,' But the two views are connected. For it is a.s.sumed that the Absolute Reality is harmonious and all-comprehensive; and it is further a.s.serted that these two characteristics of harmony and comprehensiveness may be taken as criteria of the "degree of reality" possessed by any "appearance." The more harmonious anything is--the fewer its internal discrepancies or contradictions--the higher is its degree of reality; and the greater its comprehensiveness--the fewer predicates left outside it--the higher also is its degree of reality. No attempt is made at a measured scale of degrees of reality, such, for example, as is offered by the Hegelian dialectic; but a sort of rough cla.s.sification of various 'appearances' is offered. In this cla.s.sification a place is given to goodness which is comparatively high, and yet "subordinate" and "self-contradictory." [1]

[Footnote 1: Appearance and Reality, p. 420.]

Mr Bradley's Absolute, we may say, has two faces, one of which is described as good, while the other is inscrutable. "Obviously," he says, "the good is not the Whole, and the Whole, as such, is not good. And, viewed thus in relation to the Absolute, there is nothing either bad or good, there is not anything better or worse. For the Absolute is _not_ its appearances." This is the inscrutable side. But yet "the Absolute appears in its phenomena and is real nowhere outside them;... it is all of them in unity. And so, regarded from this other side, the Absolute _is_ good, and it manifests itself throughout in various degrees of goodness and badness."[1] What would be contradiction in another writer is only two-sidedness in Mr Bradley. And it is this second side which interests us, for here "the Absolute _is_ good," and yet, good as it is, manifests itself in badness as well as goodness, and that in various degrees. If we are to follow another statement of the doctrine, however, we shall have to allow that the "badness" is also good, and that the "various degrees" are all equal. For "the Absolute is perfect in all its detail, it is equally true and good throughout."[2] Whether or not the good is contradictory, as Mr Bradley maintains,[3] we must allow that he succeeds in making his account of it contradictory.

[Footnote 1: Appearance and Reality, p. 411.]

[Footnote 2: Ibid., p. 401.]

[Footnote 3: Ibid., p. 409.]

I will try to put the gist of the matter in my own words. Mr Bradley's Absolute is eternal, relationless, ineffable. To it goodness cannot be ascribed; indeed no predicate can be properly applied to it, for any predication implies relation: in earlier language than Mr Bradley's it involves determination and therefore negation. Even to say that the Absolute appears or manifests itself is to predicate something, to imply relation, and thus is an offence against the absoluteness of the Absolute. But nevertheless there _is_ a world of phenomena, which the most mystical of philosophers must recognise, if only as a world of illusion. The sum-total of these phenomena may be called the appearances of the Absolute; and the Absolute, according to Mr Bradley, "is real nowhere outside them." In this sense of reality we may make predicates about it. Indeed all our predicates, Mr Bradley teaches in his 'Logic,' have reality--the universe of reality--for their ultimate subject.

In this sense it may be possible to speak of reality as good (though it is a misapplication of the term "Absolute" to call it good). But the question remains what we mean by "good" in this connexion, and what justification we have for using the predicate. And the answer must be that Mr Bradley means very little, since the goodness is manifested "in various degrees of goodness and badness," and that the justification for using the term is not made clear. It seems to be used of reality in a somewhat vague sense, as it were _jure dignitatis_ and to have as little ethical significance as "right honourable" when applied to a politician or "reverend" to a clergyman: cases in which it might be consistent to say that right honourable gentlemen manifest various degrees of honour and dishonour, or that reverend gentlemen are worthy of various degrees of reverence and the opposite. All the details of the phenomenal world are bound together by chains of necessity; each is an essential part of the sum-total.[1]

How can the distinction of good and evil apply as between these parts?

[Footnote 1: Appearance and Reality-Appearance and Reality, p. 401.]

We may speak of parts as higher or lower; and Mr Bradley defines the "lower" as "that which, to be made complete, would have to undergo a more total transformation of its nature."[1] The meaning of this is not clear. The reference may be to the complete state which a thing may reach in process of growth. Thus an early stage of a rose-bud may be said to be "lower" than its later stage because it requires a greater transformation before it produces the bloom. But here 'lower'

does not mean ethically lower, unless immaturity be confused with evil. Or the complete state may be regarded as the type of some order or cla.s.s, from which different individuals differ in greater or less degree. This meaning is not suggested by the author; and it could have ethical implication only if the type had been first of all shown to have an ethical value. Or again, the completeness referred to may be that which is alone complete in the strict sense of the word, namely, the universe. And we might say that a rose-leaf would require greater transformation in order to become complete in this sense than a rose-bush, or that the act of giving a cup of cold water was less complete than the far-reaching activity say of the first Napoleon.

But this difference in completeness would not entail a corresponding difference in moral worth or goodness.

[Footnote 1: Appearance and Reality, p. 401.]

Where all stages are essential, it is not possible to say that one is good and another evil. Is not the good something that ought to be striven for, attained, and preserved? and is not evil something that ought not to be at all? And how can we say that any part ought not to be when every part is essential?

From the monistic view of reality, as set forth by Mr Bradley, there is no direct route to the distinction between good and evil. If the distinction is reached at all, it will be found to be psychological rather than cosmical, to be relative to the att.i.tude of the human mind which contemplates the facts, and in this strict sense to be, what Mr Bradley calls it, appearance.

And this is the view which Mr Bradley takes when he proceeds to describe what he means by the 'good.' It is, he says, "that which satisfies desire. It is that which we approve of, and in which we can rest with a feeling of contentment."[1] "Desire"--"approval"--"feeling"--to these mental att.i.tudes the good is relative: they are expressed in its definition. Mr Bradley, it will be seen, re-states Green's doctrine with a difference which makes it at once more logical and less ethical. Green had said that "the moral good is that which satisfies the desire of a moral agent"; and in so saying had simply walked round the difficulty, for he was unable to say wherein consisted the peculiarity of the moral agent without reference to the conception of moral good which he had started out to define. But Mr Bradley dispenses with the qualification, and says simply that the good "satisfies desire." And in so far his definition is more logical. The question is whether it distinguishes good from evil. Both the practical importance and the theoretical difficulty of the problem arise from the fact that evil is sometimes desired, and that the evil desire may be satisfied. The desire of a malevolent man may be satisfied by another's downfall, and his mind may even "rest with a feeling of contentment" in that result, much in the same way as the benevolent man is satisfied and content with another's happiness. Fortunately, the case is not so common: the dominant leanings of most men are in sympathy with good rather than with evil: but it is common enough to make the emotional characteristics of the individual an uncertain basis on which to rest the distinction of good from evil.

[Footnote 1: Appearance and Reality, p. 402.]

There is also another way of putting the matter: "the good is coextensive with approbation."[1] If by 'approbation' we mean simply 'holding for good,' then the sentence will mean that the good is what we hold for good--that is to say, that our judgments about good are always true judgments,--a proposition which either ignores the divergence between different individual judgments about good, or else implies a complete relativity such that that is good to each man at any time which he at that time approves or holds to be good; and this latter view would make all discussion impossible. But this is not what Mr Bradley means. "Approbation is to be taken in its widest sense"; in which sense "to approve is to have an idea in which we feel satisfaction, and to have or imagine the presence of this idea in existence."[2] And here the criterion is the same as before, and equally subjective. In desire idea and existence are separated; they are united in the satisfaction of desire; and approbation is said to be just the feeling of satisfaction in an idea which is also present (or imagined as present) in existence. Not only actual satisfaction of the desire but also imagined satisfaction is covered by "approbation"; but this approval is still simply a feeling of some individual person.

[Footnote 1: Appearance and Reality, p. 407]

[Footnote 2: Appearance and Reality, p. 418.]

We need not concern ourselves at present with the adequacy of this statement as an account of the way in which we come to 'approve' or hold something as good. The point is, that it does not advance us at all towards determining the validity of this approval, or towards an objective criterion for distinguishing 'good' from evil.

Mr Bradley draws a distinction between a general and a more special or restricted meaning of goodness. For the former it is enough that existence be "_found_ to be in accordance with the idea"; for the latter, it is necessary that the idea itself produce the fact.[1]

In the former sense "beauty, truth, pleasure, and sensation are all things that are good,"[2] quite irrespective of their origin; in the latter sense, only that is good which the idea has produced, or in which it has realised itself, which is the work, therefore, of some finite soul. In this narrower meaning goodness is the result of will: "the good, in short, will become the realised end or completed will.

It is now an idea which not only _has_ an answering content in fact, but, in addition also, has _made_, and has brought about, that correspondence.... Goodness thus will be confined to the realm of ends, or of self-realisation. It will be restricted, in other words, to what is commonly called the sphere of morality,"[3] Even in its more general meaning, as we have seen, Mr Bradley has not succeeded in giving an objective account of good. For the correspondence of idea and existence in which it is said to consist is defined in relation to desire, and to some kind of feeling on the part of the conscious subject. Nor was his account successful in distinguishing good from evil: to that distinction feeling is a blind guide. When he goes on to discuss goodness in the narrower sense, in which it belongs to the results of finite volition, he adopts, as expressing the nature of goodness, that conception of 'self-realisation' which, as put forward by Green, has been found inadequate. The same conception was used by Mr Bradley, in his first work, as "the most general expression for the end in itself," "May we not say," he asked, "that to realise self is always to realise a whole, and that the question in morals is to find the true whole, realising which will practically realise the true self?"[4] It is easy to make the distinction between good and evil depend upon this, that in the former the true self is realised, and that what is realised in the latter is only a false self. But it is equally easy to see that this is only to subst.i.tute one unexplained distinction for another. This short and easy method is not that which Mr Bradley adopts in his later work. He has something of much greater interest to say regarding the nature of the self-realisation in which goodness is made to consist; and upon it he lays stress, "solely with a view to bring out the radical vice of all goodness."[5] Goodness, it is said, is self-realisation; and Reality--it was a.s.sumed at the outset--is harmonious and all-comprehensive. These last characters are also criteria of degrees of reality, and consequently of degrees of self-realisation. There are, therefore, two marks of self-realisation--harmony and extent; and these two may and do diverge. No doubt "in the end," they will come together; but "in that end goodness, as such, will have perished."[6] "We must admit," says Mr Bradley, "that two great divergent forms of moral goodness exist.

In order to realise the idea of a perfect self a man may have to choose between two partially conflicting methods. Morality, in short, may dictate either self--sacrifice or self--a.s.sertion,"[7] "The conscious duplicity of the hypocrite," according to an outspoken adherent of Mr Bradley's, is "but the natural exaggeration of the unconscious duplicity which resides in the very heart of morality."[8]

[Footnote 1: Appearance and Reality, p. 412.]

[Footnote 2: Ibid., p. 410.]

[Footnote 3: Appearance and Reality, pp. 412, 413.]

[Footnote 4: Ethical Studies (1876), pp. 59, 63.]

[Footnote 5: Appearance and Reality, p. 414.]

[Footnote 6: Appearance and Reality, p. 414.]

[Footnote 7: Ibid., p. 415.]

[Footnote 8: A.E. Taylor, Problem of Conduct (1901), p. 65.]

It is worth while considering this view of the contradictions inherent in morality. To start with, goodness was defined by relation to desire: the good was said to be what satisfies desire. Desire is plainly a mental state in which idea and existence are separated. As such it cannot be attributed to the Absolute Reality. It will involve a contradiction, therefore, if we identify goodness with Absolute Reality; for goodness implies a distinction (between idea and existence) which cannot find place in the Absolute. But if "degrees"

of reality be a.s.serted, we must admit stages short of the Absolute, and goodness may belong to such a stage in which process or development is allowed as a fact. But Mr Bradley will have it not only that it is a contradiction to identify this process with the Absolute, but also that the conception of goodness is itself contradictory. "A satisfied desire," he says, "is, in short, inconsistent with itself.

For, so far as it is quite satisfied, it is not a desire; and, so far as it is a desire, it must remain at least partly unsatisfied."[1] Of course, if the desire is satisfied, it ceases. It was and it is not.

But there is no more contradiction here than in any other case of temporal succession. A satisfied desire is, it is true, no longer a desire. But the phrase is contradictory only in appearance; for it means that the desire has been satisfied and in its satisfaction has ceased to exist as a desire. A much more important discrepancy is a.s.serted when it is said that "two great divergent forms of moral goodness exist." The fight for moral goodness is 'under two flags'--self-a.s.sertion and self-sacrifice. And the allies "seem hostile to one another," "at least in some respects and with some persons."[2] We have here the time-honoured opposition of egoism and altruism, with a difference. Mr Bradley's most notable adherent in the region of ethical enquiry prefers to overlook the difference and to return to the older opposition of conflicting ideals.[3] But Mr Bradley himself declines to rate the social factor in conduct so high. It is not altruism or social activity which is the opponent of self-a.s.sertion or egoism, but self-sacrifice; and both self-a.s.sertion and self-sacrifice are kinds of self-realisation: in the former the self seeks its realisation by perfecting its harmony; in the latter, by increasing its extent. It is not in content that the two modes of self-realisation differ: social factors, for instance, may enter into both; it is in the diverse uses made of the contents:[4] 'system' is aimed at in the one; 'width' in the other.[5] The harmony of these two methods is attained only when both morality and the individual self are "transcended and submerged."[6]