Recent Tendencies in Ethics Three Lectures to Clergy Given at Cambridge

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Title: Recent Tendencies in Ethics

Author: William Ritchie Sorley

Release Date: June 2, 2004 [eBook #12492]

Language: English

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RECENT TENDENCIES IN ETHICS

Three Lectures to Clergy Given at Cambridge

BY

W. R. SORLEY, M.A. HON. LL.D. EDIN.

Knightbridge Professor of Moral Philosophy

MCMIV

PREFACE

These lectures were given to a summer meeting of clergy, held at Cambridge in the month of July last. Some passages have been added as they were written out for the press, and the crudities of the spoken word have, I hope, been pruned away; but, in other respects, the original plan of the lectures has been retained. They are now published in the hope that they may prove of interest to those who heard them, and to others who may desire an account, in short compass and in popular form, of some leading features of the ethical thought of the present day.

It is inevitable for such an account to be controversial: otherwise it could not give a true picture of contemporary opinion. Intellectual and social causes have conspired to accentuate traditional differences in ethics, and to make the questions in dispute penetrate to the very heart of morality. It has been my aim to trace the new influences which are at work, and to estimate the value of the ethical doctrines to which they have seemed to lead. The estimate has taken the form of a criticism, but the criticism is in the interests of construction.

W.R. SORLEY.

CAMBRIDGE, 7th March, 1904.

CONTENTS.

I. CHARACTERISTICS II. ETHICS AND EVOLUTION III. ETHICS AND IDEALISM

INDEX

I.

CHARACTERISTICS.

A survey of ethical thought, especially English ethical thought, during the last century would have to lay stress upon one characteristic feature. It was limited in range,—limited, one may say, by its regard for the importance of the facts with which it had to deal. The thought of the period was certainly not without controversy; it was indeed controversial almost to a fault. But the controversies of the time centred almost exclusively round two questions: the question of the origin of moral ideas, and the question of the criterion of moral value. These questions were of course traditional in the schools of philosophy; and for more than a century English moralists were mainly occupied with inherited topics of debate. They gave precision to the questions under discussion; and their controversies defined the traditional opposition of ethical opinion, and separated moralists into two hostile schools known as Utilitarian and Intuitionist.

As regards the former question—that of the origin of moral ideas—the Utilitarian School held that they could be traced to experience; and by 'experience' they meant in the last resort sense-perceptions and the feelings of pleasure and of pain which accompany or follow sense-perception. All the facts of our moral consciousness, therefore,—the knowledge of right and wrong, the judgments of conscience, the recognition of duty and responsibility, the feelings of reverence, remorse, and moral indignation,—all these could be traced, they thought, to an origin in experience, to an origin which in the last resort was sensuous, that is, due to the perceptions of the senses and the feelings of pleasure and pain which accompany or follow them.

With regard to the criterion or standard of morality,—the second question to which I have to call attention,—they held that the distinction between right and wrong depended upon the consequences of an action in the way of pleasure and pain. That action was right which on the whole and in the long run would bring pleasure or happiness to those whom it affected: that action was wrong which on the whole and in the long run would bring pain rather than pleasure to those whom it affected.

From their view as to the origin of moral ideas, the school might more properly be called the Empirical School. It is from their views on the question of the standard of value, or the criterion of morality, that it claimed, and that it received, the name Utilitarian[1]. On both these points the Utilitarian School was opposed by an energetic but less compact body of writers, known as Intuitionists.

[Footnote 1: It seems to have been through J.S. Mill's influence that the term obtained currency. It was used by him as the name of a little society to be composed of young men agreeing in fundamental principles which he formed in the winter of 1822-23. He did not invent the word, but found in one of Galt's novels, the 'Annals of the Parish.' With a boy's fondness for a name and a banner I seized on the word, and for some years called myself and others by it as a sectarian appellation ('Autobiography,' pp. 79, 80; cf. 'Utilitarianism,' p. 9 n.) A couple of sentences from Galt may be quoted: As there was at the time a bruit and a sound about universal benevolence, philanthropy, utility, and all the other disguises with which an infidel philosophy appropriated to itself the charity, brotherly love, and well-doing inculcated by our holy religion, I set myself to task upon these heads…. With well-doing, however, I went more roundly to work. I told my people that I thought they had more sense than to secede from Christianity to become Utilitarians, for that it would be a confession of ignorance of the faith they deserted, seeing that it was the main duty inculcated by our religion to do all in morals and manners to which the new-fangled doctrine of utility pretended. Mill is wrong in supposing that his use of the term was the first time that any one had taken the title of Utilitarian; and Galt, who represents his annalist as writing of the year 1794, is historically justified. Writing in 1781 Bentham uses the word 'utilitarian,' and again in 1802 he definitely asserts that it is the only name of his creed ('Works,' x. 92, 392). M. Halévy ('L'évolution de la doctrine utilitaire,' p. 300) draws attention to the presence of the word in Jane Austen's 'Sense and Sensibility,' published in 1811.]

The Intuitionists maintained—to put the matter briefly—that the moral consciousness of man could not be entirely accounted for by experiences of the kind laid stress on by the Utilitarians. They maintained that moral ideas were in their origin spiritual, although they might be called into definite consciousness by the experience of the facts to which they could be applied. Experience might call them forth into the light of day; but it was held that they belonged, in nature and origin, to the constitution of man's mind. On this ground, therefore, the school was properly called Intuitional: they held that moral ideas were received by direct vision or intuition, as it were, not by a process of induction from particular facts.

And, in the second place, with regard to the criterion of morality, that also (they held) was not dependent on the consequences in the way of happiness and misery which the Utilitarians emphasised. On the contrary, moral ideas themselves had an independent validity; they had a worth and authority for conduct which could not be accounted for by any consequences in which action resulted: belonging as they did to the essence of the human spirit, they also had authority over the conduct of man's life.

Now the ethical controversies of last century were almost entirely about these two points and between these two opposed schools. No doubt the two questions thus discussed did go very near to the root of the whole matter. They pointed to the consideration of the question of man's place in the universe and his spiritual nature as determining the part which it was his to play in the world. They suggested, if they did not always raise, the question whether man is entirely a product of nature or whether he has a spiritual essence to which nature may be subdued. But the larger issues suggested were not followed out. Common consent seemed to limit the discussion to the two questions described; and this limitation of the controversy tended to