Recent Tendencies in Ethics | Page 3

in particular, the case with John Stuart Mill, the high-minded representative of the Utilitarian philosophy in the middle of last century. "In the golden rule of Jesus of Nazareth," he says, "we read the complete spirit of the ethics of utility. To do as one would be done by, and to love one's neighbour as oneself, constitute the ideal perfection of utilitarian morality."[1]
[Footnote 1: Utilitarianism, 9th ed., pp. 24, 25.]
No doubt Mill was a practical reformer as well as a philosophical thinker, and he wished on certain special points to revise the accepted code. He says that "the received code of ethics is by no means of divine right, that mankind has still much to learn as to the effects of actions on the general happiness."[1] He would even take this point--the modifiability of the ordinary moral code--as a sort of test question distinguishing his own system from that of the intuitional moralists; and in one place he says that "the contest between the morality which appeals to an external standard, and that which grounds itself on internal conviction, is the contest of progressive morality against stationary--of reason and argument against the deification of mere opinion and habit. The doctrine that the existing order of things is the natural order, and that, being natural, all innovation upon it is criminal, is as vicious in morals as it is now at last admitted to be in physics and in society and government."[2]
[Footnote 1: Ibid., p. 35.]
[Footnote 2: Dissertations, ii. 472.]
A passage such as this leads us to ask, What exactly is the extent of the modifications which Mill seeks to make in the ordinary scale of values? Does he, for instance, wish to invert any ordinary moral rules? Would he do away with, or in any important respect modify, the duties of truth or justice, temperance or benevolence? Far from it He only suggests, as many moralists of both parties have suggested, that in the application of moral law to the details of experience certain modifications are required. How far he goes in this direction may be seen from his own instance, that of truth. He would admit certain exceptions to the law of truth; he would give the less rigorous answers to the time-honoured questions as to whether one should tell the truth to an invalid in a dangerous illness or to a would-be criminal. But Mill always asserts the sanctity of the general principle; and, on this account, he holds that "in order that the exception may not extend itself beyond the need, and may have the least possible effect in weakening reliance on veracity, it ought to be recognised and, if possible, its limits defined; and if the principle of utility is good for anything, it must be good for weighing these conflicting utilities against one another, and marking out the region within which one or the other preponderates[1]." He holds that there are such limits to veracity. He even thinks--though here he is not quite correct--that such limits have been acknowledged by all moralists[2]. He would have been correct if he had said that they had been acknowledged by moralists of all schools: the admission of these limits is not peculiar to Utilitarians. But he vigorously defends the validity of the general rule, and maintains that, in considering any possible exception, we have to take account not merely of the present utility of the falsehood, but of its effect upon the sanctity of the general principle in the minds of men. The Utilitarian doctrine is expressly used by him to confirm the ordinary general laws of the moral consciousness. Nay, these rules--such as the duties of being temperate and just and benevolent--were, according to Mill, themselves the result of experiences of utility on the part of our predecessors, and from them handed down to us by the tradition of the race. No doubt in this Mill is applying a theoretical view too easily to a question of history. It is one thing to maintain, as he does, that utility is the correct test of morality; it is another thing altogether to say that our ordinary moral rules are the records or expressions of earlier judgments of utility. The former statement is made as a controversial statement which is admitted to be so far doubtful that most men need to be convinced of it. The latter statement could only be true if nobody had ever doubted the former--if everybody in past ages had accepted utility as the standard of morality. But, for our present purpose, his attitude to this question is of interest only as bringing out the point that the different schools of ethical thought during last century had a large basis of common agreement, and that this basis of common agreement was their acknowledgment of the