Ethics

B

Ethical Philosophies Before Darwinism

During the 18th century the British philosopher David Hume, in Essays Moral and Political (1741-1742), and Scottish philosopher Adam Smith, in his Theory of Moral Sentiments (1759), formulated similarly subjective ethical systems. They identified the good with what evoked feelings of satisfaction and the bad with what evoked painful feelings. According to Hume and Smith, ideas of morality and public interest originate in the feelings of sympathy people bear toward one another even when not bound by kinship or other direct ties.

In Europe, the French philosopher and novelist Jean Jacques Rousseau, in his Social Contract (1762), accepted Hobbes's theory of a social contract. His novel Émile (1762) and other works, however, attributed evil to social maladjustments and held that humans were by nature good. The British anarchist, philosopher, novelist, and political economist William Godwin developed this idea to its logical extreme in his Enquiry Concerning Political Justice (1793), which rejected all social institutions, including that of the state, on the grounds that their mere existence is the source of evil.

A major contribution to ethics was made later in the century by the German philosopher Immanuel Kant in Grundlegung zur Metaphysik der Sitten (Principles of the Metaphysics of Ethics, 1785). According to Kant, no matter how intelligently one acts, the results of human actions are subject to accident and circumstance; therefore, the morality of an act must not be judged by its consequence, but only by its motivation. Intention alone is good, for it leads a person to act, not from inclination, but from duty, which is based on a general principle that is right in itself. As the ultimate moral principle, Kant restates the golden rule in logical form, “Act as if the principle on which your action is based were to become by your will a universal law of nature.” This rule is called the categorical imperative, because it is unqualified and a command. Kant further insists that one must treat all others as “in every case an end, never as a means only.”

C

Utilitarianism

The ethical and political doctrine known as utilitarianism was formulated by the British philosopher Jeremy Bentham toward the end of the 18th century and later expounded by the British philosopher James Mill and his son, John Stuart Mill. In his Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation (1789), Bentham explained the principle of utility as a means of augmenting the happiness of the community. He believed that all human actions are motivated by a desire to obtain pleasure and avoid pain. Because utilitarianism is a universal hedonism, not an egoistic hedonism like Epicureanism, its highest good is the greatest happiness of the greatest number of people.

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D

Hegelian Ethics

The German philosopher Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, in his Grundlinien der Philosophie des Rechts (Foundations of the Philosophy of Right, 1821), accepted Kant's categorical imperative, but included it in a universal evolutionary theory in which all history is regarded as a series of stages leading toward the manifestation of a fundamental reality that is both spiritual and rational. Morality, according to Hegel, is not the result of a social contract, but a natural growth, arising in the family and culminating, historically, in the Prussian state of his time. “The history of the world,” he wrote, “is the discipline of the uncontrolled natural will, bringing it into obedience to a universal principle and conferring subjective freedom.”

The Danish philosopher and theologian Søren Kierkegaard reacted strongly against Hegel's system. In Either-Or (1843), Kierkegaard expressed his major ethical concern, the problem of choice. He believed that philosophical systems such as Hegel's obscure this crucial problem by making it seem an objective matter capable of a universal solution, rather than a subjective one that each person must confront individually. Kierkegaard's own choice was to live within the framework of Christian ethics. His emphasis on the necessity of choice influenced several philosophers associated with the movement known as existentialism, as well as a number of Christian and Jewish philosophers.

E

Ethics Since Darwin

The scientific development that most affected ethics after the time of Newton was the theory of evolution advanced by Charles Darwin. Darwin's findings provided documentary support for the system, sometimes termed evolutionary ethics, propounded by the British philosopher Herbert Spencer, according to whom morality is merely the result of certain habits acquired by humanity in the course of evolution. A startling but logical elaboration of the Darwinian thesis that survival of the fittest is a basic law of nature was advanced by the German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche, who held that so-called moral conduct is necessary only for the weak. Moral conduct—especially such as was advocated in Jewish and Christian ethics, which in his view is a slave ethic—tends to allow the weak to inhibit the self-realization of the strong. According to Nietzsche, every action should be directed toward the development of the superior individual, or Übermensch (“superman”), who will be able to realize the most noble possibilities of life. Nietzsche found this ideal individual best exemplified in the persons of ancient Greek philosophers before Plato and of military dictators such as Julius Caesar and Napoleon.

In opposition to the concept of ruthless and unremitting struggle as the basic law of nature, the Russian social reformer and philosopher Prince Pyotr Kropotkin, among others, presented studies of animal behavior in nature demonstrating mutual aid. Kropotkin asserted that the survival of species is furthered by mutual aid and that humans have attained primacy among animals in the course of evolution through their capacity for cooperation. Kropotkin expounded his ideas in a number of works, among them Mutual Aid, A Factor in Evolution (1890-1902) and Ethics, Origin and Development (posthumously published, 1924). In the belief that governments are based on force and that if they are eliminated the cooperative instincts of people would spontaneously lead to a cooperative order, Kropotkin advocated anarchism.

Anthropologists applied evolutionary principles to the study of human societies and cultures. These studies reemphasized the different concepts of right and wrong held by different societies; therefore, it was believed, most such concepts had a relative rather than universal validity. Outstanding among ethical concepts based on an anthropological approach are those of the Finnish anthropologist Edvard A. Westermarck in Ethical Relativity (1932).

XIV

Psychoanalysis and Behaviorism

Modern ethics is profoundly affected by the psychoanalysis of Sigmund Freud and his followers and the behaviorist doctrines based on the conditioned-reflex discoveries of the Russian physiologist Ivan Pavlov. Freud attributed the problem of good and evil in each individual to the struggle between the drive of the instinctual self to satisfy all its desires and the necessity of the social self to control or repress most of these impulses in order for the individual to function in society. Although Freud's influence has not been assimilated completely into ethical thinking, Freudian depth psychology has shown that guilt, often sexual, underlies much thinking about good and evil.

Behaviorism, through observation of animal behavior, strengthened beliefs in the power to change human nature by arranging conditions favorable to the desired changes. In the 1920s, behaviorism was broadly accepted in the United States, principally in theories of pediatrics and infant training and education in general. The greatest influence, however, was on thinking in the former Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. There, the so-called new Soviet citizen was developed according to behaviorist principles through the conditioning power of the rigidly controlled Soviet society. Soviet ethics defined good as whatever is favorable to the state and bad as everything opposed to it.

In his late 19th-century and early 20th-century writings, the American philosopher and psychologist William James anticipated Freud and Pavlov to some extent. James is best known as the founder of pragmatism, which maintains that the value of ideas is determined by their consequences. His greatest contribution to ethical theory, however, lies in his insistence on the importance of interrelationships, in ideas as in other phenomena.