the author of "conscience, its origin and authority," attempts, after the manner of priests, to demolish the utilitarian principle of morality by stating that the utilitarian must, to be logical, justify any means if the end is desirable. as though the utilitarian and not the theist was for ever trying to show that the intrinsic character or value of an action depended upon the motive (which must be distinguished from the intention; a man who saved another from drowning in order to put him to death afterwards would be influenced by an intention to murder, but the motives were: first, desire to rescue, and, for the subsequent action, desire to kill). mr. richardson writes: "the good and the right possess their authority to the utilitarian because they tend to the greatest possible happiness of the greatest number of sentient beings." now suppose a case which i do not think actually happened, but which may easily be conceived as happening. suppose that cecil rhodes deliberately caused the south african war, as many people believed at the time. this would be characterized (and[pg 21] was, in fact, characterized) as an immoral act of unscrupulous aggression. but he might defend his action thus: "granted that so many thousands of soldiers and citizens will be slain, and the land cleared of its inhabitants. in a few years the land so cleared will produce increased harvests of gold and grain. more food will mean an increase of human productiveness and an increase of population; thriving townships and farmsteads will support a people more numerous and richer in the comforts which make life desirable than could have existed without my action. therefore on the utilitarian hypothesis my action was right and good, and deserved, not reprobation, but approval."
not only is this position not admitted by utilitarians, but john stuart mill long ago pointed out that such a hypothesis "is to mistake the very meaning of a standard of morals, and to confound the rule of action with the motive of it. it is the business of ethics to tell us what are our duties, or by what test we may know them; but no system of ethics requires that the sole motive of all we do shall be a feeling of duty.... the great majority of good actions are intended, not for the benefit of the world, but for that of individuals, of which the good of the world is made up; and the thoughts of the most virtuous man need not on these occasions travel beyond the particular persons concerned, except so far as is necessary to assure himself that in benefiting them he is not violating the[pg 22] rights—that is, the legitimate and authorized expectations—of any one else."[25]
this is sufficient refutation of such objections to utilitarianism as the one brought forward by richardson, and clearly founded on a misconception.
mill, in what is still the best defence of this system, continues: "utilitarians ... are ... of opinion that in the long run the best proof of a good character is good actions; and resolutely refuse to consider any mental disposition as good, of which the predominant tendency is to produce bad conduct."[26]
"the creed which accepts as the foundation of morals, utility, or the greatest happiness principle, holds that actions are right in proportion as they tend to promote happiness, wrong as they tend to produce the reverse of happiness."[27]
the theistic writer says "the essence of morality is sacrifice."[28]
the utilitarian morality does recognize in human beings the power of sacrificing their own greatest good for the good of others. it only refuses to admit that sacrifice is itself a good. a sacrifice that does not increase, or tend to increase, the sum total of happiness, it considers as wasted.
as regards "conscience": the utilitarian, when he attempts an analysis, realizes that "in that complex phenomenon as it actually exists,[pg 23] the simple fact is in general all encrusted over with collateral associations derived from sympathy, from love, and still more from fear; from all forms of religious feeling; from recollections of childhood and of all our past life; from self-esteem, desire of the esteem of others, and occasionally even self-abasement."[29]
for the priest "ethics cannot be built securely upon anything less than religious sanctions, and it is for the sake of conscience that ethics have a practical value."[30]
can an honest and unbiased thinker doubt that the first is the truer statement?
let us now return to a further statement of the position of utilitarianism as dealt with by j. s. mill. from professor sidgwick and those utilitarians who attempt to claim for the atheistic moralist a conscience of mathematical accuracy we are unlikely to derive much assistance.
"according to the greatest happiness principle, the ultimate end, with reference to, and for the sake of which, all other things are desirable (whether we are considering our own good or that of other people), is an existence exempt as far as possible from pain and as rich as possible in enjoyments, both in point of quantity and quality; the test of quality, and the rule for measuring it against quantity, being the preference felt by those who, in their opportunities of experience, to which must be added their habits of [pg 24]self-consciousness and self-observation, are best furnished with the means of comparison."[31]
this, according to utilitarians, is also the standard of morality.
in conformance with this principle of moral obligation, we choose the greater before the lesser good. between general morality and the obligation of duty, with which he associates justice, mill draws what appears to be a somewhat unnecessarily hard line of distinction, insomuch as the difference may be seen to consist more of degree than of kind. other ethical writers make the same distinction when they divide moral duties into the two classes of perfect and imperfect obligation, "the latter being those in which, though the act is obligatory, the particular occasions of performing it are left to our choice, as in the case of charity or beneficence."
if, in assessing the "amount" of good, we take into consideration, besides the categories of quantity and quality, a third category of "proximity," it would, i think, prove a useful qualification by enabling the utilitarian good to embrace all moral obligation, including legal duty, which is considered by mill apart from general morality. by "proximity" it is intended to imply that the nearer good is more binding than the further good, which may in some measure counteract the value of "quantity and quality" where these are involved, and when a decision between conflicting moral obligations has to be made.
[pg 25]
though this additional category of good may not altogether abolish the distinction which mill makes between general morality and justice or duty which may be obligatory by law, it appears to amplify and extend the scope of the principle of utility.
"duty," in the words of j. s. mill, "is a thing which may be exacted from a person as one exacts a debt. unless we think that it might be exacted from him we do not call it his duty."
from this it might be assumed that there could never be any doubt about what is a person's duty, since when any one owes another or the community a debt, he is clearly conscious of it, even to the amount. in the case of right conduct which implies duty, this, however, is not always so clearly recognized, especially when duty implies allegiance or responsibility.
in this connexion we may say that the good we do for our own country is a nearer good than the good we do for an alien country, therefore if doing the good involves a choice we should choose our own country; for the debt we owe to our own country is greater than the debt we owe to humanity at large. equally the good we owe to our own family is nearer than, and therefore comes before, the good we owe to society. to this most people will accede, and, in fact, the realization of this is at the base of all sense of responsibility; thus every man, in whatsoever capacity he is acting, whether as statesman, county councillor, soldier or head of a family,[pg 26] should put the considerations of the body he represents or belongs to before all others; and finally he owes it to himself—or god[32]—to be true to himself, even before he can be true to another, in the sense that keeping faith with a friend will not excuse a man acting dishonestly or untruthfully towards himself. and this for the reason that truth is independent of utilitarian valuation, since truth alone is an a priori and self-evident "good"; by its very meaning it is a statement of "what is," temporally as well as ultimately; as such it must be a statement of indisputable fact, not opinion or faith which rests on assertion. since more things are capable of being proved untrue than ultimately true, it follows that as a criterion of conduct its value is chiefly negative. it can thus be shown that lying, deception, breach of contract are wrong per se, for truth is the basic principle upon which all others depend, and the necessary postulate of the idea of god, whilst the value of our positive acts must for the most part depend upon some such standard as the greatest happiness or utility principle.
as an illustration of the "nearer is the greater good" principle may be cited the line taken up by disraeli when the controversy over the opium trade between india and china first came to the fore. disraeli firmly refused to ruin our export[pg 27] trade in opium for any quixotic considerations involving the moral effect upon the chinaman, whilst it in no way implied a breach of faith with him.
less clear is the question of precedence when two primary obligations are conflicting; primary obligations are here intended to mean those obligatory duties which may rightly be exacted from a person by reason of his indebtedness to the corporate body to which he belongs, or which he represents, and which is entitled to a preference in the good he does.
for instance, it may sometimes be said that a man's duty to his country as a soldier conflicts with his duty to his family as its sole support; both are primary obligations; as long, then, as allegiance to one does not involve a betrayal of the other, which could only be if their interests were fundamentally opposed and directed against each other, both obligations must be equally acknowledged, and a via media discovered to satisfy the claims of both to an equal extent.
should, however, this confliction of interests be so direct and antagonistic as necessarily to involve an overt repudiation of the claims of one or the other, as in the hypothetical case of a soldier being ordered to execute the members of his own family, his conduct, supposing him to be actuated by a desire to act solely in conformance with ethical considerations, would be determined by his judgment as to which course would promote the greater good or utility, having regard to the[pg 28] categories: quantity, quality and proximity; the "nearer" in this case undoubtedly being his family, though this fact alone would not necessarily outweigh the other values of quantity and quality. in certain eastern countries it would possibly appeal to a man's sense of appropriateness to be the agent by which the crime or dishonour of his relative would be expiated.
a man is often heard to claim that his moral duty towards himself, in other words "his conscience," absolves him from the fulfilment of another primary duty or obligation. as i have attempted to show, the only real or a priori duty which a man can prove he owes to himself, and therefore has a right to place before any other clear duty derived from the fact of his membership of any community or corporate body, is his obligation not to violate truth, which is a statement of reality, not of opinion. thus no other duty can rightly oblige a man to perjure himself.
if this maxim is accepted, it will be seen that a deadlock of this sort between a man's duty to his country as a citizen and his duty to himself or his "conscience," could rarely occur in a civilized or rational community. against this a man might argue that he had solemnly vowed not to shed human blood, either as a soldier or otherwise, and that he is right to resist any attempt to conscript him for the army, since he would thereby be required to perjure himself. the answer is simple, for the man clearly violated his duty to his country in the first place by vowing he[pg 29] would deprive his country of his services should they be required, a right which no country has ever forsworn and which is considered the natural return due for free citizenship and state protection; these conditions are presumed to be accepted with the benefits of citizenship and protection of person and property; his first violation of duty towards his country will therefore not absolve him of a second.
neither can it be shown according to this principle that a man is entitled to take an oath of this nature, regardless of potential conflicting obligations, on the score that such an oath is merely in conformance with the postulates of truth, since the question of the rightness or wrongness of shedding blood under all circumstances is not susceptible of ultimate proof, but must remain finally on the authority of an ipse dixit, or of utility.
thus far we have examined to some extent the purely ethical basis on which the idea of priority of duty, as evinced by conscience or reason, rests: the sanction of conscience which rests on religious authority is dealt with elsewhere.
to further illustrate the "nearer good" principle with which we have been dealing, it may be profitable to refer to a passage from an account of the life of general robert e. lee, commander-in-chief of the confederate troops during the american civil war, a devoutly religious man, and a lifelong member of the protestant episcopal church.[33]
[pg 30]
"colonel lee was in command of the department of texas in 1860, but was recalled to washington early in 1861, when the 'irrepressible conflict' between the free and the slave states seemed imminent. when lee reached the capital in march 1861, seven states had passed ordinances of secession from the union, and had formed the southern confederacy. virginia seceded from the union on april 17, and colonel lee, believing that his supreme political allegiance was due to his state rather than to the union, felt compelled to send his resignation to general scott, which he did on april 20. the bitter struggle between his personal preferences and his high sense of duty is shown in the words of his wife written to a friend at the time: 'my husband has wept tears of blood over this terrible war; but he must as a man and a virginian share the destiny of his state, which has solemnly pronounced for independence.'"
lee's action in choosing the "nearer" duty to his own state in preference to the duty he owed to the union as a soldier and a citizen, even against his personal preferences and, as far as one can discern them, his religious opinions, affords a striking example of the principle i have been attempting to illustrate.
whether his decision was arrived at spontaneously and impulsively, or as the result of deliberation, is immaterial as affecting the "rightness" of his action. equally immaterial is the possibility that he might have arrived at an[pg 31] opposite conclusion whilst still employing the same principles, by judging that the categories of "quantity" and "quality" outweighed that of "proximity." whenever clear duties are mutually annihilating, which fortunately is very rarely the case, the problem will always have to be solved, if it is solved with scrupulous honesty, by a careful balance of values, whilst the result at best cannot be infallible.
what stands out, however, in this case, is the triumph of clearly recognized duty founded on "nearer" indebtedness, and so of responsibility, over lesser indebtedness, even though the latter was reinforced by personal predilection and religious sentiment.