Recent Tendencies in Ethics | Page 3

inheritance. But we do not find any attack upon the main content of
morality by the Utilitarian writers. On the contrary, they were
interested in vindicating their own full acceptance of the traditional
morality. This is, 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