Recent Tendencies in Ethics | Page 4

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 validity of the moral rules recognised by the ordinary conscience.
[Footnote 1: Utilitarianism, p. 34.]
[Footnote 2: Ibid., p. 33.]
The Utilitarians no more than the Intuitionists sought to make any
fundamental change in the content of right and of wrong as
acknowledged by modern society. Their controversies were almost
entirely of what may be called an academic kind, and, however decided,
would have little effect upon a man's practical attitude. But it would not
be possible to make any such confident assertion regarding the ethical
controversies of the present day. We have no longer the same common
basis of agreement to rely upon that our predecessors had a generation
ago. There are many indications in recent literature that the suggestion

is now made more readily than it was twenty or thirty years ago that the
scale of moral values may have to be revised; and it seems to me that
the ethical controversies of the coming generation will not be restricted
to academic opponents whose disputes concern nothing more than the
origin of moral ideas and their ultimate criterion. Modern controversy
will involve these questions, but it will go deeper and it will spread its
results wider: it appears as if it would not hesitate to call in question the
received code of morality, and to revise our standard of right and wrong.
One school at any rate has already made a claim of this sort, and the
extravagance of its teaching has not prevented it from attracting
adherents.
It is on this ground, therefore,--because I believe that the ethical
question is no longer so purely an academic question as it was some
years ago, because it affects not only the philosophic thinker but the
practical man who is concerned with the problems of his day,--that I
have selected the topic for these lectures. It is not merely that many
modern writers assert some general doctrine as to the relativity of right
and wrong. So much was implied, though it was not much laid stress
upon, in the utilitarian doctrine. For the utilitarian conduct is right
according to the amount of happiness it produces: goodness is relative
to its tendency to produce happiness. But a much greater importance
may attach to the assertion of the relativity of morals when one couples
that doctrine with the idea now prevalent of the indefinitely great
changes which the progress of the race brings about, not only in the
social order but also in the structure and faculties of man himself.
Hence it is not surprising to find that there are at the present day some
writers who ask for nothing less than a revision of the whole traditional
morality, and in whose minds that demand is connected with the
dominant doctrine of progress as it is expressed in the theory of
evolution.
Perhaps we might trace the beginnings of this controversy as to the
content of what is right and what is wrong to an older opposition in
ethical thought, an opposition which especially affects the utilitarian
doctrine--the controversy of Egoism and Altruism. If we look at these
two conceptions of egoism and altruism as the Utilitarians did, if we
regard the conception of egoism as having to do with one's own
personal happiness, and that of altruism as describing the general

happiness, the happiness of others rather than of oneself, then
obviously the questions arise whether the conduct which produces the
greatest happiness of others will or will not also produce the greatest
happiness of the individual agent, and which should be chosen in the
event of their disagreement. Is my happiness and that which will tend
to it always to be got on the same lines of conduct as those which will
bring about the greatest happiness of the greatest number?
The Utilitarian writers of last century were of course conscious of this
problem, conscious that there was a possible discrepancy between
egoistic conduct and altruistic conduct; but they agreed to lay stress
upon altruistic results as determining moral quality. Their tendency was
to minimise the difference between the egoistic and the altruistic effects
of action, and in so far as a difference had to be allowed to emphasise
the importance of the claims of the community at large, that is, roughly
speaking, to take the altruistic standpoint. Recent and more careful
investigators have brought out more exactly the extent and significance
of the divergence. In particular this was done with perfect clearness and
precision by the late Professor Sidgwick. He showed that the
difference--although it might be easily exaggerated--was yet real and