A Short History of Modern Philosophy: From Descartes to Wittgenstein

by Roger Scruton

  Such a synthetic picture is attractive, but its parts are logically independent. Moreover they are far from uniformly persuasive. It has often been pointed out that both the labour theory of value and the theory of history have serious flaws. The first purports to explain something which it does not in fact explain; the second makes predictions which have turned out to be false. But enough of the theory of history remains to render its image persuasive. There is something almost irresistible in the idea of a social ‘superstructure’ propelled and destroyed by the movement of an economic ‘base’. Many who find themselves unable to accept the details of the theory are still driven to find the movement of history elsewhere than in the movement of human consciousness. With this outlook has come the ‘third personal’ approach to political action. This approach sees ‘ideology’, ‘false consciousness’ and economic determination where the agent himself finds values, sanctions, laws and the stuff of social life. It is paradoxical that this withdrawal from human affairs should arise from a philosophy which brought to its culmination the theory of the Kantian subject, and which attempted, in its earlier stages, to make sense of the condition of modern man in ways which would both remain in touch with his actual experience, and yet be respectful of his reality as part of the material world.

  Marx’s philosophy recognised as the basis of all political thought the intuition that man is both object and subject for himself. From this intuition came the doctrine of ‘praxis’, according to which theory and practice must be one. The only theory that will remove the mystery from human things is the theory which can be incorporated into the practical reasoning of the agent. But this philosophy, in borrowing the credentials of science, finds itself renouncing the viewpoint which makes it intelligible, creating a barrier between theory and practice that has come to seem impassable. The attempt to show the social reality behind the tissue of human illusion ‘demystifies’ consciousness. Almost inevitably, therefore, it ends by removing the values which are the sole stimulus to social action, and so generates a new mystery of its own.

  16 - UTILITARIANISM AND AFTER

  Marx’s philosophy is of lasting value, largely because of its attempt to reconcile the Hegelian vision of consciousness with an empiricist political economy. There emerged from this attempt a distinctive view of human nature which has been transformed and adopted by many who would regard the quest for a theory of history as a delusion, and who would scorn the study of political economy as pseudo-science.

  The emergence of Marxism from political economy partly coincided with that of another school of thought, deeply rooted in the traditions of empiricism. This school is memorable, if at all, not for a theory of human nature, but for its attempt to describe the whole of morals and politics without one. Utilitarianism represents the will of the eighteenth century to survive into the nineteenth, and the determination of empiricism to resist for as long as possible the attempt to represent the peculiarities of the modern spirit. When this modern spirit finally prevailed, it was with the weapons of an intransigent scepticism. These weapons, devastating in the hands of Bradley and the English idealists, were soon to be turned against idealism itself, and indeed against every form of constructive metaphysics, leaving that desert-land of philosophical agnosticism, over which the logical positivists briefly ruled in empty triumph. In this chapter I shall not discuss all the aspects of the renewed struggle between empiricism and idealism. However, no history can give a picture of nineteenth-century philosophy without discussing the transference of this struggle into the spheres of ethics and politics.

  Hume, in a famous essay, dismissed the idea of the social contract as a superstition, and, suggested that there could be no criterion of legitimacy in the public realm other than utility. It was a reading of this that inspired Jeremy Bentham (1748-1832) to write his Fragment on Government (1776), a piece which attempts to introduce common sense and scientific method into the discussion of the affairs of state. At the same time Adam Smith, a philosopher deeply influenced by the moral psychology of the British empiricists, wrote his Wealth of Nations. This is the treatise which laid the theoretical foundations for laissez-faire capitalism, arguing that self-interest, within the confines of a constitutional government, must inevitably adjust the balance of politics; in acting for his own good, a man would act automatically for the good of the whole. Smith’s subtle work was the pioneer study in political economy, and provided for Dr Johnson’s remark that a man is never so harmlessly engaged as when making money, a philosophical support that fitted it for the optimistic and progressive spirit of the trading years.

  Bentham ‘translated this optimism into the language of moral philosophy, losing, in the process, most of the moral and philosophical insights for which British empiricism is remembered. Adam Smith had shared those insights, and wrote with delicacy and tact on moral and political issues. He therefore produced no new system, expressing his cheerfulness of outlook in reflections about matters which, because they were so new, lay outside the accepted purview of philosophy. These matters awaited the work of later philosophers—and in particular of Marx—to become the subject of philosophical examination.

  It was therefore through Bentham that the optimistic spirit found its philosophical expression. Bentham’s outlook in all matters was one of ‘radical reform’. The resistance to the ethos of reform had expressed itself in the work of Edmund Burke (1729-1797), another philosopher whose roots were in eighteenth-century moral psychology. But Burke’s high-minded literary allusions to the complexity of human things proved unsatisfying in the age of the political amateur and the merchant moralist. A system was needed, and Bentham provided that system, giving expected answers to predictable questions, in terms of intelligible profit and loss. Trained as a lawyer, he had an acute eye for the law, together with a vision both narrow enough to focus his imagination on its details and simple enough to cast the same light on each of them. His Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation (1789) has the singular merit of deriving a philosophy of radical legal reform from a theory which also seemed applicable to morals. Thus he resolved the difficult question of the relation between law and morality to the satisfaction of many at a time when the law, and the institutions which it upheld, were the subject of repeated moral critique.

  Bentham’s premise was simple, namely psychological hedonism. Men seek pleasure and avoid pain, and that is the single moral fact.

  Nature has placed mankind under the governance of two sovereign masters, pain and pleasure... They govern us in all we do, in all we say, in all we think: every effort we can make to throw off our subjection will serve but to demonstrate and confirm it. In words a man may pretend to abjure their empire, but in reality he will remain subject to it all the while.

  This observation Bentham at once transformed into a principle, saying that it is for pleasure and pain alone ‘to point out what we ought to do, as well as to determine what we shall do’. From this it is but a small step to the famous ‘principle of utility’, which states that ‘the greatest happiness of all those whose interest is in question’, is ‘the only right and proper and universally desirable end of human conduct’. Bentham makes no distinction between happiness and pleasure, expressly dismissing, as metaphysical obfuscation, those philosophies, such as Aristotle’s, in terms of which such a distinction had been made.

  The principle of utility had of course been stated before—for example by Hutcheson. Bentham’s novelty consists in his faith in the ultimate nature of the principle. There is no further fact—such as conscience, or moral sentiment or the moral law—which justifies or requires the principle. On the contrary, anyone who appeals to such a further fact must answer the question ‘Why does that settle the issue?’ And nothing can provide the answer, save the principle of utility itself.

  The great apparent advantage of the principle is that it enables ethics to be conceived in quantitative terms. We can envisage units of pleasure and pain (to be evaluated in terms of intensity, durati
on, certainty, propinquity and so on) whereby to measure one course of action against another. Bentham (following the earlier, less devoted, example of Hutcheson) conceived of a ‘felicific’ calculus, which would settle all statable questions of right and wrong. Provided pleasures and pains are thought of as bearing only a quantitative, but not a qualitative, relation to each other (that is, provided the principal aim and subject matter of ethics is forgotten), then it is possible to envisage a solution to all moral problems.

  The method extends automatically into politics. In fact there are reasons for thinking that politics is its natural home. But it at once gives rise to the philosophical problem for the discussion of which the nineteenth-century utilitarians acquired that part of their reputation which is genuinely deserved: the problem of political freedom. For if the right thing to do is that which maximises human pleasure, we must know how to summate the pleasures of individuals. And there is no a priori reason for thinking that the entire pleasure of one individual might not be usefully sacrificed for the greater benefit of the whole.

  It is the problem raised by this last thought which occupied John Stuart Mill (1806-1873) in his most significant works of moral theory: Utilitarianism (1861), On Liberty (1859), and those parts of the earlier System of Logic (1843) (a work of considerable ingenuity and power) which deal with ethics and politics. J.S.Mill’s father, James, was an ardent disciple of Bentham and particularly anxious to incorporate the newfound utilitarian principles into a satisfactory theory of political economy. The interest in these matters was bequeathed to his son (along with certain emotional disabilities vividly recorded in the latter’s Autobiography (1873)). But Mill reacted against the influence of Bentham, and attempted to remedy the evident defect of the principle of utility, which is that it is founded in no theory of human nature that could distinguish people from pigs. This seems absurd, since it is only some creatures who are moral agents or who are treated as such. We ought therefore to present a moral theory that will be answerable to the distinguishing characteristics of the moral agent. To put it bluntly, the concept upon which all the great moral theories from Plato to Kant had been founded, the concept of the rational agent or person, had dropped out of utilitarian philosophy altogether, not because it had been examined and found wanting, but because it had not been examined.

  Mill, like his predecessors, came to philosophy from an interest in political economy, in which subject he had been profoundly influenced by Adam Smith. His encounter with the writings of the French socialist Saint-Simon (1760-1825), caused him, however, to introduce qualifications into the ideology of laissez-faire, and indeed to end life (as he had begun it) on a square of self-contradiction in political matters which his vehement style barely served to conceal. In ethics, too, his outlook was contradictory. He had absorbed something of the romantic anti-utilitarianism of Coleridge and Carlyle, but showed little understanding of the German philosophy which had created it. He felt strong upsurges of rebellion against the flatness and philistinism of the Benthamites, but he did little to undermine its philosophical basis. In the end Utilitarianism and On Liberty—which, like all his moral works, hide intense intellectual conflict behind a mask of superficial clarity— are expressions of an inauthenticity of outlook, which is worth our attention now partly because of the vast numbers of people who have been tempted to share in it.

  Like Bentham, Mill did not clearly distinguish pleasure from happiness, and he affirmed the ‘greatest happiness’ principle in terms which would have been largely acceptable to his predecessor. He attempted, however, to provide an independent argument for it, based on the concept of desirability. Happiness, he said, is not just desired, but desirable, and what could be greater proof of this than the fact that men desire it? Not much of an advance, you might think; but at least the argument has the merit of introducing into the discussion a concept which is peculiar to the mental life of rational beings—the concept of the desirable.

  Again, in his discussion of happiness or pleasure, Mill introduces a covert reference to a distinguishing feature of rationality. He argues that there are qualitative differences between pleasures. Thus Mill is led to reject the purely quantitative approach of the ‘felicific calculus’. He fails to notice however that this amendment removes all authority from the philosophy which he uses it to endorse. For what is the standard of ‘quality’ in pleasure? What tells us that the pleasure of love is more valuable than the pleasure of carnal desire? We seem to have invoked another criterion of value which, because it makes the principle of utility applicable, is presupposed in that principle, and so not provable from it.

  The argument continues in this vein, introducing all the objections to utilitarianism through spurious refutations. One objection in particular springs out at the reader. The principle of the greatest happiness, fine though it may be as an ideal, does not identify a motive. Why, we may ask, should a rational being be led to obey it? Mill, like Bentham, was driven to believe that there is a principle in human nature—the old empiricist principle of benevolence or sympathy—which automatically provides the missing motive. (Bentham was sufficiently impressed by the associationist psychology of the eighteenth century to try to develop a theory of this benevolent motive.) But consider the following case. A tribe observes strict laws of religious devotion, and imposes strict penalties for sacrilege. This practice has a utilitarian justification: it sustains the cohesion of the tribe and so protects it from its foes and predators. But the utilitarian justification, which may be furnished with the most elaborate theories by some observing anthropologist, is not, and could not be, the motive for the religious act. A member of the tribe who engages in religious ceremony in order to sustain social cohesion has lost the sense of religion. In his heart, he is already alienated from the social organism which he seeks to uphold. A wise anthropologist might, in such circumstances, refrain from revealing the utilitarian reasons that underlie the natives’ practice, for fear of doing irreparable harm.

  Here we see that the utilitarian justification of an action may be inseparable from a third-person viewpoint. It cannot be made part of the ‘first-person’ outlook which generates action. It will not, then, be a reason for the agent to do what he does, but only an endorsement of his action in the eyes of an observer. Mill had some inkling of this when he argued that happiness is most rarely arrived at when it is most directly pursued, but he did not see its consequence, which is that, by the principle of utility, the principle of utility must often be concealed from the agent. In which case the agent requires some other source of his values. The fault here lies in the loss of that first-person standpoint which, as the Kantian philosophy makes clear, is the premise of moral thinking.

  It is in addressing himself to the problem of political freedom that Mill wrote his most influential and in some ways most impressive work— the little tract On Liberty. Elaborating the issue already discussed by Bentham, he argued that the problem of political freedom could be resolved once the matter is seen negatively, in terms of the restraints that can legitimately be placed on the individual. Since happiness lies in the satisfaction of desire, then political liberty, if it is to be a value in accordance with the principle of utility, must consist in the liberty to satisfy desires. However, one person may desire to do something which impedes the satisfaction of the desires of another. What principle should be invoked in legislating between them? Or should there be no principle; only the struggle of nature for dominion?

  It seemed to Mill that there ought to be constraint, but that it could not be founded merely on the principle of utility: for that would lead to no settled law, and no civil allegiance to the established order. Each person might differ in his opinion as to which satisfaction would be the greater or most beneficial in the long run. Hence, Mill argued, we need a more straightforward criterion. He therefore proposed the criterion of harm. According to this, a person is at liberty to pursue whichever of his desires causes no harm to his fellow human beings. Mill recognised that there a
re difficulties in defining what is meant by harm, and in his exposition of the concept he exercised his usual talent for dogmatic selfcontradiction. But in some ways this self-contradiction is generic to the ‘negative’ concept of political freedom, as it has come to be known. Many of the things that we wish the law to forbid harm us, not physically, but morally. And in these cases our being harmed and our wishing for legal constraint are not two phenomena but one. We are ‘harmed’ in this sense by the spectacle of offensive pornography, by indecent exposure, by insulting gestures. The concept of harm begins to bring with it precisely that reference to shared moral intuitions which the idea of utility and the negative concept of freedom were designed to replace.

  Despite such difficulties, Mill’s theory of liberty has survived in essence to our own day. His influence passed through Sidgwick and Herbert Spencer to provide what has become liberal orthodoxy in jurisprudence. Mill himself was attached to it because of an ideal of self-development. This ideal was suited to the progressive and individualistic spirit of the age, but not obviously compatible with the classical principles of utilitarianism. However liberty is to be curtailed, it also has, for Mill, a positive content. This positive freedom consists in the ability to exercise and extend one’s desires, to conduct those ‘experiments in living’ without which human progress will be abridged or impeded, to fulfil one’s nature through gestures which reflect fundamental choices that are the responsibility of the individual alone. It should be noted that, neither in describing its containment, nor in gesturing towards its positive reward, is Mill referring to ‘freedom’ in any sense other than the political. His discussion proceeds, as it should proceed, independently of that metaphysical issue of free-will, which asks not about the nature of individual fulfilment and social constraint, but about the metaphysical status of those actions and omissions which we recognise as free.