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CHAPTER V

THE TELEOLOGICAL VIEW 1

BEFORE attempting to discuss the problems suggested in the last chapter, let us examine a little more carefully our fundamental thesis that the moral worth of acts ultimately depends upon the effects which they naturally tend to produce, and consider some objections which may be urged against it.

1. Conscience and Teleology. When we say that the end which morality subserves is its ground or reason for being, we do not mean to imply that the agent always has the end or purpose clearly in

1 Advocates of the Teleological View: Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics; Butler, Sermons upon Human Nature; Hutcheson, Inquiry into the Original of Our Ideas of Virtue and Beauty; Hume, Inquiry concerning the Principles of Morals; Paley, Moral Philosophy; Mill, Utilitarianism, chap. ii; Spencer, Data of Ethics, chaps. i– iii; Stephen, Science of Ethics, chaps. iv-v; Höffding, Ethik, chap. vii; Jhering, Der Zweck im Recht, Vol. II, pp. 95 ff.; Wundt, Ethics, Part III, chaps. ii-iv; Paulsen, Ethics, pp. 222 ff.; Sutherland, The Moral Instinct, especially Vol. II, pp. 32 ff.; and all the thinkers mentioned in next two chapters. Opponents of the Teleological View: Kant, Metaphysik der Sitten, Abbott's translation, pp. 9 ff.; Lecky, History of European Morals, chap. i; Bradley, Ethical Studies; Martineau, Types, Vol. II; Spencer, Social Statics, first edition.

view.1 We have already pointed out in our chapter on conscience that he pronounces judgment upon an act immediately or instinctively, so to speak, that he calls the act right or wrong because his conscience tells him so. He may not be conscious of the utility of the act which he approves or feels himself obliged to perform. Our theory does not at all assert that he performs acts because of their effects. Moral acts are not necessarily prompted by the conscious desire on part of the doer to produce certain consequences. We eat without being conscious of the utility of eating and without intending to preserve our bodies, but because we feel hungry. Still, we may say, and have the right to say, that the taking of nourishment produces beneficial results, and that these constitute the reason or ground for our taking food. There is no contradiction whatever between the statement that we call stealing wrong because we feel it to be wrong, or because conscience tells us so, and the statement that stealing is wrong because of its effects. In the former case we give the psychological reason or ground for the wrongness

1 See Stephen, The Science of Ethics, chap. iv, ii, "The Moral Law." See also supra, p. 72, note 3.

2 See Williams, A Review of Evolutional Ethics, pp. 326 ff. See Butler, Human Nature: "It may be added that as persons without any conviction from reason of the desirableness of life, would yet, of course, preserve it merely from the appetite of hunger; so, by acting merely from regard (suppose) to reputation, without any consideration of the good of others, men often contribute to public good."

of the act; in the latter we point out the real

reason.

It is just as easy and just as hard, in the last analysis, to explain why we should perform certain acts without being conscious of their utility, why we should feel obliged to pursue certain modes of conduct, the purpose of which turns out to be useful, without being conscious of their purposiveness, as it is to tell why animals should feel impelled to do the very things which they ought to do in order to preserve life, without knowing anything of the end or purpose realized by their impulses. The attempts which have been made to account for this apparently preestablished harmony in the latter case greatly resemble those employed to explain the former. According to some, God has implanted certain ideas and feelings in the soul of the bird for the purpose of enabling it to do what it does. It knows what is good for it, because God has given it a faculty of knowing it. Others simply declare that instincts are innate capacities for acting in a certain useful way. Still others try to explain them as the results of a long line of development, as products of evolution; but in every case the utility of the instinct is confessed. to be the ground of the animal's possessing it.

The fact that conscience prescribes acts which are useful, without knowing of their usefulness, is accounted for in the same ways, as we have already seen.1 According to some, God has given us a 1 See chap. ii.

faculty by means of which we immediately discover useful acts. We, however, prefer to say, as we said before, that conscience is a development, and grows with its environment. The race learns by experience that certain acts make happy and peaceful living together impossible, while others tend to create relations of harmony and good will, and gradually evolves a code of morals which, in a measure at least, tends to preservation or happiness, or whatever the end may be. These modes of conduct, which must be strictly enforced, become habitual or customary, and are surrounded with the feelings—all the way from fear of retaliation to pure obligation which we noticed before. By the side of these feelings, which are more or less intense and easily hold the attention, the real purpose of the rules is lost sight of. Of course, it is not to be supposed that primitive societies carefully reasoned out the possible effects of certain conduct and then adopted a particular end or purpose by an act of parliament. But we may imagine, I believe, that the primitive man had sense enough to find out when he was hurt, and when he hurt some one else, and that in order to live at all every one had to have some regard for every one else. Humanity did not solve the problem of adapt

1 Thus, Hutcheson says: "Certain feelings and acts are intuitively recognized as good; we have a natural sense of immediate excellence, and this is a supernaturally derived guide. All these feelings and acts agree in one general character, — of tending to happiness. See also Paley, Moral Philosophy.

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2 See chap. iii.

ing itself to its surroundings in a day; indeed, it is far from having mastered the subject even in the enlightened present.

The objection, then, that individuals are not always conscious of the ultimate ground of moral distinctions does not affect our theory at all. We can without difficulty explain both the immediacy with which moral judgments are uttered, and the ignorance of the agent with reference to the end or purpose upon which the law is based.

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2. Categorical and Hypothetical Imperatives. Closely connected with this objection is the one that the teleological theory cannot explain the absoluteness of the moral law. The law, it is asserted, commands categorically or unconditionally, Thou shalt, Thou shalt not; and is apparently utterly regardless of ends or effects or experience. We answer, in the first place, that the so-called categorical imperative is the expression in language of the feeling of obligation within us, which speaks peremptorily, and that when we have explained this feeling we have explained the categorical imperative. Secondly, the teleological view will have to regard this imperative in the same light in which it views all imperatives or rules or commands or prescriptions. The claim of the teleological school is that acts are good or bad, right or wrong, according to the effects which they tend to produce.2 Stealing,

1 See first edition of Spencer's Social Statics.
2 See, for example, Mill's Utilitarianism, p. 9.

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