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RECENT TENDENCIES IN ETHICS

Three Lectures to Clergy Given at Cambridge

BY

W. R. SORLEY, M.A. HON. LL.D. EDIN.

Knightbridge Professor of Moral Philosophy

MCMIV





PREFACE


These lectures were given to a summer meeting of clergy, held at
Cambridge in the month of July last. Some passages have been added as
they were written out for the press, and the crudities of the spoken
word have, I hope, been pruned away; but, in other respects, the
original plan of the lectures has been retained. They are now
published in the hope that they may prove of interest to those who
heard them, and to others who may desire an account, in short compass
and in popular form, of some leading features of the ethical thought
of the present day.

It is inevitable for such an account to be controversial: otherwise it
could not give a true picture of contemporary opinion. Intellectual
and social causes have conspired to accentuate traditional differences
in ethics, and to make the questions in dispute penetrate to the very
heart of morality. It has been my aim to trace the new influences
which are at work, and to estimate the value of the ethical doctrines
to which they have seemed to lead. The estimate has taken the form of
a criticism, but the criticism is in the interests of construction.

W.R. SORLEY.

CAMBRIDGE, 7th March, 1904.




CONTENTS.

  I. CHARACTERISTICS
 II. ETHICS AND EVOLUTION
III. ETHICS AND IDEALISM

INDEX






I.

CHARACTERISTICS.


A survey of ethical thought, especially English ethical thought,
during the last century would have to lay stress upon one
characteristic feature. It was limited in range,--limited, one may
say, by its regard for the importance of the facts with which it
had to deal. The thought of the period was certainly not without
controversy; it was indeed controversial almost to a fault. But
the controversies of the time centred almost exclusively round two
questions: the question of the origin of moral ideas, and the question
of the criterion of moral value. These questions were of course
traditional in the schools of philosophy; and for more than a century
English moralists were mainly occupied with inherited topics of
debate. They gave precision to the questions under discussion; and
their controversies defined the traditional opposition of ethical
opinion, and separated moralists into two hostile schools known as
Utilitarian and Intuitionist.

As regards the former question--that of the origin of moral ideas--the
Utilitarian School held that they could be traced to experience; and
by 'experience' they meant in the last resort sense-perceptions
and the feelings of pleasure and of pain which accompany or follow
sense-perception. All the facts of our moral consciousness,
therefore,--the knowledge of right and wrong, the judgments of
conscience, the recognition of duty and responsibility, the feelings
of reverence, remorse, and moral indignation,--all these could be
traced, they thought, to an origin in experience, to an origin which
in the last resort was sensuous, that is, due to the perceptions of
the senses and the feelings of pleasure and pain which accompany or
follow them.

With regard to the criterion or standard of morality,--the second
question to which I have to call attention,--they held that the
distinction between right and wrong depended upon the consequences of
an action in the way of pleasure and pain. That action was right which
on the whole and in the long run would bring pleasure or happiness to
those whom it affected: that action was wrong which on the whole and
in the long run would bring pain rather than pleasure to those whom it
affected.

From their view as to the origin of moral ideas, the school might more
properly be called the Empirical School. It is from their views on the
question of the standard of value, or the criterion of morality, that
it claimed, and that it received, the name Utilitarian[1]. On both
these points the Utilitarian School was opposed by an energetic but
less compact body of writers, known as Intuitionists.

[Footnote 1: It seems to have been through J.S. Mill's influence
that the term obtained currency. It was used by him as the name of a
"little society to be composed of young men agreeing in fundamental
principles" which he formed in the winter of 1822-23. He "did not
invent the word, but found in one of Galt's novels, the 'Annals of the
Parish.'" "With a boy's fondness for a name and a banner I seized
on the word, and for some years called myself and others by it as
a sectarian appellation" ('Autobiography,' pp. 79, 80; cf.
'Utilitarianism,' p. 9 n.) A couple of sentences from Galt may be
quoted: "As there was at the time a