The elements of social justice

Preface

THE subject of this book is the social application of the ethical principles explained by the writer in The Rational Good. ‘These principles are summarized in Chapter I so as to be intelligible without reference to the preceding work, to which the reader is referred for the fuller statement of the arguments on which they are based. The treatment as here developed is therefore in form deductive, but this is not to say that it is an attempt to apply abstract principles without experience. On the contrary, the only valid principles are those that emerge out of our experience, and the function of the highest generalizations is to knit our partial views together in a consistent whole. That our social philosophy must form such a whole and that our social efforts suffer from lack of articulate statement and rational coherence is only too palpable. To promote unity of aim among men of goodwill and lay a basis of co-operation between those attacking different sides of the social problem is a practical problem of the highest importance.

I have to thank Mr. J. A. Hobson for reading the MS., and suggesting many valuable emendations; and Mr. A. W. Perris for performing the same service with the proofs.

L. T. H.

Contents

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Cuapter I. ETHICS AND SOCIAL PHILOSOPHY. . . 3

Institutions are not ends but means, Politics are subordinate to Ethics. This was clearly recognised by the Utilitarians in insisting on the impartial application of the “Greatest Happiness principle.” They erred in identifying happiness with pleasure and in the analysis of motive. The good as a harmony of Experience with Feeling. Harmony as opposed both to anarchy and repression. Harmony of attainment as the object of rational endeavour,

Chapter I Ethics And Social Philosophy

SOCIAL and political institutions are not ends in themselves. They are organs of social life, good or bad, according to the spirit which they embody. The social ideal is to be sought not in the faultless unchanging system of an institutional Utopia, but in the love of a spiritual life with its unfailing spring of harmonious growth unconfined. But growth has its conditions and the spiritual life its principles, the sum of which in the relation with which we are here concerned we call Social Justice. To define these conditions and display them as a consistent whole is the object of this book. In what institutions they may best be realized is a further question, on which history and psychology, economics and politics must have their say. We approach this problem towards the close of the volume, but our main concern is not with applications but with principles, not with institutions but with the ends that they serve. This is not a popular subject in political controversy, for it is obnoxious to those who, making success their god, naturally wish to discard all questions of right and wrong, and is hardly more attractive to the reformer, who sees a short cut to Utopia in some political or economic change in pursuit of which he is ready to 3 throw away everything that makes social life worth living. Both views are practically disastrous as they are theoretically false. Politics must be subordinate to Ethics,? and we must endeavour to see Ethics not in fragments but as a whole. The need of a reasoned ethical basis for political reform was more clearly recognized a hundred years ago than it is today, and perhaps that is one of the reasons why for a couple of generations the course of political improvement made steady strides, while the lack of such principles may

1It might have been expected that insubordination of politics to ethics, which is an integral part of Utilitarian doctrine, would have been taken up and insisted on by the Idealist critics of Benthamism. Unfortunately Idealistic thinkers in their very zeal for an ethical basis of society, tend to distort and even invert this relation. Bent on finding spiritual values in institutions, they come perilously near to justifying anything that exists, because it exists. They of course admit relative goodness and badness, but one of their ablest can write: “If we would avoid such scepticism about humanity as would paralyse all serious effort and make us hesitate to call anything right or wrong we must admit the fundamental rationality of all institutions and practical beliefs that have been able to hold their ground for some considerable time, and to afford shelter and supply cohesion to considerable numbers of human beings.” Thus we must admit the fundamental rationality of slavery, serfdom, polygamy, polyandry, indissoluble marriage, divorce by mutual consent, animism, magic and witchcraft, polytheism, and also the denial of these beliefs. Why? Because “The evolution theory compels those who accept it to regard social cohesion and durability as the proof of some degree at least of ethical value and truth” (Ritchie, Natural Rights, pp. 16,17). The evolution theory as such has nothing to do with ethical values, and if it compelled us to serve them so ill it would be self-condemned. What Professor Ritchie must have really meant is this: there must be some elements of goodness in or derivable from a society which maintains itself—not on the ground of the evolution theory partly explain why the forces of progress have fallen into disorder and left the world to the reign of violence.

Whatever hostages it may have given to criticism, the Benthamite school had the merit of clearly and avowedly subordinating politics to ethics, and attempting to apply a simple and comprehensive theory of the good as the touchstone of all personal and social relations alike. The Greatest Happiness principle is now and long has been out of favour, but one of its most deterbut of the nature of goodness as something that works socially. But it is one thing to say that there may be many good elements in a slave society and quite another to find slavery a rational institution. What is good may have survived in spite of slavery, and may have even turned some of the consequences of slavery (eg. industrial organization) to good use (e.g. useful or artistic works). The social spirit of man which is good may turn to its own uses many of the products of the selfishness and fears and stupidities of man which are bad—and that is why the institutions which express these bad elements are so long preserved. The bad in society lives on the good. It may be added that there may be some good in an institution or some glimpse of truth in an idea which it would yet be absurd to describe as fundamentally rational. According to Mr. Cole (Social Theory, p. 15, etc.) social theory is not subordinate but complementary to Ethics, which he defines as the “theory of individual conduct” (p. 7). For me, Ethics is the theory of Ends or Values, whether realized in social relations or through individual conduct, and it is, I suppose, by the lack of such a theory of the disbelief in it that Mr. Cole is “driven back upon the individual consciousness and judgment as the basis of all social values” (p. 54). The aim of this book is to suggest an objective standard in place of individual, ie. arbitrary choice, and the method is to lay down a theory of Ends which have been argued elsewhere and to deduce the principle of social organization therefrom. The “functions” which are the staple of Mr. Cole’s theory can, as I think, only be valued, defined, limited and co-ordinated by the application of such principles.

mined critics, T. H. Green, recognized that it was as much for its virtues as for its vices that it was unpopular, and as I think that it contains valuable elements of truth that have been too much ignored, I propose to examine it here and sift if possible the grain from the chaff. Bentham’s principle, then, is that actions are good in so far as they tend to promote the greatest possible happiness of the greatest possible number of those whom they affect. All questions of right and wrong were to be referred to this standard. What, for example, are the rights of property? Show that upon the whole private property tends to make the generality of people happy and you justify it. Show that it tends to make them unhappy and you condemn it. Show that any particular development of these rights has one or other of these effects and you justify it or condemn it, as the case may be. Show that in a given particular case the exercise of a right will cause misery though in general it is necessary to happiness, and you have then to consider the probable consequence of making exception. Now it may be, sometimes it clearly is, exceedingly difficult to make such calculations, but the principle has this element of value which the scientific sociologist may appreciate. It gives him an open field for investigation. He is tied by no rights or duties which are absolute and independent of all consequences. It is open to him to investigate freely all the conditions upon which human happiness and misery depend and from the best view that he can obtain draw his conclusions as to what is right and wrong in institutions.

It does not by any means follow that he will put a low value on general rights and duties. On the contrary, a survey of society will probably convince him that one of the things generally necessary to human happiness is security, and that men can neither shape their own lives nor co-operate with one another unless they know what to expect and what is expected of them under given conditions, unless, that is, they have recognized rights and duties. At the same time he will see how important it is that rights and duties should be modifiable by a regular and agreed procedure in accordance with the changing requirements of human happiness. Thus the Utilitarian principle has at least the merit of providing a basis for an applied sociology. Next, the principle, Hedonistic as it seems to be, possesses what some consider the austere merit and others the inhuman defect of a rigid impartiality. “Every one to count for one and nobody for more than one’ is Bentham’s rider to his formula." “Between his own happiness and that of any other human being, the Utilitarian theory requires a man to be rigidly impartial,” says J. S. Mill. A theory which carried this consequence is absurdly caricatured when it is stigmatized as a Pig- Philosophy. The question is rather whether it does not strain certain human virtues too far. Is it seriously contended that I am to care no more and do no more for my son’s happiness than for that of any casual stranger? I am not quite sure what the orthodox reply would be, but I imagine that the Utilitarian would admit that par-

1“The happiness of the most helpless pauper constitutes as large a portion of the universal happiness as does that of the most powerful, most opulent member of the community” (Constitutional Code, I. xv. 7).

ental affection is one of the things generally necessary to social salvation and that the special rights and duties of the family play a beneficent part within the general circle of obligations. But he would go on to say, and here he would have right on his side, that the family feelings should not be a centre of collective selfishness but rather of radiant sympathy. They should enable me to understand and respect another man’s feelings for his son, and only so will they work out in the end to the general happiness. In particular—here the essential doctrine of social equality strikes in—I must recognize that to all reasonable thinking the poor man’s feeling for his son is much the same as the rich man’s, the Jew’s as the Gentile’s, the bond as the free man’s. In this respect, as in many others, men differ as individuals but not by classes. It is the relation itself and the depth, tenderness and purity of the affections involved in it that matter. The Utilitarian theory demands of us an equal recognition of human feelings of identical character wherever and in whomsoever found.

Criticism, however, has fastened mainly upon the term Happiness, and upon the Benthamite definition of the term. By Happiness, says Bentham, is intended Pleasure and the absence of Pain. Now this is so far true—and the element of truth is too rashly denied by critics—that Happiness is of the same generic nature as Pleasure. It is something that we feel and like to feel. Without feeling there would be no happiness. But Pleasure, both in ordinary language and in technical philosophic discussion, has generally meant a passing and partial condition, intense or languid as th: case may be, but not depending for its intensity on any permanent conditions, The real value of life we feel to be deeper than this. We may feel a deep-seated unhappiness through the pleasure which is meant to distract us, and we may be sensible of an inward happiness triumphant over discomfort and pain. This happiness is not a matter of additions or subtractions, but rather of some stable relation in which we feel a profound and assured satisfaction. Perhaps we should rather say relations in plural, for there seem to be at least two conditions of such satisfaction. One is that we should be at peace with ourselves, for civil war is not a happy state. The other is that our life should be anchored in some object that takes us beyond ourselves, be that object another person, or our work, or the life of the community, or the God of our belief. To know what objects will permanently satisfy is to possess the secret of happiness, but for the moment the important point is that.some object is essential, and the most serious criticism of Benthamism is that it seems to ignore the necessity. Regarding happiness as the whole and sole end, it depresses everything else to the status of a means. Now this does not consort with the psychology of happiness itself. We are happy in something, and the something must be worth while. Take from it its intrinsic value and our happiness becomes an illusion. If we are happy in things valuable only as a means to our happiness they would cease to be means to our happiness. What we wish for those we love is not merely that they should be happy on any terms, but also that they should be and do what we think worthy.

Their mistakes on this head involved the Benthamites in a very paradoxical result. As a rule of life it is clear that the Utilitarian principle is altruistic—even, as has been said, austere in its altruism. It is an attempt to give precision to the command “Love thy neighbour as thyself.” Yet the Benthamites became so entangled in questions of ends and means that their theory could be represented in the last resort as one of pure egoism. For when they faced the question of the motive appealing to the individual, they felt constrained to maintain that as happiness was the only good his own happiness must in the last resort be the good and the operating motive to the individual, the happiness of others being for him only a means thereto, or perhaps something incorporated with this own happiness by a process of association.?

1Any inconsistencies there may be in Bentham’s various references to this question are amply explained by his autobiographical statement (Works, vol. x, p. 79-82), which to any one who can enter into the spirit of it, is a pathetic story of a philanthropist’s disillusionment. The gist of it—it is, unfortunately, too long to quote—is that the “passion for improvement” which must be evident to every reader of his early Fragment in Government, is not likely to be extinguished but with life. Its “first embers” were kindled at the age of seven. “By an early pamphlet of Priestly light was added to the warmth. In the phrase ‘the greatest happiness of the greatest number’ I then saw delineated for the first time a plan as well as a true standard for whatever is right or wrong, the useful, useless or mischievous in human conduct.” Touchingly Bentham records his simple-minded certainty that he had only to publish what he had discovered and all the great and wise would fall in with it. “No sooner had my farthing candle been taken out of the bushel than I looked for the descent of torches to it from the highest regions’—those regions where as everyone assured him there dwelt nothing but goodwill. “Nothing could be more opposite to the truth. Instead of the universal sympathy, of which I had expected to see these graspings after improvement .

J. S. Mill made a step in advance by appealing to a fundamental social feeling whereby if it were properly developed the happiness of others might become identified with our own, but this does not meet the fundamental difficulty. For if, after all, on a collision arising I do actually feel that my happiness lies on one road and social happiness on another, which am I to choose? Is there or is there not a compelling obligation on me to choose the larger productive in those higher regions, universal antipathy—antipathy on the part of all parties—was the result.” There was “sympathy” only with his abilities based on the hope that they might be perverted. Bentham brooded, he tells us, till he was sixty, on the cause of these things, and not till that age did he discover the selfishness of mankind. “Now for some years past all inconsistencies, all surprises have vanished. . . . A clue to the interior of the labyrinth has been found; it is the principle of self-preference.” Once found by this lovable, great, absurd, childlike mature it was, like all new—and embittering—discoveries, exaggerated. “Man from the very constitution of his nature prefers his own happiness to that of all other sensitive beings put together: but for this self-preference the species could not have had existence. By this position neither the tenderest sympathy nor anything that commonly goes by the name of disinterestedness, improper and deceptive as the appellation is, is denied. Peregrinus Proteus, the man whom Lucian saw burning himself alive, though not altogether without reluctance, in the eyes of an admiring multitude and without any anticipation of a hereafter was no exception to it.” For any pain or pleasure, however feeble, can under favourable circumstances swallow up all others, “as Aaron’s serpent swallowed up all other serpents,” and the pleasure of reputation had “obtained exclusive possession” of the mind of Proteus, In the same way, presumably, pleasure in the welfare of her child may swallow up every other pleasure in the mind of a mother, pleasure in the happiness of mankind every other pleasure in the mind of Bentham. The interest of this passage is not logical but biographical. Bentham first, like many young people, thinks that everyone is and sink the smaller end, and is this obligation, if felt, rationally justified? *

To this question it was impossible to reply in the affirmative as long as action was attributed ultimately to desire and desire to an expectation of pleasure. But the relation of desire to pleasure was misconceived. When we desire something, not as a means to something else but as an end, we certainly anticipate pleasure in the attainment, but we do not think of the attainment as a mere means and the pleasure as a substantive end standing by itself and separable. If we did we should be quite prepared to sink the object of desire as soon as another means of obtaining equal pleasure is proposed. But this is precisely what in desiring and in proportion to the strength of desire we refuse to do. The advertisement says the baby “‘won’t be happy till he gets it.” It is useless for his mother to offer him something filled with the same love of the kind with which he himself is brimming over. They only lack knowledge of the way of displaying it. Bentham shows them this way and is at once treated as an enemy of the people. He broods on the puzzle for forty years, and at last concludes that people love themselves most. This astounding discovery he generalizes into the principle of self-preference and at once is faced with the difficulty that after all many people—he himself to begin with—do not prefer themselves. This he gets out of by the mechanism of a disinterested pleasure without seeing that at bottom this is nothing but a verbal device wherein the substance of his self-preference principle is abandoned. 1To this Bentham, having accepted the self-preference principle, would clearly answer no. “When I say the greatest happiness of the whole community ought to be the end or object of pursuit what is it that I express? this and no more, namely, that it is my wish, my desire, to see it taken for such. . . . (Constitutional Code, Introduction, § I. Works, ix, p. 4).

else which, as she quite well knows, might afford him equal satisfaction. As long as he is in the toils of desire he wants one thing and one thing only will satisfy him, and the mother, foiled in the attempt to satisfy desire with substitutes, has to undermine it by distracting attention and so starting afresh. It is the same in principle with the grown-up babies. A thinker is not satisfied till he has solved a problem. As long as he is in the grip of it nothing else appeals to him. It matters nothing that there are a dozen other problems that he might solve to his vast contentment. This does not ease desire. One of Mr. Shaw’s characters gravely tells a young man that men of his age vastly exaggerate the difference between one young woman and another. It is possible that the young man might admit this with his intellect as a general truth holding in all cases but one. But it would be the exception that would still appeal to him, even though he should reach the stage of understanding that it would be much better for his happiness if it could be banished.

Desire, then, in its essence is an impulse not towards pleasure as such but towards some attainment as such. But at this point many critics of Utilitarianism have overstated their case. They have sought to reduce pleasure to the mere satisfaction of the impulse, the relief from the tension that keeps us on the stretch till the impulse is fulfilled. This is to ignore the difference between an agreeable and a disappointing result. ‘Rosamond could not be happy without the purple jar, but possession showed her her mistake. Now there are many attractive things that disappoint us in the attainment, but in spite of the cynic there are many abiding or recurrent sources of satisfaction. Were it otherwise life would be nothing but a series of vain pursuits. In insisting on experience, on actual results in feeling, the Utilitarians were contending for the control of action by rational values as against mere animal instinct on the one side, or a vague and unchecked enthusiasm on the other. The truth is that something that we may call broadly feeling underlies desire from its inception to its fulfillment, prompting, controlling, and, in the end, if all goes well, confirming and approving. This last phase of feeling is not the least important in action, for it determines the future course of desire itself. As irrational beings we may continue to desire that which is only vapid or hateful when attained, but again in spite of the cynic, that is not the normal course of things. We see, then, in normal desire a certain harmony of feeling, action and experience. Feeling prompts and sustains a course of action arising in experiences which appeal to that very same feeling, and the feeling endeavours to maintain or renew the experience. The different elements concerned move in a circle, maintaining one another in activity, and it is this relation of mutual support which is intended by the term harmony. On the other hand, feeling and desire may fall asunder. Experience disappoints us and there is disharmony and frustration.

Now when we speak of anything whatever as good we are not making a merely intellectual proposition. We mean that it appeals to our feeling that we want to be it, to do it, to have it, to bring it about, to witness it, as the case may be. It is, in fact, something in harmony with our feeling, and here we see the root truth in the Utilitarian doctrine that the good is universally the Pleasurable. Conversely, if we really think a thing bad our feelings towards it are just the negation of the former. It is intrinsically displeasurable. The good, then, is a kind of harmony between feeling and action and experience. Unfortunately, what appeals to one spring of feeling in us as good may in itself, or perhaps in its consequences, appeal to some other strain of feeling as bad. What is to happen in such case we do not for the moment enquire, but it will be seen that, by our definition of the good as a harmony, it cannot be realized as long as there is strife between the feelings themselves. When we speak of a harmony between feeling and experience we must note that feeling is itself part. of experience and the definition therefore includes a harmony between feeling and feeling. Again, unfortunately, what is one man’s pleasure may be another’s pain, so that there is a radical disharmony between two feelings though they are not feelings of the same individual. This quite bald opposition, however, can hold only if there is no sort of social relation between the two persons. If there is anything of the nature of Mill’s social feeling within me there is a traitor in my camp, and the division between my neighbour and me is reflected in a division of my own feelings. These feelings, if given full scope and drawn out into all their consequences, compel me to include my neighbour, and with him in the end all men whom my action may affect, in the harmony that I can be satisfied with as really good, and to recognize any disharmony within this world of felt experience as evil; and this feeling, with all the burden of obligation that it carries, must be deemed reasonable. For in reason what we consider good as such we must hold to be good universally, and if it is good for me to prefer myself, then it is equally good for you to prefer yourself, and where our egoisms clash opposed actions will be equally good.’ Reason as distinguished from feeling is not the basis of our social action, but the system of feeling at the basis of our social action is reasonable.” The fundamental principles in which this system of feeling expresses itseli— e.g. that I must consider my neighbour as myself, are justified in reason, and the judgments of right and wrong founded upon them are true.

“Good” thus means a harmony of anything that in - the widest sense may be called experience with feeling. “Experience” includes, besides that which is passively

1Jt may be urged that there is no absolute good, but that one thing is “good for me” and another good for you. This either means (a) that I can reasonably condemn you when you act in a way which is “bad for me.” If so, however, I must also admit that you reasonably approve your own action. In that case, the same act is reasonably held good and bad by different people, and contradictory judgments about an act may, therefore, both be reasonable. Or (b) that I cannot condemn you because there is no “reasonable” good at all. This is equivalent to the admission that if there is anything which can be reasonably held good it must be universal in its application and not dependent on self or any partial preference,

2As the basis of action the Practical Reason is the harmonized body of impulse-feeling. As a standard or guide it is the order of life in which such a harmony can be expressed.

enjoyed or suffered, our actions and desires, and our feelings themselves, and it includes the experience in the same wide sense of all human beings. But in all relations there are endless collisions of feeling and only that can be reasonably and finally held good in which such collisions are overcome. This, it may be said, is to make the good an ideal unattainable by man, and such in a sense it is. But it will remain that everything that makes for the ideal is right, and every feeling and impulse that conflicts with it is wrong, for though there is stress and indeed disharmony in the very nature of the moral effort, the success of that effort is the way to a possible harmony while its failure involves a disharmony accepted as perpetv-al.

Nevertheless it cannot be too clearly understood that harmony is not the same thing as order resting on mere repression. We are apt to identify personal morality with self-control and good government with the maintenance of order. But in either case order resting on repression is not harmony. The impulse which is merely held down still subsists as a source of inner conflict. Possibly by persistent repression it may be extinguished, but contemporary psychology sees reason to think that even so it is either apt to emerge again in another form, or to become the centre of a deep-seated division operating below the threshold of our conscious life with ill effect psychological or physical. Still, it may be said, there are impulses with which we can make no compromise. Their satisfaction, to take our own criterion, is radically inconsistent with the main bent of our permanent feeling. Excise them and a harmony of the rest of our nature is possible. Admit them and no con- Sistency can be reached. We cannot deny a priori that this is so. There may be radically bad impulses, original sin, and we may have to cut off a hand or a foot to enter the kingdom of heaven. That is, there may be within our own nature radical disharmonies which we have to accept as we accept what is untoward in external nature, our business being merely to minimize the ill effects as best we can. But this we can say, that if or in so far as an impulse can be so guided as to consist with the other requirements which we accept as necessary, then its repression is an unnecessary disharmony. There is a deep distinction between the repression of a fundamental impulse and the governance of the temporary desire in which such an impulse manifests itself. If something fundamental and ineradicable is persistently repressed, there is a permanent disharmony. Conversely, a harmonious personality develops in so far as the fundamental needs find satisfying expression in a consistent life. Just the same principles apply in social relations. It is possible, it is in fact necessary, to use a certain measure of repression in maintaining order, but in so far as that which is silenced is the voice of any real and persistent need of any class of men there remains a standing disharmony, and if this need could in fact be met without prejudice to the needs which are admitted it is an unnecessary disharmony and therefore wrong. Social like personal development will consist in finding more adequate expression for the fundamental needs not of some men but of all in a consistent working scheme.t In sum, repression as such is disharmony and is justified only so far as forced on us by something which we do not know how to work in with the partial harmony that we seek to preserve. Harmony is a plastic principle which does not destroy but remoulds.