Moral Science by Alexander Bain (top 20 books to read txt) 📖

prove that Justice is good in itself, ensuring the happiness of the doer by its intrinsic effect on his mind; and irrespective of exemption from the penalties of injustice. He reaches this result by assimilating an individual to a state. Justice is shown to be good in the entire city, and by analogy it is also good in the individual. He accordingly proceeds to construct his ideal commonwealth. In the course of this construction many ethical views crop out.

The state must prescribe the religious belief, and allow no compositions at variance with it. The gods must always be set forth as the causes of good; they must never be represented as the authors of evil, nor as practising deceit. Neither is it to be allowed to represent men as unjust, yet happy; or just, and yet miserable. The poetic representation of bad characters is also forbidden. The musical training is to be adapted for disposing the mind to the perception of Beauty, whence it becomes qualified to recognize the other virtues. Useful fictions are to be diffused, without regard to truth. This pious fraud is openly recommended by Plato.

The division of the human mind into (1) REASON or Intelligence; (2) ENERGY, Courage, Spirit, or the Military Virtue; and (3) Many-headed APPETITE, all in mutual counter-play--is transferred to the State, each of the three parts being represented by one of the political orders or divisions of the community. The happiness of the man and the happiness of the commonwealth are attained in the same way, namely, by realizing the four virtues--Wisdom, Courage, Temperance, Justice; with this condition, that Wisdom, or Reason, is sought only in the Ruling caste, the Elders; Courage, or Energy, only in the second caste, the Soldiers or Guardians; while Temperance and Justice (meaning almost the same thing) must inhere alike in all the three classes, and be the only thing expected in the third, the Working Multitude.

If it be now asked, what and where is Justice? the answer is--'every man to attend to his own business.' Injustice occurs when any one abandons his post, or meddles with what does not belong to him; and more especially when any one of a lower division aspires to the function of a higher. Such is Justice for the city, and such is it in the individual; the higher faculty--Reason, must control the two lower--Courage and Appetite. Justice is thus a sort of harmony or balance of the mental powers; it is to the mind what health is to the body. Health is the greatest good, sickness the greatest evil, of the body; so is Justice of the mind.

It is an essential of the Platonic Republic that, among the guardians at least, the sexual arrangements should be under public regulation, and the monopoly of one woman by one man forbidden: a regard to the breed of the higher caste of citizens requires the magistrate to see that the best couples are brought together, and to refuse to rear the inferior offspring of ill-assorted connexions. The number of births is also to be regulated.

In carrying on war, special maxims of clemency are to be observed towards Hellenic enemies.

The education of the Guardians must be philosophical; it is for them to rise to the Idea of the good, to master the science of Good and Evil; they must be emancipated from the notion that Pleasure is the good. To indicate the route to this attainment Plato gives his theory of cognition generally--the theory of Ideas;--and indicates (darkly) how these sublime generalities are to be reached.

The Ideal Commonwealth supposed established, is doomed to degradation and decay; passing through Timocracy, Oligarchy, Democracy, to Despotism, with a corresponding declension of happiness. The same varieties may be traced in the Individual; the 'despotized' mind is the acme of Injustice and consequent misery.

The comparative value of Pleasures is discussed. The pleasures of philosophy, or wisdom (those of Reason), are alone true and pure; the pleasures corresponding to the two other parts of the mind are inferior; Love of Honour (from Courage or Energy), and Love of Money (Appetite). The well-ordered mind--Justice--is above all things the source of happiness. Apart from all consequences of Justice, this is true; the addition of the natural results only enhances the strength of the position.

In TIMAEUS, Plato repeats the doctrine that wickedness is to the mind what disease is to the body. The soul suffers from two distempers, madness and ignorance; the man under passionate heat is not wicked voluntarily. No man is bad willingly; but only from some evil habit of body, the effect of bad bringing-up [very much the view of Robert Owen].

The long treatise called the LAWS, being a modified scheme of a Republic, goes over the same ground with more detail. We give the chief ethical points. It is the purpose of the lawgiver to bring about happiness, and to provide all good things divine and human. The divine things are the cardinal virtues--Wisdom, Justice, Temperance, Courage; the human are the leading personal advantages--Health, Beauty, Strength, Activity, Wealth. He requires the inculcation of self-command, and a training in endurance. The moral and religious feelings are to be guided in early youth, by the influence of Poetry and the other Fine Arts, in which, as before, a stringent censorship is to be exercised; the songs and dances are all to be publicly authorized. The ethical doctrine that the just man is happy and the unjust miserable, is to be preached; and every one prohibited from contradicting it. Of all the titles to command in society, Wisdom is the highest, although policy may require it to be conjoined with some of the others (Birth, Age, Strength, Accident, &c.). It is to be a part of the constitution to provide public exhortations, or sermons, for inculcating virtue; Plato having now passed into an opposite phase as to the value of Rhetoric, or continuous address. The family is to be allowed in its usual form, but with restraints on the age of marriage, on the choice of the parties, and on the increase of the number of the population. Sexual intercourse is to be as far as possible confined to persons legally married; those departing from this rule are, at all events, to observe secresy. The slaves are not to be of the same race as the masters. As regards punishment, there is a great complication, owing to the author's theory that wickedness is not properly voluntary. Much of the harm done by persons to others is unintentional or involuntary, and is to be made good by reparation. For the loss of balance or self-control, making the essence of injustice, there must be a penal and educational discipline, suited to cure the moral distemper; not for the sake of the past, which cannot be recalled, but of the future. Under cover of this theory, the punishments are abundantly severe; and the crimes include Heresy, for which there is a gradation of penalties terminating in death.

We may now summarize the Ethics of Plato, under the general scheme as follows:--

I.--The Ethical Standard, or criterion of moral Right and Wrong. This we have seen is, ultimately, the Science of Good and Evil, as determined by a Scientific or Wise man; the Idea of the Good, which only a philosopher can ascend to. Plato gave no credit to the maxims of the existing society; these were wholly unscientific.

It is obvious that this vague and indeterminate standard would settle nothing practically; no one can tell what it is. It is only of value as belonging to a very exalted and poetic conception of virtue, something that raises the imagination above common life into a sphere of transcendental existence.

II.--The Psychology of Ethics.

1. As to the Faculty of discerning Right. This is implied in the foregoing statement of the criterion. It is the Cognitive or Intellectual power. In the definite position taken up in Protagoras, it is the faculty of Measuring pleasures against one another and against pains. In other dialogues, measure is still the important aspect of the process, although the things to be measured are not given.

2. As regards the Will. The theory that vice, if not the result of ignorance, is a form of madness, an uncontrollable fury, a mental distemper, gives a peculiar rendering of the nature of man's Will. It is a kind of Necessity, not exactly corresponding, however, with the modern doctrine of that name.

3. Disinterested Sentiment is not directly and plainly recognized by Plato. His highest virtue is self-regarding; a concern for the Health of the Soul.

III.--On the Bonum, or Summum Bonum, Plato is ascetic and self-denying. 1. We have seen that in Philebus, Pleasure is not good, unless united with Knowledge or Intelligence; and the greater the Intelligence, the higher the pleasure. That the highest happiness of man is the pursuit of truth or Philosophy, was common to Plato and to Aristotle.

2. Happiness is attainable only through Justice or Virtue. Justice is declared to be happiness, first, in itself, and secondly, in its consequences. Such is the importance attached to this maxim as a safeguard of Society, that, whether true or not, it is to be maintained by state authority.

3. The Psychology of Pleasure and Pain is given at length in the Philebus.

IV.--With regard to the scheme of Duty. In Plato, we find the first statement of the four Cardinal Virtues.

As to the Substance of the Moral Code, the references above made to the Republic and the Laws will show in what points his views differed from modern Ethics.

Benevolence was not one of the Cardinal Virtues.

His notions even of Reciprocity were rendered hazy and indistinct by his theory of Justice as an end in itself.

The inducements, means, and stimulants to virtue, in addition to penal discipline, are training, persuasion, or hortatory discourse, dialectic cognition of the Ideas, and, above all, that ideal aspiration towards the Just, the Good, around which he gathered all that was fascinating in poetry, and all the associations of religion and divinity. Plato employed his powerful genius in working up a lofty spiritual reward, an ideal intoxication, for inciting men to the self-denying virtues. He was the first and one of the greatest of preachers. His theory of Justice is suited to preaching, and not to a scientific analysis of society.

V.--The relation of Ethics to Politics is intimate, and even inseparable. The Civil Magistrate, as in Hobbes, supplies the Ethical sanction. All virtue is an affair of the state, a political institution. This, however, is qualified by the demand for an ideal state, and an ideal governor, by whom alone anything like perfect virtue can be ascertained.

VI.--The relationship with Theology is also close. That is to say, Plato was not satisfied to construct a science of good and evil, without conjoining the sentiments towards the Gods. His Theology, however, was of his own invention, and adapted to his ethical theory. It was necessary to suppose that the gods were the authors of good, in order to give countenance to virtue.

Plato was the ally of the Stoics, as against the Epicureans, and of such modern theorists as Butler, who make virtue, and not happiness, the highest end of man. With him, discipline was an end in itself, and not a means; and he endeavoured to soften its rigour by his poetical and elevated Idealism.

Although he did not preach the good of mankind, or direct beneficence, he undoubtedly prepared the way for it, by urging self-denial, which has no issue or relevance, except either by realizing greater happiness to Self (mere exalted Prudence, approved of by all sects), or by promoting the welfare of others.

THE CYNICS AND THE CYRENAICS.