=Criticism of Utilitarianism.=--The utilitarian account of the
development of the consciousness of duty or its emphasis upon concrete
facts of social arrangements and education affords a much-needed
supplement to the empty and abstract formalism of Kant. (i.) The
individual is certainly brought to his actual recognition of specific
duties and to his consciousness of obligation or moral law in general
through social influences. Bain insists more upon the family training
and discipline of its immature members; Bentham and Spencer more upon
the general institutional conditions, or the organization of government,
law, judicial procedure, crystallized custom, and public opinion. In
reality, these two conditions imply and reënforce each other. It is
through the school of the family, for the most part, that the meaning
of the requirements of the larger and more permanent institutions are
brought home to the individual; while, on the other hand, the family
derives the aims and values which it enforces upon the attention of its
individual members mainly from the larger society in which it finds its
own setting. (ii.) The later utilitarianism, in its insistence upon an
"internal sanction," upon the ideal personal, or free facsimile of
public authority, upon regard for "intrinsic consequences," corrects the
weak point in Bentham (who relies so unduly upon mere threat of
punishment and mere fear of pain) and approximates in practical effect,
though not in theory, Kant's doctrine of the connection of duty with the
rational or "larger" self which is social, even if individual. Even in
its revised version utilitarianism did not wholly escape from the rigid
unreal separation between the selfhood of the agent and his social
surroundings forced upon it by its hedonistic psychology.
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