On Mr. Spencer's Data of EthicsGuthrie, Malcolm (Writer on Herbert Spencer)
Philosophy
On Mr. Spencer's Data of Ethics
Guthrie, Malcolm (Writer on Herbert Spencer)
Ethics, Evolutionary; Spencer, Herbert, 1820-1903. Data of ethics
outer changes and works in the body adapted changes, the implication
being that psychology becomes a science, as fast as these relations of
phenomena are explained as consequences of ultimate principles.
Sociology, too, represented down to recent times only by stray ideas
about social organisation, scattered through the masses of worthless
gossip furnished us by historians, is coming to be recognised by some as
also a science; and such adumbrations of it as have from time to time
appeared in the shape of empirical generalisations, are now beginning to
assume the character of generalisations made coherent by derivation from
causes lying in human nature placed under given conditions. Clearly
then, _ethics, which is a science dealing with the conduct of associated
human beings_, regarded under one of its aspects, has to undergo a like
transformation, and, at present undeveloped, can be considered a
developed science only when it has undergone this transformation.
"A preparation in the simpler sciences is pre-supposed. Ethics has a
physical aspect, since it treats of human activities, which, in common
with all expenditures of energy, conform to the law of the persistence
of energy; moral principles must conform to physical necessities. It has
a biological aspect, since it concerns certain effects, inner and outer,
individual and social, of the vital changes going on in the highest type
of animal. It has a psychological aspect, for its subject matter is an
aggregate of actions that are prompted by feelings and guided by
intelligence. And it has a sociological aspect, for these actions, some
of them directly, and all of them indirectly, affect associated beings.
"What is the implication? Belonging under one aspect to each of these
sciences--physical, biological, psychological, sociological--it can find
its ultimate interpretations only in those fundamental truths which are
common to all of them. Already we have concluded in a general way that
conduct at large, including the conduct Ethics deals with, is to be
fully understood only as an aspect of evolving life; and now we are
brought to this conclusion in a more special way.
"Here, then, we have to enter on the consideration of moral phenomena as
phenomena of evolution; being forced to do this by finding that they
form a part of the aggregate of phenomena which evolution has wrought
out. If the entire visible universe has been evolved--if the solar
system as a whole, the earth as part of it, the life in general which
the earth bears, as well as that of each individual organism--if the
mental phenomena displayed by all creatures, up to the highest, in
common with the phenomena presented by aggregates of these highest--if
one and all conform to the laws of evolution; then the necessary
implication is that those phenomena of conduct in these highest
creatures with which morality is concerned, also conform."[3]
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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