Progressive Morality: An Essay in EthicsFowler, Thomas
Philosophy
Progressive Morality: An Essay in Ethics
Fowler, Thomas
Ethics, Evolutionary
And yet, as the phrases 'pleasure' and 'happiness' are apt
too exclusively to suggest material well-being and the gratification of
the more animal parts of our nature, so the phrases 'perfection' or
'development' of 'character' are apt altogether to keep out of sight
these necessary pre-suppositions of a healthy and progressive condition
of humanity. Unless there were some standard of comfortable living, and
a constant effort not only to maintain but to improve it, and unless
some zest were given to every-day life by the gratification of the
appetites, within reasonable limits, and the endeavour to obtain the
means of indulging them, men, constituted as they are, would be in
danger of sinking into sloth, squalor, and indigence, and, to the great
mass of mankind, the opportunity of developing and perfecting their
higher nature would never occur. We seem, therefore, to require some
term which will not only suggest the highest results of moral endeavour,
but also the conditions which, in the case of humanity, are essential to
the attainment of those results. Moreover, to a greater extent even than
the words 'pleasure' and 'happiness,' the expressions 'perfection' and
'development' of 'character' are in danger of being supposed to imply an
exclusive reference to self. It is true that we cannot properly develope
our characters, much less attain to all the perfection of which they are
capable, without quickening the moral feeling and giving larger scope to
the sympathetic emotions; but, in the mere attempt to improve their own
nature, men are very apt to lose sight of their relations to others. The
phrases ought, however, to be taken, and usually are intended to be
taken, to include the effort to improve the character of others as well
as our own; and if this extension of their meaning be well understood,
and it is also understood that the development or perfection of
character implies certain conditions of material comfort and the
gratification, within reasonable limits, of our appetitive nature, there
ought to be no objection on the part of the moralist to their employment
for the purpose of designating the test of right conduct; and, any way,
they are useful as supplementing, correcting, and elevating the
associations attached to the more commonly employed terms, pleasure and
happiness. But are there no terms by which the somewhat exclusive
associations connected with the two sets of phrases already examined may
be avoided? I venture to suggest that such terms may be found by
reverting to the old, but now usually discarded, expressions 'welfare'
and 'well-being.' These words, it seems to me, do not primarily suggest
material prosperity, like happiness, nor the gratification of the lower
parts of our nature, like pleasure, nor the exclusive development of the
higher parts of our nature, like perfection, but cover the whole ground
of healthy human activity and the conditions which are favourable to it.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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