W. R. Sorley and Utilitarianism*

R.T. Allen

 

I shall briefly survey Sorley’s account and criticisms of contemporary Utilitarianism. Throughout I shall suggest why Sorley is worth studying today, not only to correct accounts of British philosophy as it was a hundred or so years ago, which have written him and similar philosophers out of that history, but also to show how contemporary Analytic philosophy, in its frequent lack of a proper historical perspective, may have something to learn about what it stems from and thus what it tends mistakenly to take for granted and thus fails to consider and cultivate.

W. R. Sorley (1855-1935), the son of a Free Church of Scotland minister in Selkirk, enrolled at Edinburgh University at the age of 15, graduated in philosophy and mathematics, and then theology. He remained at Edinburgh and visited Berlin. In 1880 he went to Trinity College, Cambridge, where he was awarded the BA in Moral Sciences and became a Fellow in 1883, and then the MA in 1886. He was Deputy Professor of Philosophy of the mind and logic, at London University, 1886-7; Professor of Philosophy at Cardiff, 1888-94; Regius Professor of Moral Philosophy at Aberdeen, 1894-1900; and finally Knightsbridge Professor of Moral Philosophy, at Cambridge, 1900-33. Hon. LL.D., Edinburgh, 1900; Litt.D., Cambridge, 1905; an original fellow of the British Academy. His son, Charles Sorley, was a poet who was killed in the First World War and W.R. Sorley published a collection of his letters.

He wrote mainly on ethics, including business ethics, and economics. His books include: Jewish Christians and Judaism, 1881; On the Ethics of Naturalism, 1894; Recent Tendencies in Ethics, 1904; The Moral Life and Moral Worth, 1911; Moral Values and the Idea of God (his Gifford Lectures in 1913-5), 1918, 3rd ed. 1935; and A History of English Philosophy, 1920.¹ He discusses Utilitarianism principally in On the Ethics of Naturalism, and makes further brief comments on it in The Moral Life and Moral Worth and Moral Values and the Idea of God, which incidentally includes much more than what its title suggests, principally substantial elements of a metaphysics and of an epistemology.

 

I shall divide this paper into four sections:

1. Sorley’s aims and the background to his treatment of Utilitarianism;

2. Utilitarianism and psychological hedonism;

3. Further remarks on pleasure and pain;

4. Concluding remarks.

1. Sorley’s aims and the background to his treatment of Utilitarianism.

In Chapter I of On the Ethics of Naturalism, Sorley rightly argues that both ethics and metaphysics, are necessary parts of complete philosophy and so require each other, and also that an ultimate end, a reasoned answer to ‘What is it all for?’, is not only necessary but the primary concern of ethics. In contrast, contemporary Analytic philosophy seems both to concern itself with the minutiae of consequentialism and to ignore the consideration of which valued ends should determine which consequences of actions are to be evaluated, let alone the wider presuppositions and implications of ethics.

He views contemporary philosophy as dominated by two opposing strands which he terms ‘Realism’ or ‘Naturalism’ and ‘Idealism’ or ‘Spiritualism’. For the former, he prefers ‘Naturalism’. It has replaced ‘Materialism’ and does not assert that material atoms and their motions are the sole reality, but nevertheless holds that the completest account of reality is that given in material terms and thus spiritual factors are dependent upon materiality reality or are even illusory. Naturalism, in relation to mankind, divides into an individualist strain, in which persons are essentially isolated individuals, and an organicist strain in which they are essential organs of the social organism and determined by biological and especially evolutionary causation. A similar division occurs also in Idealism: respectively, the older attribution of innate ideas or a priori principles to the individual, and thus Intuitionism in ethics, and the now dominant one of each finite mind as an expression or vehicle of a universal reason, and thus determined by its logical operations and their development in time (i.e. Hegelianism and Absolute Idealism), though, Sorley adds, in the case of Idealism, many ethical systems do not fit easily into either of these two strains. In Part I of the book Sorely takes Utilitarianism as one of three ethical system of individualist Naturalism, along with the ethics of Moral Sentiment as a ‘subjective Naturalism’ mediating between hedonism and an ethics of practical reason, and the ethics of ‘Objective Naturalism’ in which ‘Nature’ in some sense or other gives the moral standard, while in Part II he takes Evolutionist Ethics as the ethics of organicist Naturalism but which may incorporate elements of Utilitarianism.

One could object that the organicist form of Naturalism is essentially utilitarian, because the individual person is, and has value as, merely a functionary of the social whole or a vehicle of its evolution. Indeed, the same applies also in the two sub-divisions of Idealism: in Kantianism persons, as Scheler pointed out, are really significant only as the performers of acts dutiful in terms of the Categorical Imperative and as instances of a generic and abstract humanity, and never in themselves, and, in Hegelianism and Absolute Idealism respectively, they are explicitly of significance only as the vehicles of the cosmic Geist and its self-realisation in history, or, as Bosanquet said dozens of times, in their contributions to the Whole. That is true of utilitarianism in its later and general sense as consequentialism. But Sorley is concerned with historical Utilitarianism and focuses almost exclusively on its other component of hedonism, because, as he argues, the question of appropriate methods of attaining an ultimate end, that is, codes of conduct, cannot be decided by consideration of systems of ‘methods’ alone but there could be several different relations between codes of conduct and ultimate ends, and not necessarily only those of a given end requiring but one code of morality or the reverse. Even if only as a temporary bracketing of the one in order to examine the other, he thinks they can be at least partially distinguished. Yet by thinking in these terms, Sorley appears to risk lapsing into thinking in terms of the logic of cause and effect, and in turn to think of human activity in naturalistic terms and not in genuinely personal ones in which conduct embodies and expresses value and does not merely cause the realisation of a value external to itself. In fact he completely avoided any such separation of the moral end and the means to it. In Moral Worth and the Moral Life and Moral Values and the Idea of God he expounds a virtue-ethics in which the foundation of all moral value derives from that of the moral agent himself and its expression in character, a truly personalist ethics wherein personal fulfilment is simultaneously the goal and the way, but which I do not now have the time to consider.

 

2. Utilitarianism and psychological hedonism

 

In Chapter II he characterises Naturalism in respect of human existence as the recognition that the only mental contents are ‘sensations and their mental residua or ideas’ and that they have only one ‘principle of connexion—the laws of association’, from which everything else derives. Hence conscience and reason can have no independent power for ordering conduct or establishing its end, which must be sought directly in the feelings of pleasure and pain which accompany sensory and motor presentations, or indirectly in more complex emotions if they can be reduced to such feelings. The Utilitarians assumed that they could be so reduced and therefore embraced psychological hedonism.

Psychological hedonism has three meanings which are to be found among the Utilitarians themselves: that action always follows the course (a) which will bring about the greatest balance of pleasure over pain for the agent, but we are not infallible and omniscient egoists, and, if we were, we could pursue the public good only if it gave us pleasure; (b) which appears to be the greatest balance of pleasure over pain, but this could work only when individuals are deceived as to what their action would bring, or if legislators reward action that promotes the public good and punish what decreases it; and (c) which brings the greatest balance at the time, but this is little different from (b). And the legislator (we may add, along with the enforcers of the law), would act from the very same motive of personal pleasure as those he manipulates (see also, p. 57). In all of these formulae there could be no moral motives and ‘ought’ would be redundant, for we could act only as our own pleasures and pains dictate, as Bentham himself acknowledged (Sorley cites Works, ix, 5). It is only by a concealed change of meaning of ‘greatest pleasure’ from that of the individual to that of all, that Utilitarians make the transition from egoism to enlightened egoism and Utilitarianism itself.

Before I move to the next step in Sorley’s argument, I would like to note that here he has shown, as Bentham had admitted, that psychological hedonism entails axiological hedonism and that in an egoistic form, so that only pleasure can be a value and only my pleasure at that. Indeed, the reverse also follows: that axiological hedonism entails psychological hedonism. In section 3, we shall see that Sorley rightly argued that pleasure cannot be the only bearer of value.

To continue: Even to move from psychological hedonism to an egoistic ethics, that one ought to pursue one’s greatest pleasure probably attainable in the whole course of one’s life, would require, not just a rational calculation of present and future pleasures and pains, which in fact we all too often do not make, but also that the estimates of future ones be imaginatively felt here and now, for only present feelings of pleasure and pain can determine conduct. Hence they would have to be as strong as those of ones arising from current events, and then the latter would be redundant, because the greatest pleasure could attained simply by imagining it. ‘Hedonism vindicates its rationality only on conditions which imply the futility of action altogether’ (p. 39). Objections that these arguments are too abstract and ignore the difference between the moral and pleasurable qualities of what we find pleasant, themselves result from the abstractness of hedonist psychology which reduces all motives and desires and all qualities of objects to pleasure and pain, and so leaves no place for any other standard.

In Chapter III Sorley examines more closely Utilitarianism in the more specific sense of ‘Universalistic Hedonism’, which is Utilitarianism from the point of view of the ‘social organism’ whose end is the greatest aggregate pleasure of its members, and is the position that the Utilitarians thought that they had reached from their psychological hedonism. But the members of the social organism would seek their own pleasure which may diminish, or be diminished by, that of others and the whole. Hence, as Bentham recognised, the coincidence of the two can be brought about only by legislation, and primarily that enforced by punishment, and even then it is limited to what is practicable and what does not bring about yet more pain. Therefore it cannot be, in Bentham’s terms, either a political duty, i.e. one whose breach incurs legal punishment, or a moral one, i.e. the ill-will of those of one’s neighbours who are pained by one’s actions. For the same action may not be injurious to people other than one’s neighbours, and so they would never be included in the calculations of one’s neighbours, and the latter might not show such ill-will themselves. Hence the ill-will of those immediately affected could not sanction any general rule such as ‘Universalistic Hedonism’.

As for Mill’s distinction of higher and lower pleasures, that presupposes a standard other than pleasure itself, for which Mill proposed the opinion of those who have experienced both. Either they in turn can appeal to a further standard, other than pleasure, for their preference or there can be no science of ethics but only an appeal to blind authority (here we may contrast Plato, Republic, 582a-583a, in which ‘philosophers’ have reasons for their preferences and not just their experiences). In any case, Mill’s distinction would have no relevance to those uninclined to the higher ones. Mill, in attempting to show that Utilitarianism is not egoistic, simply identified the proposition that happiness alone is desired with the moral one that it ought to be desired, and argued that, as happiness is what is good for each, therefore the general happiness is therefore good for the aggregate of all. Again Mill simply assumed from the social nature of man that we shall subordinate our own interests to those of others, nor gave any independent standard for the ‘improvement’ which society would undergo which would make men more feel more at one with each other, nor again did he specify the means whereby this could happen and how present problems could be resolved. Bain departed from strict psychological hedonism in admitting other attitudes and desires such as sympathy as exceptions to it, and also derived individual conscience as the internalisation of the imposed morality of preserving what society needs for its own preservation, which has the same fault as Bentham’s appeal to a purely external authority. George Grote claimed that each person sees himself both as an agent and as a patient of others’ action, and this, combined with external sanctions, forms a close bond between the two viewpoints, namely, a ‘sentiment of regulated social reciprocity’ (p.72). Yet, says Sorley, the first step, as similarly with Mill and Bain, is to make the individual adopt a standpoint outside his own nature and thus to break with psychological hedonism.

Also in Chapter III, Sorley deals with the other item in the transition from psychological hedonism to utilitarianism, namely, the idea of equality, without which sympathy would be restricted, but which cannot be derived from psychological hedonism. For equality, the moral element in Utilitarianism, requires the agent to act for something other than his own pleasure. Only thus can it advance from egoism to universalism. Hence Sidgwick, still holding that pleasure is the only object of desire, based his case for Utilitarianism on the principles of benevolence and equity, and thus, says Sorley, on Rational grounds and not Naturalism.

Next he argues that the realisation of utilitarianism in fact would be possible only in extraordinary political and social conditions, such as the legislature (and executive, I would add), accurately expressing the average feelings of the citizens or being so enlightened that its egoism results in benevolence. Even then, the necessary measures might be more painful than the existing state of affairs.

Thus he concludes Chapter III by stating that psychological hedonism entails egoism in ethics, and additionally is inconsistent with the nature of desire, for as previously, shown it would result either in domination by present pleasures and pains or, if future ones could be vividly imagined to counteract this, then imagination would be all we need, as indeed, we may add, happens with those who spend their time day-dreaming or reliving the past.

 

3. Further remarks on pleasure and pain

 

Later in the same book (pp. 201-7), he returns to Utilitarianism in respect of its relation to evolutionary ethics, the ‘organicist’ version of Naturalism, and to Spencer in particular. The particular question he addresses is that of the meaning of ‘the greatest happiness’. When it comes to practice, it cannot be left as an abstract and vague ideal. He merely mentions the question of whether it means the greatest average happiness or the greatest aggregate happiness, and briefly shows how it becomes more difficult to specify on an evolutionary view in which future generations may be very different from us. Likewise in The Moral Life and Moral Worth (pp. 129-30) he states that Utilitarianism has no determinate end but only a collection of innumerable persons and their experiences. Again in Moral Values and the Idea of God he states that Utilitarianism offers a single standard of value which would make it measurable, but different kinds of value are not commensurable and Utilitarians, when they preferred spiritual ones to material ones, do so because they regard them as more noble and not more pleasurable (pp. 29-30). Later in the same book, he criticised the Utilitarians for treating values as if they permitted of a ‘mechanical’ unity, like the parts of a machine, each of which can be considered in isolation and added and subtracted to arrive at a total, and not as the ‘organic’ unity of living body, whose parts, when put together again, do not, reconstitute it (pp. 154-5).

To return to The Ethics of Naturalism: Later still in the book (pp. 231-7) Sorley examines pleasure and pain themselves in connection with the attempts by evolutionist philosophers, notably Spencer, to correct utilitarianism by maintaining that pleasure comes from vitality and that it is therefore the goal of evolution. He quotes Hamilton, Dumont, Bouillier, Volkman, James Ward, and Bain, on pleasure and as wholly ‘subjective’ and related to the object-world but being not parts of it. Hence we cannot aim at it directly, but, he adds, we can aim at what we expect to give the one and to avoid what will result in the other. That, I suggest, is somewhat beside the point, for, in the Associationist psychology that Utilitarianism employed, all action is indirect for it is the setting in motion of a chain of ‘mechanical’ causes, and never a unity intended as such. Furthermore, when doing A to bring about B, or, better, when doing B by doing A, we make A our proximate object and B our ultimate one and not just a welcome side-effect.

The really important point arises, but is not explicitly made, when he next cites Hamilton, Spencer, Ward and Stout, who endorse Aristotle’s account of pleasure as unimpeded engagement in activity whereas impeded engagement is painful. But, he adds, this does not account for simple pleasures of the senses nor any passive ones, unless mental life is never purely passive. That is true, and makes any purely consequentialist ethics impossible, since if every action is to be judged by effects and not by its own inherent value, they in turn must terminate in something which does not involve any activity: consequentialism can work only if human life is primarily passive, as in empiricist philosophy and Associationist psychology. Yet some bodily experiences of pleasure are passive. Consider the enjoyment of sweets. That is simply a matter of our taste buds being affected, and even if the sweet has to be sucked, it is not the sucking that is enjoyed. Contrast that with the obviously active savouring of wine by a connoisseur. The important point is that other pleasant experiences, the vast majority, are enjoyments of the activity itself and its objects, and not of mere sensations caused by it. This is what I call ‘ingredience’ value.² Consider a walk in the country. What we enjoy is the walking, and the sights, sounds and scents that accompany it, and the pleasure they yield is not a separable ‘effect’, but is in the walking and while walking, and in and while seeing the countryside, hearing its sounds and smelling its scents. These activities and their objects give the whole experience its colour and flavour, and do not ‘cause’ it as swallowing paracetemol pills causes a headache to diminish and then disappear.² Apart from purely physical sensations, pleasure therefore arises from unimpeded engagement in activities that we find worthwhile in our very engagement in them. Pleasure, better satisfaction and self-fulfilment, is found in giving ourselves up to such activities but aiming directly at them eventually becomes frustrating. For frequently stopping to ask if we are enjoying something or could enjoy it more, takes our attention off the object, the ingredient object, of our enjoyment, and so interrupts and diminishes it. This is the paradox of happiness ignored by hedonism and ultimately also by eudaimonism.

It is in Moral Values and the Idea of God, Chapter II, that Sorley more deeply, though briefly, considers the relation of pleasure to value. Happiness, actually taken to be a value, seems to be a formal one but pleasure is always taken to be a constituent of it. Yet pleasure is not identical with happiness, as shown by the example of malicious pleasure which the hedonist must hold to be good even though he holds malice to be bad, as in fact Bentham did. Hence, according to hedonism, if a malicious act fails to give pleasure to the perpetrator, then it is worse than it would have been if it had. But, equally, it is not self-contradictory to hold the contrary, that taking pleasure in malicious actions makes them worse. Hence he concludes this brief discussion as follows:

 

The feeling of pleasure, real and positive as it is, partakes in this connexion of the formality which belongs to the ideal of happiness. It belongs to every kind of value when realised in its fulness, and in some degree belongs to every realisation of value. It may be regarded as a feeling of value, but it is not a measure or standard of value. Although it accompanies all experiences of value, it does not express their distinctive nature or enable us to discriminate their differences. Accordingly, as pleasure does not explain or measure value, it seems better also not to speak of it as an independent kind of value. It attaches itself to value of every kind, instead of being one kind amongst the others. (p. 30)

 

It is what I call a ‘shadow value’, one which for much the greater part, exists only along with, and necessarily depends upon, the realisation of other and substantive values.⁴

Sorely gives no parallel consideration of pain, except in The Ethics of Naturalism where, quoting Hamilton, Spencer, Ward and Stout as echoing Aristotle, he seems to accept that pain is, or derives from, impeded activity. But, I would contend following Roger Trigg,⁵ that pain is primarily a certain set of bodily sensations to which we normally react adversely, and only in a secondary sense of the word does it refer to our emotional response to other events that we view negatively, whereas pleasure is primarily a positive response to anything in which we find value. Another needed qualification of the Aristotelian account is that many activities include and even require some sort and degree of opposition, obstacle and even frustration, for our pleasure in them consists in overcoming the latter: there is little enjoyment in playing against opponents whom we can easily beat.

 

4. Concluding remarks

 

Finally a few general comments. I particular like Sorely and his contemporaries, and those of our own time who are like them, for they are the true empiricists: they attend to the facts of human experience in all their variety and without distorting them with prior assumptions about what they must be; nor they do attend to propositions about the facts along with the abstract relations of formal logic among those propositions, instead of the facts themselves and to the concrete relations among them. They also view philosophy and experience as integrated wholes, the constituents of which can be treated as isolated segments only temporarily, artificially and for specific purposes. Such virtues, I suggest, we have seen in this summary of Sorley’s treatment of historic Utilitarianism, which contains at least some criticisms of it which have not become commonplaces.

 

Note:

1. Copies of his books and several of his articles can be found at https://archive.org.

2. See my The Structure of Value, Guildford, Ashgate, 1993, Chap. 3.

3. I would add to this that, like all felt experiences, pleasure and displeasure can have after-effects, and put us in positive or negative moods for sometime, as when a bad day at work makes someone react tetchily to really insignificant events at home.

4. See my Ethics as Scales of Forms, Newcastle-upon-Tyne. Cambridge Scholars, forthcoming, Chap. 11 §1.

5. Pain and Emotion, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1970.

* This paper was delivered at a Conference on 'Cambridge Idealism and London Utilitarianism' at Wolfson College, Cambridge in June 2014.