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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 26 January 2009
This essay examines D. G. Ritchie's claim that ‘in Ethics the theory of natural selection has vindicated all that has proved most permanently valuable in Utilitarianism.’ Principally, it endeavours to determine what Ritchie means by ‘Vindicated’ and what kind of utilitarianism he thinks evolutionary theory vindicates. With respect to the kind of utilitarianism vindicated, I will show how he tries to fortify Millian liberal utilitarianism with new liberal values such as self-realization and common good. Ritchie's intellectual debts were eclectic and included mostly Mill, T. H. Green, Hegel and Herbert Spencer.
1 Ritchie, D. G., ‘Darwin and Hegel’, inDarwin and Hegel, London, 1893, p. 62Google Scholar.
2 Whether Green should be considered a new liberal is a matter of some debate. I am tempted to classify him as one because of his powerful influence on later new liberals, especially Ritchie. I concur with Peter Nicholson's judgement that Ritchie is ‘one of the best exponents and defenders of Green's ideas’. Though Nicholson sees more continuity between Green and Ritchie than Michael Freeden, John Morrow, and Peter Clarke, Nicholson is nevertheless less tempted than I am to view Green as a new liberal. For Nicholson's assessment of Ritchie's debts to, and differences from, Green, see Nicholson, Peter, ‘Introduction', Collected Works of D. G. Ritchie, ed Nicholson, Peter, 6 vols., Bristol, 1998, i. xvii and xxii-iiiGoogle Scholar.
3 For the view that both Green and Hobhouse were consequentialist perfectionists, see my ‘Between Kantianism and Consequentialism in T. H. Green's Moral Philosophy’, Political Studies, xli (1993)Google Scholar and my 'L. T. Hobhouse and the Reenvisioning of 19th Century Utilitarianism', Journal of the History of Ideas, lvii (1996)Google Scholar.
4 Ritchie, D. G., The Principles of State Interference, London, 1891, p. 102Google Scholar.
5 Ibid., pp. 107 f.
6 Ritchie, D. G., ‘Moral Philosophy: On the Methods and Scope of Ethics', Philosophical Studies, ed. Latta, Robert, London, 1905, p. 299Google Scholar.
7 Ibid., p. 299.
8 Hobhouse, L. T., The Rational Good, New York, 1921, pp. 196 fGoogle Scholar. See my ‘Between Kantianism’, 629, for Green's view that self-realization tends to engender happiness contingently.
9 Ritchie, D. G., ‘Confessio Fidei’, in Philosophical Studies, p. 237Google Scholar.
10 Green, like Ritchie, admired Millian utilitarianism generally while faulting it for reasons similar to Ritchie's. See Green, T. H., Prolegomena to Ethics, Oxford, 1883CrossRefGoogle Scholar, sect. 164 and T. H. Green, ‘Lecture E. T.’, Unnumbered MSS, T. H. Green Papers, Balliol College, Oxford. Hobhouse, like Green and Ritchie, also praised Mill for abandoning, in his more enlightened moments, the earlier utilitarian view that only pleasure was good. By suggesting that pleasures differed qualitatively, Mill raised ‘the question what sort of experience it is that will yield pleasure of the most desirable quality’, thereby implicitly acknowledging that good was something other than just fleeting pleasures (Hobhouse, , Rational Good, p. 196)Google Scholar. Mill effectively conceded that good was first and fore-most a kind of life, namely a self-realizing life.
11 Hobhouse also urges that pleasure alone cannot be desirable because desiring what are serial and evanescent experiences is senseless and bootless. See, for instance, Hobhouse, L. T., The Elements of Social Justice, London, 1922, p. 18Google Scholar.
12 Ritchie, , Principles, p. 142Google Scholar. But this conception of the self is not unproblematic in turn. On the one hand, it is ‘other than a mere subject for pleasurable sensations’. On the other hand, it is ‘what renders possible the consciousness of a series of feelings’ making it, in effect, a ‘mere subject’ for sensations of pleasure.
13 Ritchie, , ‘Moral Philosophy’, p. 342Google Scholar.
14 Ritchie, , Principles, p. 145Google Scholar.
15 Ibid., pp. 142 f.
16 Ritchie, D. G., ‘Review of T. H. Huxley, Collected Essays, Vol. I’, International Journal of Ethics, iv (1893–1894), 534Google Scholar.
17 D. Weinstein, ”The New Liberal Self, unpub. TS. For Hurka on extensional perfectionism, see Hurka, Thomas, Perfectionism, Oxford, 1993, pp. 23–30Google Scholar.
18 Green, Prolegomena, sect. 238. The co-extensional nature of Green's perfectionism probably accounts for Ritchie's assessment, noted previously, that there is more hedonism in Green's moral theory than seems at first sight.
19 Hobhouse, L. T., Mind in Evolution, London, 1915, p. 200Google Scholar.
20 Green, Prolegomena, sect. 286. See, by contrast, Colin Tyler, ‘The Metaethics of Pleasure: Jeremy Bentham and his British Idealist Critics’, Contemporary Political Studies, ed. Dobson, Andrew and Stanyer, Jeffrey, 1998, i. 266Google Scholar, for the ‘received view that Green and Bradley held that Benthamite utilitarianism was too vague to yield useful practical guidance’.
21 Ritchie, D. G., ”What Are Economic Laws'? in Darwin and Hegel, p. 170Google Scholar.
22 See, in addition, Ritchie, D. G., ‘Natural Selection and the Spiritual World', Darwinism and Politics, London, 1901, p. 98Google Scholar.
23 Also see Ritchie, , ‘Natural Selection and the History of Institutions’, Darwinism and Politics, p. 130Google Scholar, where Ritchie says, ‘Conscious imitation because of some expected advantage already implies reflection, which is a further cause of variation among human beings.’
24 Ritchie, , ‘Natural Selection and the Spiritual World’, pp. 104Google Scholar f. Ritchie's distaste for intuitionism was almost visceral and was the source of his preoccupation with debunking it. But note that his account of intuitionism explains our moral intuitions in terms of their utilitarian, survival value.
25 Ritchie, D. G., ‘Evolution and Democracy”, Ethical Democracy: Essays in Dynamics, ed. Coit, S., London, 1900, p. 16Google Scholar.
26 Ibid., p. 105. Also see Ritchie, D. G., ‘Darwinism and Polities’, Darwinism and Politics, pp. 82 fGoogle Scholar., where Ritchie asks whether, by substituting ‘rational’ for ‘natural’ selection in our lives, we may not hope to make ‘mutual help conscious, rational, systematic, and so to eliminate more and more the suffering going on around us’.
27 Ritchie, , ‘Natural Selection and the Spiritual World’, pp. 99 fGoogle Scholar.
28 Ritchie, D. G., ‘Review of Benjamin Kidd, Social Evolution’, International Journal of Ethics, V (1894–1895), 110 fGoogle Scholar.
29 Ritchie, D. G., Natural Rights, London, 1894, p. 70Google Scholar.
30 Ritchie, , ‘Evolution and Democracy’, p. 15Google Scholar. See as well Ritchie, D. G., ‘Note C, Utilitarianism’, Principles, p. 168Google Scholar.
31 Ritchie, , ‘Darwin and Hegel’, pp. 62 fGoogle Scholar.
32 Ritchie, , ‘Evolution and Democracy’, p. 15Google Scholar.
33 Ritchie, , ‘Note C, Utilitarianism’, p. 169Google Scholar.
34 Ritchie, , ‘Evolution and Democracy’, p. 16Google Scholar.
35 Ritchie, , ‘Moral Philosophy’, p. 322Google Scholar.
36 Ibid. The ‘perfection of character’ and the ‘good of the community are identical principles because, like other new liberals, Ritchie deemed all forms of genuine self-realization to be mutually reinforcing, common goods’.
37 Ibid., p. 268. Also see Ritchie, D. G., ‘Mr. Newman on “The Politics” of Aristotle’, Quarterly Review, CXCVI (07, 1902), 148Google Scholar, where Ritchie says approvingly that Aristotle ‘as a man of science, has an interest in purely historical questions of origin; but he never assumes that the history of how an institution came to be decides the question what is its proper function now.’
38 Ritchie, , ‘Moral Philosophy”, p. 270Google Scholar. But see Ritchie, D. G., ‘The Rationality of History’ in Essays in Philosophical Criticism, ed. Pringle-Pattison, Seth and Haldane, R. B., London, 1883, p. 140Google Scholar, where Ritchie says: ‘“If you justify the conduct of individuals or nations by results, is not that to confuse might and right?” In a sense it is and, in a sense, might is right. If individuals or nations are able permanently to succeed in influencing the world, we must regard their conduct as justified by their success.’
39 Ritchie, , ‘Moral Philosophy”, p. 295Google Scholar.
40 Ibid., p. 296. Even more than Ritchie, Hobhouse stressed the centrality of harmony as a constituent feature of self-realizing personality. See, for instance, Hobhouse, , Rational Good, pp. 115, 124Google Scholar.
41 Ritchie, D. G., ‘Origin and Validity’, Darwin and Hegel, p. 23Google Scholar.
42 Ritchie, , ‘Darwin and Hegel’, p. 70Google Scholar.
43 Ibid., p. 58.
44 Ibid., p. 70. For Ritchie's neo-Hegelian teleologizing of natural selection, see especially Otter, Sandra M. Den, British Idealism and Social Explanation, Oxford, 1996, pp. 101–9CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Also see Boucher, David, ‘Introduction’, The British Idealists, ed. Boucher, David, Cambridge, 1997, pp. xiv–xxCrossRefGoogle Scholar. And see Nicholson, Peter, ‘Introduction’, pp. xviiifGoogle Scholar. Note, especially, Nicholson's remark that Ritchie's ‘strategy, however, was to use Hegel to turn Darwinism into a philosophical theory’.
45 Ritchie, D. G., ‘Bonar's ”Philosophy and Political Economy”’, Economic Review, iii (1893), 554Google Scholar. Ritchie concludes his review of Bonar remarking: ‘It is true that Natural Selection, as it operates among plants and animals, means the perpetual destruction of the less fit; but I do not find in Hegel any attempt to deny the prodigal wastefulness (as it seems to us) of nature's processes. The elimination of the less fit in the merely natural struggle for existence is the necessary element of negativity in the lowest form’ (554 f.). For the view that Green and his followers failed to reconcile Hegel and Darwin, see Tyler, Colin, ‘The Evolution of the Epistemic Self’, Bradley Studies, V (1998)Google Scholar.
46 For Spencer's influence on the development of Ritchie's thinking, see Den Otter, pp. 93–8.
47 Ritchie, , Principles, pp. 11–13Google Scholar.
48 Ibid., p. 23. Many interpreters of Spencer have echoed Ritchie's accusation that Spencer's political and sociological theories are inconsistent. For an example of this view, see Wiltshire, David, The Social and Political Thought of Herbert Spencer, Oxford, 1978, ch. 9Google Scholar.
49 Ritchie, , ”Darwinism and Polities’, p. 10Google Scholar.
50 Spencer, Herbert, ‘Justice’, The Principles of Ethics, 2 vols., Indianapolis, 1978, ii. 62Google Scholar. ‘Law and Liberty: The Question of State Interference’ was first published in 1891 in Journal of the Society for the Study of Social Ethics.
51 Ritchie, D. G., ‘Law and Liberty: The Question of State Interference’ in Studies in Political and Social Ethics, London, 1902, pp. 58 fGoogle Scholar.
52 Ibid., p. 59: See, too, Hobhouse's similar criticisms of Spencer's equal freedom principle in Hobhouse, , Elements, p. 60Google Scholarand Hobhouse, L. T., Liberalism, Oxford, 1964, p. 36Google Scholar.
53 Ritchie, , ‘Law and Liberty’, pp. 59 fGoogle Scholar.
54 Ibid., p. 62. Spencer's equal liberty principle is likewise ultimately grounded in utilitarian considerations which Ritchie seems not to appreciate. See myEqual Freedom and Utility, Cambridge, 1998, ch. IIGoogle Scholar.
55 Ritchie, , ‘Mr. Newman’, 151Google Scholar.
56 Ritchie, , Principles, p. 39Google Scholar. Also see Taylor's, Michael recent Men Versus the State: Herbert Spencer and Late Victorian Individualism, Oxford, 1992, p. 241Google Scholar, which endorses Ritchie's assessment that Spencer defended traditional natural rights.
57 Ritchie, D. G., ‘Symposium — Is Human Law the Basis of Morality, or Morality of Human Law?', Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, ii, pt. II (1894), 126 fGoogle Scholar. Ritchie warns, however: ‘But the appeal to “Nature” is so very ambiguous, and is so apt to mean an appeal away from Reason to unanalysed instincts or sentiments, that it would be better if those who use the term as just explained were to avoid it,…’ (127). Also see Ritchie, , Principles, p. 33Google Scholar, where Ritchie says: ‘Sir F. Pollock has rightly pointed out that Naturrecht is much the same sort of thing as Bentham's theory of legislation. It is an ideal code, “purporting to be justified by the universal nature of human relations, and qualified by no respect of time and place”.’
58 Ritchie, , Principles, pp. 43 fGoogle Scholar. See, in addition, Ritchie, D. G., ”The Rights of Minorities’, Darwin and Hegel, p. 282Google Scholar.
59 Ritchie, , Natural Rights, p. 101Google Scholar.
60 Ibid., p. 103. See, as well, ibid., p. 270. There, Ritchie says: ‘We can only allow natural rights to be talked about in the sense in which natural rights mean those legal or customary rights which we have come to think or may come to think it most advantageous to recognise.’ Also note that, for Ritchie, in so far as rights to life and liberty have proven to be our most advantageous of all rights, we have come to recognize them as our most fundamental ones. See pt. II of Natural Rights for Ritchie's detailed discussion of these two basic rights as well as other important ones.
61 Ritchie, , ‘Bonar's “Philosophy”’, 549Google Scholar.
62 Ritchie, , ‘Darwin and Hegel’, pp. 50 fGoogle Scholar.
63 Spencer, , Principles, ii, p. 43Google Scholar.
64 Ritchie admits that Spencer sometimes understands rights properly, especially where Spencer says that belief in natural rights constitutes the realization that certain conditions are essential to successful social life. See Ritchie, , Principles, p. 39Google Scholar. Also note Ritchie's, comment in ‘Bonar's “Philosophy”’, 549Google Scholar, that ‘practically, however, the appeal to natural rights means with Mr. Spencer simply an appeal to those customs, usages, and ideas about property, etc., which approved themselves to the “philosophical radicals” of a by-gone generation’.
65 For Spencer's defense of Lamarckian use-inheritance, see his ”The Inadequacy of “Natural Selection”’, Contemporary Review, lxiii (1893)Google Scholar and his subsequent controversy with August Weismann about use-inheritance also published as a series of exchanges in Contemporary Review between 1893 and 1895.
66 According to Boucher, the British Idealists generally rejected Lamarckianism as unscientific. See Boucher, p. xvi.
67 Ritchie, D. G., ‘Has the Hereditahility or Non-Hereditability of Acquired Characteristics Any Direct Bearing on Ethical Theory?’“, Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, iii (1895–1896), 145Google Scholar.
68 Recent interdisciplinary studies in biology, psychology and anthropology come to similar conclusions. See, for instance, Ridley, Matt, The Origins of Virtue, New York, 1997Google Scholar, especially where Ridley concludes: ‘What makes human beings different [from other species] is culture. Because of the human capacity of passing on traditions, customs, knowledge and beliefs by direct infection from one person to another, there is a whole new kind of evolution going on in human beings - a competition not between genetically different individuals or groups, but between culturally different individuals and groups. One person may thrive at the expense of another not because he has better genes, but because he knows or believes something of practical value’ (pp. 179 f.).
69 Ritchie, , ‘Has the Hereditability?’, 147Google Scholar.
70 For both Ritchie and Spencer, then, our moral intuitions are rough-and-ready evolutionary adaptions to social life that utilitarian practical reasoning later refines. In a recent and similar vein, see Bailey, James Wood, ‘Is it Rational to Maximize?’, Utilitas, X (1998), 220Google Scholar, where Bailey writes: ‘One need not be a global moral sceptic to question the probative value of specific moral intuitions. Our moral intuitions may be a guide to some kind of strategic reality just as our physical intuitions are a guide to the physical universe. Such intuitions may be cognitive adaptions to the conditions of ordinary life.’
71 Ritchie's liberal socialism was shared by new liberals and idealists alike, which Boucher calls a ‘true or right kind of socialism, which uses the state to advance freedom of choice by removing obstacles to the development of individual freedom’. See Boucher, pp. xxiv f. Spencer's liberal utilitarianism was closer to Bosanquet's liberalism in placing more emphasis on individual self-reliance and much less emphasis on state interference. Also see Nicholson, , ‘Introduction’, xxiv–xxviiiGoogle Scholar, which discusses Ritchie's relationship to Fabianism.
72 Ritchie, , Natural Rights, p. 274Google Scholar. Spencer and Ritchie also differed about whether or not rights were indefeasible. Ritchie suggests that basic rights, though stringent, are always open to refinement. Nonetheless, there was a legislative time and place for critical, second-level thinking about revising rights. Most of the time, we should diligently stick to respecting them as everyday decision procedures. Ritchie observes: ‘Accepted rules need revision and correction, not of course in the moment when they have to be applied – the battlefield is not the place for examining bayonets, though it certainly does test them.’ Ritchie, , ‘Note C: Utilitarianism’, p. 171Google Scholar. For an analysis of Spencer's view that rights were indefeasible as well as conventional, see my Equal Freedom, ch. III.
73 Hume, David, A Treatise of Human Nature, ed. Selby-Bigge, L. A., rev. Nidditch, P., Oxford, 2nd edn., 1978 [1739], p. 484Google Scholar.
74 See, in addition, Hume, , Treatise, p. 620Google Scholar, where Hume says emphatically: ‘The interest, on which justice is founded, is the greatest imaginable and extends to all times and places.…: It is obvious, and discovers itself on the very first formation of society. All these causes render the rules of justice stedfast and immutable; at least as immutable as human nature.’
75 Hume, David, Appendix III, ‘Some Further Considerations with Regard to Justice’, An Enquiry Concerning the Principles of Morals, ed. Hendel, Charles W., New York, 1957 [1751], p. 122Google Scholar.
76 Hume, , Treatise, p. 490Google Scholar. Hume deploys this fitting and memorable example again in ‘Some Further Considerations’, p. 123.
77 Hume, , Treatise, p. 529Google Scholar. Hume scholars are divided about the purity of Hume's utilitarian credentials. For two recent critical readings of Hume as a utilitarian, see Roger Crisp, ‘Self-love and the General Interest: Hume on Impartiality’ (unpub.) and F. Rosen, ‘Reading Hume Backwards: The Idea of Utility in Hume and Bentham’ (unpub.). Crisp's essay also cites important utilitarian and non-utilitarian interpretations of Hume in two helpful footnotes (13). For his part, Crisp's Hume exemplifies what Robert Adams calls ‘motive utilitarianism’ (though Crisp would reject this characterization of his view of Hume). For Hume, in Crisp's view, moral praise and blame are ‘directed at intention, and intentions emerge from character, the “external signs” of which are actions’. Hume asks not, ‘“Which actions are right and wrong?’, but, “Which aspects of character should we praise, and why?”’ (19). In support of his interpretation, Crisp, quotes Treatise, p. 477Google Scholar, where Hume writes that in evaluating actions, ‘we regard only the motives that produced them, and consider the actions as signs or indications of certain principles in the mind and temper’. In addition, see Hume, David, Enquiry, p. 55n7Google Scholar, where Hume says by analogy: ”Why is this peach tree said to be better than that other, but because it produces more or better fruit? And would not the same praise be given it, though snails or vermin had destroyed the peaches before they came to full maturity? In morals, too, is not the tree known by the fruit?’ By contrast, see Ritchie's, nearly identical claim in ‘On the Meaning of the Term ”Motive”, and on the Ethical Significance of Motives’, International Journal of Ethics, iv (1893–1894), 93 fGoogle Scholar., that the happiness one produces in the world mirrors the purity of one's motives or, in other words, the extent to which one is self-realizing: ‘Motives being identical with the spirit in an act is done are, it seems to me, ideally, the true subject of moral judgment; but, in practice, it is well to confess that motives could be known in their fulness only to an omniscient judge, and for human beings it is wiser on the whole to pronounce judgment on acts in their general aspect. The individual cannot know even his own motives adequately. In the long run, but only in the long run and on the whole good motives cannot bring forth bad (i.e., socially mischievous) acts; and when we judge the character and the motives, we are inferring the nature of the tree from its habitual fruits. But we may err in very many cases; and it is certainly better to discuss the right and wrong acts, where we can directly apply a measure and a standard, - viz., their effects on social, well-being. … In the case of legislation it is absolutely necessary to deal with acts (the connection between English utilitarianism and theories of legislation will suggest itself).’ Thus, like Hume, Ritchie is arguably a virtue-utilitarian for whom promoting happiness is a substitute strategy testifying to the existence of self-realizing virtue. And characterizing Ritchie as a virtueutilitarian is simply an alternative way of capturing the sense in which he was an extensional perfectionist.
78 Haakonssen, Knud, ‘The Structure of Hume's Political Theory’, Cambridge Companion to Hume, ed. Norton, David Fate, Cambridge, 1993, p. 191Google Scholar.
79 Flew, Antony, David Hume, oxford, 1986, p. 159Google Scholar.
80 Ibid., p. 160. For Flew, , Hume's proto-Darwinism was also the source of his political conservatism, (p. 174)Google Scholar. Also see Penelhum, Terence, ‘Hume's Moral Psychology’, Cambridge Companion to Hume, p. 124Google Scholar. There, Penelhum says that, for Hume, our fundamental beliefs are products of instinct and that they are ‘useful’ and ‘adaptive’. Consequently, his ‘View of our beliefs is essentially a Darwinian view’. T. H. Huxley like-wise seems to have seen in Hume anticipations of his own version of evolutionary utilitarianism. See especially ch. XI, ‘The Principles of Morals’, of his Hume, New York, 1930Google Scholar.
81 Hume, , Treatise, p. 619Google Scholar.
82 See, as well, Hume, , Enquiry, p. 25Google Scholar.
83 Hume's rational utilitarianism is similarly unlike Spencer's rational utilitarianism in so far as Spencer, like Ritchie, espoused modern evolutionary theory. And it also is unlike Ritchie's in that it is non-perfectionist. Furthermore, though Hume seems to hold, like Spencer and Ritchie, that humans are prone to invent the same set of ‘nonarbitrary’ fundamental rules of justice, he does not clothe these rules in language of stringent rights as they do.
84 Ritchie was clearly familiar with Hume's writings though it is impossible to tell just how much Hume influenced his thinking particularly with respect to moral theory. For an example of Ritchie's assessment of Hume, see Ritchie, , ‘Bonar's “Philosophy”’, 545Google Scholar.
85 Earlier versions of this essay were presented at the Fifth International Conference of the International Society for Utilitarian Studies, New Orleans, March, 1997 and the Centre for Politics, Law and Society, University College London, December, 1998. I would like to thank Roger Crisp and Jacob Kline for their helpful comments.