Nevertheless, he who busies himself with ethics as
science must study them critically and strive to estimate
justly their true significance. He may come to
regard them, not as something fixed and changeless,
but as living and developing, coming into being, and
modifying themselves, in the service of life.
Does he dishonor them who so views them?
EGOISM
95. WHAT IS EGOISM?—Egoism has been
defined as “any ethical system in which the
happiness or good of the individual is made the main
criterion of moral action,” [Footnote:
Encyclopedia Britannica, 11th edition.] or
as “the doing or seeking of that which affords
pleasure or advantage to oneself, in distinction to
that which affords pleasure or advantage to others.”
[Footnote: Century Dictionary.]
It may strike the average reader as odd to be told
that such definitions bristle with ambiguities, and
that it is by no means easy to draw a sharp line between
doctrines which everyone would admit to be egoistic,
and others which seem more doubtfully to fall under
that head. “Happiness,” “good,”
“advantage,” “self,” all are
terms which call for scrutiny, and which set pitfalls
for the unwary.
96. CRASS EGOISMS.—We may best approach
the subject of what may properly be regarded as constituting
egoism, by turning first to one or two “terrible
examples.”
No one would hesitate to call egoistic the doctrine
of Aristippus, the Cyrenaic, the errant disciple of
Socrates. He made pleasure the end of life, and
taught that it might be sought without a greater regard
to customary morality than was made prudent by the
penalties to be feared as a consequence of its violation.
Where the centre of gravity of the system of the Cyrenaics
falls is evident from their holding that “corporeal
pleasures are superior to mental ones,” and that
“a friend is desirable for the use which we
can make of him.” [Footnote: Diogenes Laertius,
Lives of the Philosophers, “Aristippus,”
viii.]
The doctrine of the English philosopher, Thomas Hobbes,
is as unequivocally egoistic.
“Of the voluntary acts of every man,”
he writes, [Footnote: Leviathan, Part
I, xiv.] “the object is some good to himself;”
and again, [Footnote Ibid. xv.] “no man
giveth, but with intention of good to himself; because
gift is voluntary; and of all voluntary acts the object
is to every man his own good.”
He leaves us in no doubt as to the sort of good which
he conceives men to seek when they practice what has
the appearance of generosity. Contract he calls
a mutual transference of rights, and he distinguishes
gift from contract as follows:
