The Elements of Social Justice (Routledge Revivals)

L. T. Hobhouse

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2009
• Print ISBN: 9780415552776
• eBook ISBN: 9781135228217
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

First published in 1922, this title written by L. T. Hobhouse, British politician and one of the leading theorists of Social Liberalism, is a seminal work concerning the social application of ethical principles for the common good. The object of the book is to show that social and political institutions are not ends in themselves.

Hobhouse argues that the social ideal is to be sought not in the faultless unchanging system of an institutional Utopia, but in the love of a spiritual life with its unfailing system of harmonious growth unconfined.

The Elements of Social Justice

CHAPTER I.
ETHICS AND SOCIAL PHILOSOPHY

1. Social and political institutions are not ends in themselves. They are organs of social life, good or bad, according to the spirit which they embody. The social ideal is to be sought not in the faultless unchanging system of an institutional Utopia, but in the lore of a spiritual life with its unfailing spring of harmonious growth unconfined. But growth has its conditions and the spiritual life its principles, the sum of which in the relation with which we are here concerned we call Social Justice. To define these conditions and display them as a consistent whole is the object of this book. In what institutions they may best be realized is a further question, on which history and psychology, economics and politics must have their say. We approach this problem towards the close of the volume, but our main concern is not with applications but with principles, not with institutions but with the ends that they serve. This is not a popular subject in political controversy, for it is obnoxious to those who, making success their god, naturally wish to discard all questions of right and wrong, and is hardly more attractive to the reformer, who sees a short cut to Utopia in some political or economic change in pursuit of which he is ready to throw away everything that makes social life worth living. Both views are practically disastrous as they are theoretically false. Politics must be subordinate to Ethics,¹ and we must endeavour to see Ethics not in fragments but as a whole. The need of a reasoned ethical basis for political reform was more clearly recognized a hundred years ago than it is to-day, and perhaps that is one of the reasons why for a couple of generations the course of political improvement made steady strides, while the lack of such principles may partly explain why the forces of progress have fallen into disorder and left the world to the reign of violence.
2. Whatever hostages it may have given to criticism, the Benthamite school had the merit of clearly and avowedly subordinating politics to ethics, and attempting to apply a simple and comprehensive theory of the good as the touchstone of all personal and social relations alike. The Greatest Happiness principle is now and long has been out of favour, but one of its most determined critics, T.H.Green, recognized that it was as much for its virtues as for its vices that it was unpopular, and as I think that it contains valuable elements of truth that have been too much ignored, I propose to examine it here and sift if possible the grain from the chaff. Bentham’s principle, then, is that actions are good in so far as they tend to promote the greatest possible happiness of the greatest possible number of those whom they affect. All questions of right and wrong were to be referred to this standard. What, for example, are the rights of property? Show that upon the whole private property tends to make the generality of people happy and you justify it. Show that it tends to make them unhappy and you condemn it. Show that any particular development of these rights has one or other of these effects and you justify it or condemn it, as the case may be. Show that in a given particular case the exercise of a right will cause misery though in general it is necessary to happiness, and you have then to consider the probable consequence of making an exception. Now it may be, sometimes it clearly is, exceedingly difficult to make such calculations, but the principle has this element of value which the scientific sociologist may appreciate. It gives him an open field for investigation. He is tied by no rights or duties which are absolute and independent of all consequences. It is open to him to investigate freely all the conditions upon which human happiness and misery depend and from the best view that he can obtain draw his conclusions as to what is right and wrong in institutions. It does not by any means follow that he will put a low value on general rights and duties. On the contrary, a survey of society will probably convince him that one of the things generally necessary to human happiness is security, and that men can neither shape their own lives nor cooperate with one another unless they know what to expect and what is expected of them under given conditions, unless, that is, they have recognized rights and duties. At the same time he will see how important it is that rights and duties should be modifiable by a regular and agreed procedure in accordance with the changing requirements of human happiness. Thus the Utilitarian principle has at least the merit of providing a basis for an applied sociology.
   Next, the principle, Hedonistic as it seems to be, possesses what some consider the austere merit and others the inhuman defect of a rigid impartiality. “Every one to count for one and nobody for more than one” is Bentham’s rider to his formula.¹ “Between his own happiness and that of any other human being, the Utilitarian theory requires a man to be rigidly impartial,” says J.S.Mill. A theory which carried this consequence is absurdly caricatured when it is stigmatized as a Pig-Philosophy. The question is rather whether it does not strain certain human virtues too far. Is it seriously contended that I am to care no more and do no more for my son’s happiness than for that of any casual stranger? I am not quite sure what the orthodox reply would be, but I imagine that the Utilitarian would admit that parental affection is one of the things generally necessary to social salvation and that the special rights and duties of the family play a beneficent part within the general circle of obligations. But he would go on to say, and here he would have right on his side, that the family feelings should not be a centre of collective selfishness but rather of radiant sympathy. They should enable me to understand and respect another man’s feelings for his son, and only so will they work out in the end to the general happiness. In particular—here the essential doctrine of social equality strikes in—I must recognize that to all reasonable thinking the poor man’s feeling for his son is much the same as the rich man’s, the Jew’s as the Gentile’s, the bond as the free man’s. In this respect, as in many others, men differ as individuals but not by classes. It is the relation itself and the depth, tenderness and purity of the affections involved in it that matter. The Utilitarian theory demands of us an equal recognition of human feelings of identical character wherever and in whomsoever found.
3. Criticism, however, has fastened mainly upon the term Happiness, and upon the Benthamite definition of the term. By Happiness, says Bentham, is intended Pleasure and the absence of Pain. Now this is so far true—and the element of truth is too rashly denied by critics—that Happiness is of the same generic nature as Pleasure. It is something that we feel and like to feel. Without feeling there would be no happiness. But Pleasure, both in ordinary language and in tech- nical philosophic discussion, has generally meant a passing and partial condition, intense or languid as the case may be, but not depending for its intensity on any permanent conditions. The real value of life we feel to be deeper than this. We may feel a deep-seated unhappiness through the pleasure which is meant to distract us, and we may be sensible of an inward happiness triumphant over discomfort and pain. This happiness is not a matter of additions or subtractions, but rather of some stable relation in which we feel a profound and assured satisfaction. Perhaps we should rather say relations in plural, for there seem to be at least two conditions of such satisfaction. One is that we should be at peace with ourselves, for civil war is not a happy state. The other is that our life should be anchored in some object that takes us beyond ourselves, be that object another person, or our work, or the life of the community, or the God of our belief. To know what objects will permanently satisfy is to possess the secret of happiness, but for the moment the important point is that some object is essential, and the most serious criticism of Benthamism is that it seems to ignore the necessity. Regarding happiness as the whole and sole end, it depresses everything else to the status of a means. Now this does not consort with the psychology of happiness itself. We are happy in something, and the something must be worth while. Take from it its intrinsic value and our happiness becomes an illusion. If we were happy in things valuable only as a means to our happiness they would cease to be means to our happiness. What we wish for those we love is not merely that they should be happy on any terms, but also that they should be and do what we think worthy.
   Their mistakes on this head involved the Benthamites in a very paradoxical result. As a rule of life it is clear that the Utilitarian principle is altruistic—even, as has been said, austere in its altruism. It is an attempt to give precision to the command “Love thy neighbour as thyself.” Yet the Benthamites became so entangled in questions of ends and means that their theory could be represented in the last resort as one of pure egoism. For when they faced the question of the motive appealing to the individual, they felt constrained to maintain that as happiness was the only good his own happiness must in the last resort be the good and the operating motive to the individual, the happiness of others being for him only a means thereto, or perhaps something incorporated with his own happiness by a process of association.¹ J.S.Mill made a step in advance by appealing to a fundamental social feeling whereby if it were properly developed the happiness of others might become identified with our own, but this does not meet the fundamental difficulty. For if, after all, on a collision arising I do actually feel that my happiness lies on one road and social happiness on another, which am I to choose? Is there or is there not a compelling obligation on me to choose the larger and sink the smaller end, and, if felt, is this obligation rationally justified? ¹
   To this question it was impossible to reply in the affirmative as long as action was attributed ultimately to desire and desire to an expectation of pleasure. But the relation of desire to pleasure was misconceived. When we desire something, not as a means to something else but as an end, we certainly anticipate pleasure in the attainment, but we do not think of the attainment as a mere means and the pleasure as a substantive end standing by itself and separable. If we did we should be quite prepared to sink the object of desire as soon as another means of obtaining equal pleasure is proposed. But this is precisely what in desiring and in proportion to the strength of desire we refuse to do. The advertisement says the baby “won’t be happy till he gets it.” It is useless for his mother to offer him something else which, as she quite well knows, might afford him equal satisfaction, As long as he is in the toils of desire he wants one thing, and one thing only will satisfy him, and the mother, foiled in the attempt to satisfy desire with substitutes, has to undermine it by distracting attention and so starting afresh. It is the same in principle with the grown-up babies. A thinker is not satisfied till he has solved a problem. As long as he is in the grip of it nothing else appeals to him. It matters nothing that there are a dozen other problems that he might solve to his vast contentment. This does not ease desire. One of Mr. Shaw’s characters gravely tells a young man that men of his age vastly exaggerate the difference between one young woman and another. It is possible that the young man might admit this with his intellect as a general truth holding in all cases but one. But it would be the exception that would still appeal to him, even though he should reach the stage of understanding that it would be much better for his happiness if it could be banished.
   Desire, then, in its essence is an impulse not towards pleasure as such but towards some attainment as such. But at this point many critics of Utilitarianism have overstated their case. They have sought to reduce pleasure to the mere satisfaction of the impulse, the relief from the tension that keeps us on the stretch till the impulse is fulfilled. This is to ignore the difference between an agreeable and a disappointing result. Rosamond could not be happy without the purple jar, but possession showed her her mistake. Now there are many attractive things that disappoint us in the attainment, but in spite of the cynic there are many abiding or recurrent sources of satisfaction. Were it otherwise life would be nothing but a series of vain pursuits. In insisting on experience, on actual results in feeling, the Utilitarians were contending for the control of action by rational values as against mere animal instinct on the one side, or a vague and unchecked enthusiasm on the other. The truth is that something that we may call broadly feeling underlies desire from its inception to its fulfilment, prompting, controlling, and, in the end, if all goes well, confirming and approving. This last phase of feeling is not the least important in action, for it determines the future course of desire itself. As irrational beings we may continue to desire that which is only vapid or hateful when attained, but again in spite of the cynic, that is not the normal course of things. We see, then, in normal desire a certain harmony of feeling, action and experience. Feeling prompts and sustains a course of action arising in experiences which appeal to that very same feeling, and the feeling endeavours to maintain or renew the experience. The different elements concerned move in a circle, maintaining one another in activity, and it is this relation of mutual support which is intended by the term harmony. On the other hand, feeling and desire may fall asunder. Experience disappoints us and there is disharmony and frustration.
4. Now when we speak of anything whatever as good we are not making a merely intellectual proposition. We mean that it appeals to our feeling, that we want to be it, to do it, to have it, to bring it about, to witness it, as the case may be. It is, in fact, something in harmony with our feeling, and here we see the root truth in the Utilitarian doctrine that the good is universally the Pleasurable. Conversely, if we really think a thing bad our feelings towards it are just the negation of the former. It is intrinsically displeasurable. The good, then, is a kind of harmony between feeling and action and experience. Unfortunately, what appeals to one spring of feeling in us as good may in itself, or perhaps in its consequences, appeal to some other strain of feeling as bad. What is to happen in such case we do not for the moment enquire, but it will be seen that, by our definition of the good as a harmony, it cannot be realized as long as there is strife between the feelings themselves. When we: speak of a harmony between feeling and experience we must note that feeling is itself part of experience and the definition therefore includes a harmony between feeling and feeling. Again, unfortunately, what is one man’s pleasure may be another’s pain, so that there is a radical disharmony between two feelings though they are not feelings of the same individual. This quite bald opposition, however, can hold only if there is no sort of social relation between the two persons. If there is anything of the nature of Mill’s social feeling within me there is a traitor in my camp, and the division between my neighbour and me is reflected in a division of my own feelings. These feelings, if given full scope and drawn out into all their consequences, compel me to include my neighbour, and with him in the end all men whom my action may affect, in the harmony that I can be satisfied with as really good, and to recognize any disharmony within this world of felt experience as evil; and this feeling, with all the burden of obligation that it carries, must be deemed reasonable. For in reason what we consider good as such we must hold to be good universally, and if it is good for me to prefer myself, then it is equally good for you to prefer yourself, and where our egoisms clash opposed actions will be equally good.¹ Reason as distinguished from feeling is not the basis of our social action, but the system of feeling at the. basis of our social action is reasonable.¹ The fundamental principles in which this system of feeling expresses itself—e.g. that I must consider my neighbour as myself, are justified in reason, and the judgments of right and wrong founded upon them are true.
   “Good” thus means a harmony of anything that in the widest sense may be called experience with feeling. “Experience” includes, besides that which is passively enjoyed or suffered, our actions and desires, and our feelings themselves, and it includes the experience in the same wide sense of all human beings. But in all relations there are endless collisions of feeling and only that can be reasonably and finally held good in which such collisions are overcome. This, it may be said, is to make the good an ideal unattainable by man, and such in a sense it is. But it will remain that everything that makes for the ideal is right, and every feeling and impulse that conflicts with it is wrong, for though there is stress and indeed disharmony in the very nature of the moral effort, the success of that effort is the way to a possible harmony while its failure involves a disharmony accepted as perpetual.
5. Nevertheless it cannot be too clearly understood that harmony is not the same thing as order resting on mere repression. We are apt to identify personal morality with self-control and good government with the maintenance of order. But in either case order resting on repression is not harmony. The impulse which is merely held down still subsists as a source of inner conflict. Possibly by persistent repression it may be extinguished, but contemporary psychology sees reason to think that even so it is either apt to emerge again in another form, or to become the centre of a deep-seated division operating below the threshold of our conscious life with ill effect psychological or physical. Still, it may be said, there are impulses with which we can make no compromise. Their satisfaction, to take our own criterion, is radically inconsistent with the main bent of our permanent feeling. Excise them and a harmony of the rest of our nature is possible. Admit them and no consistency can be reached. We cannot deny a priori that this is so. There may be radically bad impulses, original sin, and we may have to cut off a hand or a foot to enter the kingdom of heaven. That is, there may be within our own nature radical disharmonies which we have to accept as we accept what is untoward in external nature, our business being merely to minimize the ill effects as best we can. But this we can say, that if or in so far as an impulse can be so guided as to consist with the other requirements which we accept as necessary, then its repression is an unnecessary disharmony. There is a deep distinction between the repression of a fundamental impulse and the governance of the temporary desire in which such an impulse manifests itself. If something fundamental and ineradicable is persistently repressed, there is a permanent disharmony. Conversely, a harmonious personality develops in so far as the fundamental needs find satisfying expression in a consistent life. Just the same principles apply in social relations. It is possible, it is in fact necessary, to use a certain measure of repression in maintaining order, but in so far as that which is silenced is the voice of any real and persistent need of any class of men there remains a standing dis-harmony, and if this need could in fact be met without prejudice to the needs which are admitted it is an unnecessary disharmony and therefore wrong. Social like personal development will consist in finding more adequate expression for the fundamental needs not of some men but of all in a consistent working scheme.¹ In sum, repression as such is disharmony and is justified only so far as forced on us by something which we do not know how to work in with the partial harmony that we seek to preserve. Harmony is a plastic principle which does not destroy but remoulds.
6. The inner harmony of feeling and effort will be reflected as far as we control the conditions of nature in an outer harmony of attainment. In every gratified impulse we fulfil some part of our nature. If the fulfilment too often disappoints us it is because our nature is not in harmony with itself, and what is our gain is also our loss. It is this disharmony, supported perhaps by a fatalistic sense of the overwhelming power of the physical world, which has governed the pessimistic view of human achievement which has bidden us seek the good rather in renunciation than in fulfilment. But here we touch upon a contrast between the individual and the collective point of view. The individual may renounce all on his own account in order that he may better serve the good of mankind, but why should mankind as a whole renounce? Only it would seem for one of two reasons. One would be, that its aims and interests are radically discrepant, which ceases to be true if a way of harmony is found. The other would be that, let men work together as they will, the way of nature is too hard for them, the major events of life, the ills that flesh is heir to, the death of those we love, the ultimate physical limitations on human progress, the “unscalable walls fixed with a word at the prime” To this the reply is that human power expands in self-accelerating measure, and that we can no longer fix the possible limits of the control of natural conditions by intelligence, provided always that the will to co-operate overcomes the dispersive forces. We do not yet know what man can make of human life when he sees it as a whole susceptible of a harmonious fulfilment. Through recorded history many good men have wor...

Table of contents

• COVER PAGE
• TITLE PAGE
• COPYRIGHT PAGE
• CHAPTER I. ETHICS AND SOCIAL PHILOSOPHY
• CHAPTER II. RIGHTS AND DUTIES
• CHAPTER III. LIBERTY—(1) MORAL FREEDOM.
• CHAPTER IV. LIBERTY (continued).—(2) SOCIAL AND POLITICAL FREEDOM.
• CHAPTER V. JUSTICE AND EQUALITY
• CHAPTER VI. PERSONAL JUSTICE
• CHAPTER VII. THE PAYMENT OF SERVICE
• CHAPTER VIII. PROPERTY AND ECONOMIC ORGANIZATION
• CHAPTER IX. SOCIAL AND PERSONAL FACTORS IN WEALTH
• CHAPTER X. INDUSTRIAL ORGANIZATION
• CHAPTER XI. DEMOCRACY