ETHICS. — From the Greek ἠθικός, moral, pertaining to conduct and to human character: it is the philosophical study of custom and human conduct.
CONTENTS:
I. The object and method of ethics
II. The history of ethics
III. Fundamental problems: 1. The end; 2. Law as the way to the end; 3. The values of moral action.I. OBJECT AND METHOD OF ETHICS
The object of ethics is human activity considered in itself and in its intrinsic value: considered in itself, and not in its results, as πρόττειν “not as ποιεῖν, as agere and not as facere; this distinguishes ethical and moral consideration from the technical consideration that studies human action in relation to the object produced, to the factum. Moreover, by the words “in its intrinsic value,” it is asserted that ethics is not limited to describing human custom, but is a search for the criterion or criteria by which human actions may be evaluated. It is asserted, that is, that ethics is and cannot fail to be normative, contrary to the positivist conception of ethics as pure description, “the science of customs” in the sense of L. Lévy-Bruhl. Ethics is a normative science because human beings cannot avoid making moral evaluations and therefore appealing, as a criterion of evaluation, to a norm. Now, either the investigation and justification of moral norms is entrusted to reason, in which case a normative ethics is neces-sarily elaborated, or moral evaluation is left at the mercy of arbitrariness, taste, and caprice, in which case one truly falls into dogmatism in the pejorative sense, that is, into the claim to make value judgments without justifying them.
The attempt to escape normative ethics by elevating history—that is, the customs of a society in a given period—to the status of a changeable criterion of evaluation is futile, since such customs are also determined by the actions of people (heroes, political innovators) who, in their own time, were not at all conformists and deliberately set out to modify the existing customs. Thus the historicist is remarkably inconsistent when he asserts that history is the criterion of moral evaluation, but then exalts the “historical men” who, at least in part, determined the direction of history.
The need for a normative ethics raises the problem of its justification. Two possible paths present themselves: the intuitionist path and the path that grounds ethics in a metaphysical conception. Ethical intuitionism means any theory that entrusts the discovery of moral norms to an immediate apprehension irreducible to rational knowledge (moral sentiment, emotional intuition of values, etc.). But if moral intuition were the apprehension of an objective norm or value, divergences in moral evaluations would be inexplicable; and if it is a subjective feeling, it is not a sufficient foundation for a universal norm. The other path therefore remains: that of metaphysical grounding. The method of ethics will consequently be deductive, but in this sense: it will consist in applying metaphysical principles to human conduct, as this is attested by experience and by the phenomenology of moral life.
II. HISTORY OF E
Ethical speculation in Western culture has Socrates as its initiator. The exercise of an uninhibited rational inquiry, which does not accept the positive laws, customs, and religion of the time as unquestionable presuppositions, but asks what their value is, is common to Socrates and the sophists. Socrates too asks what virtue is and what is just, without taking as a criterion of truth what is thought concerning these problems; indeed, he demonstrates that beneath apparently firm common opinions there lie ignorance and uncertainty. But Socrates’ conclusions are very different from those of the sophists. First of all, Socrates concludes his critical inquiry positively: he affirms the existence of objective moral norms and makes virtue consist in observing them. The sophists, including Protagoras in Plato’s dialogue of that name, presuppose that virtue is a particular technique, an art or a craft; Socrates demonstrates that it is not an art, but the art of being human, and that this art is founded on knowledge. Hence the famous Socratic thesis that identifies virtue with knowledge; this perhaps does not have the excessively and erroneously intellectualistic meaning Aristotle attributes to it (Eth. nicom., VI, 13), but simply asserts that there is neither virtue nor morally good action if a person does not know what the true values are, if he does not know toward what he ought to direct his life. When a person does not merely let himself live, does not allow the ends of his life to be imposed upon him by circumstances or impulses, but sets them for himself on the basis of an exact knowledge of values, and when he allows this true knowledge to determine him to act, then he acts virtuously. Certainly Socrates did not ask what this allowing true knowledge to determine us consists in; he did not ask whether it is still knowledge or whether it is will. That it is will and freedom will be recognized by Aristotle and, above all, by Christianity. A consequence of the Socratic thesis that virtue is knowledge is the assertion that no one does evil voluntarily, that is, no one does evil when he knows it as evil (Proteg., 353 agg.); this is demonstrated through the identification of good with pleasure. This Socratic thesis too, much debated, does not seem to require a utilitarian interpretation, given the nobility of Socrates’ moral character; the identity between good and pleasure established by Socrates should rather be understood in the sense that a person always tends toward the good, and that only the true good is what procures true pleasure. From the Socratic identification of good with pleasure, two theories could arise, and in fact they distinguished two Socratic schools: one, the Cynic school (v. CINICI), maintains that virtue alone suffices to procure true pleasure, and therefore that nothing besides virtue is necessary to procure the good of man; the other, the Cynic school (Aristippus, V. CIRENAICI; EDONISMO), maintains instead that pleasure is man’s supreme good.Plato, together with Socrates, conceives the supreme good as the unity of virtue and happiness, of intelligence and pleasure (Phil., 65-67 and passim), but gives this ethical conception a metaphysical foundation. The good is hypostatized in the Idea of the Good, which stands at the summit of the world of Ideas. Man’s true good is the good of the soul, which is distinct from the body and akin to the world of Ideas. Plato’s metaphysical and anthropological dualism corresponds to an e. of detachment from sensual pleasures. Philosophy is conceived as meditation, as care for death (Phoedo, 64 a, 67 e), because only death frees the soul from the body and makes it capable of perfect wisdom. In the Gorgias it is said that it is better to suffer injustice than to commit it, because committing injustice harms the soul, that is, what is highest in man (473 c). For Plato, therefore, good and useful are also identified, but useful is only that which benefits the soul. Despite this primacy of spiritual life and contemplation, Plato gives great importance to political life (Respubl., Polit., Leg.); but politics too must be directed toward man’s spiritual life, not toward economic well-being.
The assertion that the supreme end, the highest good, and man’s blessedness consist in contemplation remains in Aristotle from the Protrepticus through the Eudemian Ethics to the fullest expression of his ethical thought, the Nicomachean Ethics (cf., concerning the theory of blessedness, bk. X). But the attainment of this blessedness, which is realized by few people and in few moments of their lives, requires all those goods that can make life tranquil and permit the exercise of contemplation. Some of these are allotted by fortune, such as good health and a sufficient amount of wealth (Eth. nic., I, 8); others are obtained through the exercise of virtue. Virtue is a habit (ἔξις) that a person acquires through the repetition of good acts (op. cit., II, 1). For an act to be virtuous, it must be performed consciously and with deliberate volition. Aristotle therefore emphasizes, in addition to the intellectual element, the volitional element in virtue (op. cit., III, 3), and for this reason he distances himself from what he interprets as Socrates’ intellectualism, asserting that virtue cannot be reduced to knowledge, to φρόνησις, but requires a volitional element (op. cit., VI, 13). Virtue is not the suppression of sensible impulse, of affection, of πάθος, but the equilibrium of opposing passions. Hence the definition: «Ἔστιν ἔρα ἡ ἀρενὴ ἔξις προαιρετικὴ ἐν μωσύτῃν οὖσε» (op. cit., II, 6).
Stoicism (v.) and Epicureanism (v. EPICURO) represent, in a certain sense, a return to the two Socratic schools, the Cynic and the Cynic. Notable in Stoicism is the concept that moral life, virtue, consists in being in accord with oneself, that is, with one’s own nature; since this nature is a moment of universal nature, it already bears within itself a vestige of that reason which animates all nature and is its supreme law. In order to follow nature-reason, man must free himself from the passions, of which the Stoics developed a phenomenology that exerted its influence even on Descartes’ and Spinoza’s treatises on the passions (Ethica, part 3).
Christianity brought about a profound renewal in e. The assertion that man has value as a moral person through good will, independently not only of his social position but also of his intellectual qualities and the abilities he may possess (an assertion that can already be found in the
Stoicism) finds its foundation in the concept that all human beings are children of God and equal before Him. Hence the first commandment of evangelical morality, which unites the love of God and the love of one’s neighbor and gives the latter the greatest emphasis (Mt. 22, 37; Mc. 12, 29). Moral perfection is not the prerogative of a group (the Pharisees) or of a class, but is open to everyone, including the poor, indeed especially the poor, the persecuted, and those who “do not count” in society (Mt. 5, 3). From God, human beings have received, as a gift, their natural qualities and external goods, which they must make fruitful (the parable of the talents, ibid., 25, 14; Lc. 19, 12) with a view to attaining the one thing that matters: the salvation of the soul, eternal life (the parable of the hidden treasure and the precious pearl, Mt. 13, 44). Eternal life, beatitude, consists in contemplation (Io. 17, 3), but not in philosophical contemplation, which can be practiced by only a few people in this world; rather, in a contemplation that will take place beyond this life and will be given to anyone who has acted with rectitude and good will. Moral life is not an untouchable possession, an achievement made once and for all; it is built from moment to moment, and good will and love of God (Lc. 7, 47; 19, 1) obtain for us the forgiveness of our faults and the possibility of beginning anew. Moral life, virtue, always demands a choice, and therefore sacrifice (Mt. 7, 13; 11, 34; 16, 24): serene equilibrium and harmony cannot be attained in this life, which is a life of struggle, but only in the next.
For ethics, as for philosophy in general, the principal task of Christian, patristic, and scholastic thought was to harmonize the conclusions of reason, as they emerged in Greek speculation, with revealed truths. St. Augustine, who received his first stimulus toward philosophy from reading Cicero’s Hortensius, always conceived philosophy as a search for that wisdom which is at once beatitude and the fullness of spiritual life. Nor, on the other hand, did it ever seem possible to him that beatitude could be separated from possession of the truth (Contra Acad., I, 5, cited by Mausbach, I, p. 53). The path to the attainment of beatitude is marked out by the moral law, which, like the eternal truths, is the reflection within us of something superior to us, the lex aeterna (De libero arbitrio, II). Moral good consists in the will’s adhering to what the moral law prescribes. Human beings become virtuous «cogitando animum illis incommutabilibus regulis luminibusque virtutum, quae incorruptibiliter vivunt in ipsa veritate sapientiaque communi (ibid., II, 52, cited by Mausbach, I, p. 94). Against Manichaeism, St. Augustine defended freedom of the will, although against Pelagius he affirmed its insufficiency in the state of fallen nature after sin. Only Grace can bestow that love of God which is the principle of all virtues and free us from cupiditas, from self-love, which is the root of all evils.
A distinctive insistence on distinguishing moral good from utility, and on emphasizing the importance of intention in moral activity, is found in St. Anselm, who defines justice (in the broad sense of morality) as «rectitudo voluntatis propter se servata», after observing that «sicut volendum est uniciuque quod debet, ita volendum est quia debet, ut iusta sit eius voluntas» (De Verit., chap. 12. Cf. De lib. arbitrii, chap. 3; De conceptis virginali; De casu diaboli, chaps. 3 and 23-24). St. Thomas grounds ethics, in Aristotelian fashion, on finality, and traces the concept of law back to that of an end: eternal law, defined as «ratio divinae sapientiae moventia omnia ad debitum finem» (Sum. Theol., 1a-2ae, q. 93, a. 1); natural law, which is «participatio legis aeternae in rationali creatura» (ibid., q. 91, a. 2); and positive law, which is the application of natural law by human authority according to differing historical situations (ibid., q. 95 in its entirety). Natural moral law is known by reason and followed freely. Freedom is justified by the very nature of the will, which follows intellectual knowledge of the good and, as such, is determined only by that object which fully embodies the nature of goodness, while remaining undetermined with respect to particular goods (ibid., q. 16, 1a, qq. 82-83; De var., q. 24). The exceptionally rich 2a-2ae of the Sum. Theol. is devoted principally to the analysis of the virtues. Questions 1-5 of the 1a-2ae deal with beatitude.
With the disintegration of the metaphysical foundation of ethics, a tendency emerged in the scholasticism of the period of decline to “positivize” morality—that is, to conceive moral life as obedience to positive laws established not by the demands of human nature but by an external, divine or human will (Occam). “Nature” was thus no longer conceived as shaped by an eternal law and as bearing moral demands within itself, but as the opposite of law: the blind impulse toward self-preservation of the animal individual, struggling with other individuals. Life in conformity with nature would then be identified either with the refined pursuit of pleasure (L. Valla and the Epicureanism of the Renaissance) or with the sublimation of vital impulses: audacity, the will to power, the capacity to succeed, to accomplish something great, and to achieve an objective by overcoming every obstacle (virtue in Machiavelli’s sense).
From a pessimistic view of nature as an egoistic impulse, Hobbes’s theory would arise concerning the necessity of a positive law founded solely on the will of the legislator and capable of imposing itself upon individuals. The necessity of law, however, always serves the utility and security of individuals, threatened by the struggle among individual egoisms.
Against Hobbes’s assertion that human tendencies are exclusively egoistic, and that moral and civil law has no other purpose than to secure the greatest possible utility, there arose a school of thought whose principal representatives were Shaftesbury and F. Hutcheson. It maintained that, alongside the egoistic impulse, human beings possess an original altruistic tendency, or benevolence, which is the moral impulse. And just as there is an original moral impulse, so too there is an original faculty for morally evaluating actions, for sensing the beauty (morality) of an action—a “moral sense” that cannot be reduced to theoretical, rational knowledge, still less to a calculation of the advantages that an action may procure.
This doctrine of the moral sense, analogous to that which Rousseau placed in the mouth of the Savoyard vicar (Emile, IV), Kant (v.) in his pre-critical period. From the intuitionism of the English moralists and of Rousseau, Kant also retained in his mature works (Grundlegung zur Metaphysik der Sitten [1785] and Kritik der reinen Vernunft [1788]) the conviction that the moral law is given immediately as a Faktum der Vernunft, that is, it is not deduced from any theoretical knowledge. The moral law is given as universally valid, and therefore cannot be known by induction from experience. It does not express a necessity, but a command, an imperative, which may also not be observed by man. There are two types of imperatives: the hypothetical, which subordinates the performance of the commanded action to the attainment of an end (do this if you want to obtain that), and the categorical, which commands an action absolutely. The moral law is a categorical imperative and therefore presupposes no end, object, or matter, but is valid by virtue of its form as law, by virtue of its universality: it is purely formal law. In this consists the formalism of Kantian morality (Kritik der prakt. Vernunft, theorems I–III). If the will must follow a purely formal law, it is free (you can, because you must), that is, determined by nothing extrinsic, but only by itself: it is autonomous (v. AUTONOMIA). Under the influence of Kantian ethics there arose the ethical idealism of J. G. Fichte, who held that, in order to affirm freedom, it was not enough to affirm that the I gives itself its own law, but that it was necessary to conceive the I as the creative activity of all reality (cf. especially Grundlagen der gesamten Wissenschaftslehre [1794], part 3 and Sittenlehre [1798]).
To the moral genius of Romanticism, which identifies the moral good with the full development of individuality, Hegel opposes an identification of moral perfection with Stilleheit, that is, with the firm insertion of the individual into the social structure of his time, with the “overcoming” of individual personality in the life of the State (it is significant that Hegel considers morality as a part of law, in the broad sense). Cf. especially, for Hegel, Grundlinien der Philosophie des Rechts.
In the second half of the nineteenth century there occurred: 1) a resurgence of utilitarianism (already asserted by Bentham at the beginning of the century) in positivism (Stuart-Mill, Spencer); 2) an affirmation of naturalism or vitalism, with Nietzsche; 3) an affirmation by Marxism of the primacy of economic values, from which an ethics of solidarity is sought to be deduced, rather than an individualistic utilitarianism, in which the individual must sacrifice himself to the prosperity of the group.
In the twentieth century, the idealistic revival in Italy took, with regard to ethics, two different forms: one of Hegelian inspiration, with a historicist character; the other represented by P. MARTINETTI, PIERO (v.), who asserted the primacy of moral and religious values. In Filosofia della pratica, B. Croce distinguishes action from ethical knowledge; within the sphere of action (which he identifies with volition), he distinguishes the volition of the particular (economics) from the volition of the universal (ethics). Applying to ethics the central theory of his Logica, namely, the identification of the definitional judgment with the individual judgment, which means the identification of necessary truths with truths of fact, he asserts that practical judgment is not judgment concerning values or ideals, but historical judgment, and that history is the supreme criterion of value. Indeed, what comes to pass in history is the work “not of the individual, but of the Whole. They (the facts that have occurred) are the work of God: and God is not judged” (Filosofia della pratica, 3rd ed., Bari 1925, p. 61). For Gentile, practical activity and theoretical activity are one and the same, and good is everything that is actualized: evil is the fact, the past.
In the idealism of transcendence of P. Martinetti (cf. Il regno dello spirito [1908]; La libertà [1928]; Ragione a fede [1934]), the moral good is not what comes to pass and asserts itself in history, but is the duty that manifests itself in the interiority of consciousness, as the demand to live according to reason. Here reason is understood in a Kantian sense, as the faculty of the Absolute. To live according to reason means to rise to the intelligible world, of which our spirit forms a part, and which finds its highest unity in God. Among the most vital currents of contemporary ethics, mention should be made of the material ethics of values of M. Scheler (Der Formalismus in der Ethik und die materials Wirtschaft, Halle 1916), who held that it was possible to elaborate a material ethics (in contrast to the formalism of Kantian morality) and yet a pure, a priori ethics, that is, one expressing rigorously universal laws. This material ethics is founded on an intuition of values considered as such, in their essential nature, independently of the concrete goods in which they are embodied. M. Scheler’s material ethics of values presupposes Husserl’s theory of the intuition of essences. According to M. Scheler, however, the intuition of values is atheoretical and emotional in nature. In addition to his systematic work, Scheler wrote admirable essays in the phenomenology of moral life. A position akin to that of M. Scheler was adopted by N. Hartmann in his extensive, rich, and systematic treatise (Ethik, Berlin 1920).
Contemporary French ethics also, when it does not wish to be purely descriptive and does not resolve itself into sociology (Durkheim, Lévy-Bruhl), inclines toward intuitionism (Rauh, Bergson).
III. FUNDAMENTAL PROBLEMS
It has been said that ethics, or moral philosophy, must rationally justify moral evaluations, that is, the judgments by which we qualify certain actions as good and certain others as bad. Now, if ethical intuitionism is excluded for the reasons stated, an ethical evaluation can be justified only by appealing to a moral norm and deriving that norm from metaphysics. The moral norm has two characteristics: that of possessing absolute validity and that of expressing not a necessity, but a duty (not a Müssen, but a Sollen), that is, a command which may also be disobeyed, an ideal which may also be betrayed. The first characteristic is justified by a metaphysics of finality, by a teleological conception of reality; the second is justified by recognition of human freedom.1. The end
For if one asks what the moral law is, what it expresses, the answer must be that it indicates the path to be followed in order that man may attain his perfection, his end as man. But in order that the law may have absolute value, may be, to use a Kantian term, a categorical imperative, there must exist an end of man as such; that is, the end to be realized must not be one arbitrarily chosen by each individual, an end which men in fact set before themselves but might also fail to set before themselves; otherwise there would be no duty, no norm of absolute value, but each person could choose his own law. The end to be attained must therefore be an end by right, an end towards which man is directed by nature, by virtue of his essence. The concept of an end by right, or of the end of human nature, corresponds in a certain sense to the concept of value, as understood, for example, by M. Scheler: in the sense, namely, that the end of human nature is not a fact, felt hic et nunc as good, but a good known in its nature or essence as good, known in its ratio boni. It cannot therefore be objected (as Kant objects) to an ethics of the end understood in this sense that it makes our moral will dependent upon a sensible impulse towards an object, since that end which underlies the moral law is a perfection towards which man is directed by a requirement inherent in his nature. But it is impossible to justify such a concept of an end by right or of value unless value is referred back to being, unless, that is, value is conceived as the object of the intelligence and will of the Creator. And in this, that is, in referring the being of value back to real being, Christian ethics differs from most contemporary philosophies of values. For an end exists only in an intelligence; and therefore, if there are ends in nature, if there is an end of human nature independently of what individual men may or may not set before themselves, this means that there is an intelligence underlying nature, underlying man's very being, which gives meaning to the activity of every thing and therefore also to human activity. Values are nothing other than the ends which the creative intelligence sets for the various beings by creating them. Just as everything is according to an idea of the Creator, so it must conform to what God, in creating it, wills it to be.By attaining the end of its nature, a being capable of feeling will also obtain the greatest joy of which it is capable: the traditional concept of beatitude indeed implies both objective perfection and the greatest joy. In a teleological conception of reality, pleasure, in the broadest sense of delectatio, is the subjective resonance of an objective perfection attained; it is therefore unnatural to separate pleasure from value. And this separation may follow two paths: that of rigorism and that of hedonism. By rigorism we mean an ethical doctrine that commands the exclusion of pleasure. In this sense Christian ethics is not rigoristic, as has sometimes been objected against it: it merely inculcates the need not to allow oneself to be guided by the pleasure of the moment, which may sometimes fail to correspond to the greater objective value. And since man often neglects the objective good in order to pursue pleasure, Christian ethics affirms the value of renunciation and ascetic exercise, not as a value in itself, but as a means of obtaining that freedom from sensible impulses which enables him to choose the greater objective good. Hedonism, on the other hand, is the theory that makes pleasure the aim of human action. This theory too is excluded by the teleological conception of reality, according to which every being has an objective perfection to attain, which is the end of its nature. Logically, hedonism is the consequence of a pessimistic conception of reality, in which, since it is held that nothing has meaning, that nothing is worth doing, there remains nothing but to abandon oneself to the pleasure of the moment.
2. The law as the way to the end
It must, however, be borne in mind that finality is given to every being with its very nature, immanent in it, since the Creator (of nature) and the Ordainer of ends are the same Being. Thus the law which expresses orientation towards the end expresses the deepest requirements of human nature. Natural moral law is understood in Christian ethics as the reflection in human nature of the intelligible order governing creation (the lex aeterna).Natural moral law has two characteristics distinguishing it from other natural laws: it must be known in order to be followed, and it is followed freely. Man is a self-conscious and free being: therefore he not only lives the law of his nature, but knows it, and could not follow it unless he knew II. It should nevertheless be noted that this knowledge of natural law, like all other human knowledge, is immediate only with respect to the most universal truths, and mediate with respect to more determinate truths. Man knows that he must pursue his end as man, that he must be fully himself; but in order to know what his end as man is and how he will be fully himself, he must reason: he must reflect upon his nature in order to conclude what values he must realize and in what order. This theory of traditional ethics—that knowledge of our duties is acquired through reasoning—often encounters opposition. Frequently the objections are caused by confusion between moral knowledge, knowledge of duty, and between what E. Juvalta (I limiti del razionalismo etico, Torino 1945, p. 4) calls the justificatory requirement and the executive requirement. Now, when traditional ethics affirms that knowledge of the moral law is the work of reason, it does not at all mean that following that law, acting morally, is the result of reason, of logical necessity; this would be equivalent to denying freedom.
The affirmation of freedom is, together with the teleological conception of reality, a fundamental presupposition of Christian ethics. If freedom is denied (as, for example, in Spinozist pantheism), every command and every moral duty loses its meaning, since it makes no sense to command one who is already determined. The freedom affirmed by Christian philosophy, from s. Agostino to s. Anselmo to s. Tommaso, is not mere spiritual spontaneity; it is freedom as risk, as choice, as self-determination.
The assertion that knowledge of our duties is the fruit of reasoning is the only theory capable of reconciling ethical objectivism (the affirmation of objective values and norms) with the fact of variations in moral conscience, of its progress and regressions. If moral conscience were the fruit of an intuition, divergences in moral evaluations could not exist: divergences exist because, starting from certain universal premises on which all agree (no one denies that one must do good, attain the perfection of man), it still remains to determine what good and perfection consist in. And when it is a matter of arriving at more determinate norms, of specifying what the good is, one always appeals, consciously or unconsciously, to a conception of man.
Indeed, it is not true that, even starting from very different philosophical conceptions, one arrives at the same conclusions concerning moral precepts, as Schopenhauer would have it when he asserts that, if it is difficult to found morality, it is easy to preach II. In reality, Schopenhauer’s observation is not always true, since divergences also exist in special ethics. One need only consider the opposition which Christian ethics has always encountered and continues to encounter—even on the theoretical plane—or the difference between the ethics preached by Kant and that preached by Nietzsche. Secondly, it should be observed that philosophers are not always consistent and that they often derive their moral judgments not from the metaphysics they profess in words, but from a metaphysics latent in their spirit, perhaps that which Bergson called “the natural metaphysics of human intelligence.”
3. The values of moral realization
A framework for determining what man ought to be is offered by s. Tommaso in Sum. Theol., 1°-2°, q. 94, s. 2, where, after saying that the supreme principle of morality is that which commands one to do good and avoid evil, he observes that the good of man entails the realization of a plurality of values, in accordance with the complexity of human nature. Man has three kinds of goods to attain: those pertaining to his preservation as a being, those pertaining to his animal life, and those characteristic of his spiritual nature. In aiming at self-preservation, man realizes those values which in a broad sense might be called economic; in aiming at the fullness of his animal life, he realizes vital values, those whose poles are the healthy and the unhealthy; in aiming at the perfection of his rational nature, he realizes spiritual values culminating in contemplation. There are two fundamental requirements of a fully human ethics: 1) to respect the hierarchy of values; 2) to sacrifice as little as possible of the lower values.Against the first requirement stand all ethical systems which in some way overturn the hierarchy of values. Utilitarianism, for example, places economic values at the summit, making the sensible well-being of the individual the supreme good. Utilitarianism differs from hedonism because, from the experience of the harm often caused by the pursuit of momentary pleasure, it draws the conclusion that pleasure must be measured out and sometimes renounced in order to obtain a more lasting well-being. And since money is the means par excellence for procuring well-being, utilitarian ethics leads to a type of civilization in which money has supreme importance. Now history attests to how many evils avri sacra fames is the source. Christian ethics, on the other hand, which commands that the pursuit of well-being be subordinated to other values, also requires that everyone be given that degree of well-being which permits a human level of life, precisely because it recognizes that the realization of lower values is a condition for the realization of higher values.
Vitalism, which places vital values, the values of human animality (strength, boldness, pride), at the summit, represents another type of overturning in the hierarchy of values. We have a typical example in the ethics of Nietzsche. Placing these values at the summit logically leads to the exaltation of the superman, of the will to power, to the legitimization of the slavery of the weak in general and of women in particular, and to the exaltation of war. In this respect too, Christian ethics, sometimes accused of depressing “life,” is instead that which recognizes the right to life not only of some but of all, and, by subordinating vital impulses to spiritual values, guarantees women respect for their dignity as persons and does not reduce them to mere instruments for the propagation of the species.
Certainly, the subordination of economic and vital values to spiritual values often requires a choice, an option, and this entails sacrifice; but the necessity of sacrifice is imposed by the very complexity of human nature and is not an arbitrary imposition of Christian ethics, which, indeed, is that which sacrifices least of what is authentically human.
The primacy of spiritual values must be understood in a twofold sense: in the sense that reason must in a certain manner be the form of morality, that is, must regulate the realization of all values; and in the sense that at the summit of all values stand those of the contemplative life. In the first sense, reason must affirm its primacy especially in social life, which is a characteristic manifestation of human nature—which is corporeal and spiritual—because, though rooted in the needs of man as an animal, it is nevertheless a condition for the realization of spiritual values. This is already true in the first and most elementary form of human society, the family, which, being oriented toward generation, presupposes man’s corporeal being, but is also the environment in which man receives his first form of culture and learns to raise himself to God. It is likewise true in civil society, which is organized into a State. As s. Tommaso observes (De verginibus principium, cap. 1), man must live in society in order to have those means of defense and preservation which other animals already possess in their organism and instinctive activities; but in civil society and through his relations with other men he finds the indispensable conditions for his very spiritual life. Precisely for this reason, society is not man’s supreme end, but the means by which man realizes the supreme value of his nature, which is contemplation, as Plato and Aristotle had already seen. For if one does not admit that man’s end is contemplative activity, the human individual is inevitably reduced to a link in the chain of generations and to a cog in the machinery of the State; that is, the value of man as a person is denied.
Bust. Starch dell'a, in generale: H. Sidgwick, Outings of
the history of ethics, Londra 1886 (trad. II. di Z. Zini, To-
mo 1922); F. Jodl, Gesch. der Ethik, 2 voll., 1ª ed., Stoczerda 1882-
1886, 3ª ed., Stoczerda-Berlino 1920; E. Westermarch, The
Origin and development of the moral ideas, 2 voll., 2ª ed., Londra
1912-17 (trad. Franc., Parigi 1928-29); R. Zucken, Die Lebens-
enzhausungen der grauen Denker, 18ª ed., Berlino 1922 (trad. II. di Pino Martinetti, Torino 1922); O. Dittrich, Gesch. der Ethik,
2 voll. (fino alla fine del medioevo), Lipsia 1923-34 (con ampia
bibl.). Opere sull'a, del classici e dei principali periodi della
storia della filosofia; e. greca: E. Zeller, Die Philosophie der
Griechen, 4ª, 5ª, 6ª ed., Lipsia 1903-22; Max Wundt, Gesch. der
griechischen Ethik, 2 voll., ivi 1908-11; E. Zeller-Mondolfo, La
filosofia dei greci, 2 voll. (solo la filosofia presocratica), Firenze
1932-38; L. Robin, La morale antique, Parigi 1938.
E. cristiana: C. E. Luthard, Gesch. der Christlichen Ethik,
2 voll., Lipsia 1888-93. Nella collezione Les moralistes chré-
tices edita a Parigi da Lecoffre, Gabalda sono pubblicati singoli
volumi contenenti testi scelti e commentati dai Padri del de-
serno. Clemente Alessandrino, Origene, Tertulliano, s. Basilio,
s. Giovanni Crisostomo, s. Agostino, s. Tommaso, s. Francesco
di Sales, Pascal, Nicole, Malebranche, Bourdaloue, Ollé-La-
grume, Blondel, J. Mousbach, Die Ethik des hl. Augustin, 2 voll.,
2ª ed., Friburgo in Br. 1929; M. Wittmann, Die Ethik des hl.
Thomas von A., Monaco 1933; A. D. Sertillanges, La philosophie
morale de si Thomas d'A., 1ª ed., Parigi 1916, nuova ed., Pa-
rigé 1940; J. Klein, Zur Sittenlehre des Dans Scotus, in Proven-
channische Studien, 1 (1914), pp. 401-37; 2 (1915), pp. 137-60;
E. Garin, Filosofi italiani del Quattrocento, Firenze 1943.
E. moderna: V. Delbos, Le problème moral dans la philo-
sophie de Spinoza et dans l'histoire du spinozisme, Parigi 1893;
S. Stephen, The english utilitarianism, 2 voll., Londra 1900; E. Ga-
rin, L'illuminium regime, I moralisti, Milano 1941; V. Delbos,
La philosophie pratique de Kant, 2ª ed., Parigi 1926; H. J. Paton,
The categorical imperative, Londra 1946; G. Gurwitch, Fichtes
System der konkreten Ethik, Tubinga 1924; R. Haym, Die roman-
ische Schule, 4ª ed., Berlino 1920; H. Eber, Regels Ethik in
Ihrer Entwicklung bis zur Phänomenologie, Strasburgo 1910;
Ch. Andler, Nietzsche. Sa vie et sa pensée, 6 voll., Parigi 1920-31.
(Av. A. M. Schneider, Die Hayla Sophia zu Kantantinopoli,
Berlin 1929, lav. 35)