Handbook of Ethical Theory by George Stuart Fullerton (e reader TXT) 📕

45. COMPLEX ENDS.—I may desire to clear my throat and may do so. The action is a trivial one, is over in a moment, and is forgotten. On the other hand, I may desire to spend my summer on the sea-coast, to grow rich in business, to attain to high social position, or to satisfy political ambition.

When the object is of this complicated description, there may easily be elements in it which, considered alone, I should not desire at all.

The summer on the New Jersey coast may make for health. But it may entail mosquitoes, uncomfortable rooms, unaccustomed food, the lack of wonted occupations, and a distasteful association at close quarters with neighbors not of one’s choosing. The road to wealth is an arduous one. The envied social station may imply the swallowing of many rebuffs. The way of the politician is hard.

One may desire, on the whole, one of these objects, or a thousand like them; but there are, obviously, many things comprised in the whole, or unavoidably bound up with it, that cannot attract, and are not eligible for their own sake.

46. INTENTION.—An object chosen and realized may bring in its train an indefinite series of consequences foreseen or unforeseen.

The striking of a match to light a candle may result in an unforeseen and disastrous conflagration. The overmastering desire to grow rich may have its fruit in an excessive application to business, the neglect of the family and of the duties of citizenship, and in hard and, perhaps, unscrupulous dealings. These things may be foreseen and accepted as natural accompaniments of the end chosen. But there may also be entailed shattered health, overwhelming anxieties, and the distress of seeing one’s sons, brought up in luxury and without incentive to effort, victims to the dangers which menace the idle rich.

Whether such consequences might have been foreseen and provided against or not, it is true that they are frequently not foreseen with clearness. They certainly form no part of the intention of the man who bends his energies to the attainment of wealth. He does not deliberately intend to injure his health, to lose the affection of his family, to leave behind him degenerate children. He does intend to get rich, if he can.

How many of the elements contained in the object chosen, or so bound up with it that they must be accepted along with it, may fairly be said to fall within the intention of the chooser? There may easily be dispute touching the latitude with which the word intention may be used. Some things a man sees clearly to be inseparably connected with the object of his choice; some he is less conscious of; some he overlooks altogether. It does not seem unwarranted to maintain that the first of the three classes of things, at least, may be said to be intended. When Dr. Katzenberger, in his desire to get across the road without sinking in the mire, used as a stepping-stone his old servant Flex, who had fallen down, his complete intention was not simply to cross the road unmuddied. It was to cross the road unmuddied by stepping on Flex.

Evidently the intention—the whole object—gives some revelation of the character of a man. Many men may will to avoid the mud; but not all of these can will to avoid it by stepping upon a fellow-man.

47. MOTIVE.—The stepping upon a fellow-man with whom one is on good terms can scarcely be regarded as a thing desirable in itself. If it is desired, it is because of the complex in which it is an element. Some other element or elements may exert the whole attractive force which moves desire and will. In other words, some things are chosen for the sake of others.

When we have discovered that for the sake of which any object is chosen, we have come upon the Motive. The intention may be said to embrace the whole object as foreseen. The motive embraces only a part of it, but the vital part, the part without which the object would not be desired and willed.

48. ETHICAL SIGNIFICANCE OF INTENTION AND MOTIVE.—There has been much dispute among moralists as to the ethical significance of intention and motive. Bentham maintains that “from one and the same motive, and from every kind of motive, may proceed actions that are good, others that are bad, and others that are indifferent.” He gives the following illustration: [Footnote: Principles of Morals and Legislation, chapter x, Sec 3.]

“1. A boy, in order to divert himself, reads an inspiring book; the motive is accounted, perhaps, a good one; at any rate, not a bad one. 2. He sets his top a-spinning: the motive is deemed at any rate not a bad one. 3. He sets loose a mad ox among a crowd: his motive is now, perhaps, termed an abominable one. Yet in all three cases the motive may be the very same: it may be neither more nor less than curiosity.”

In criticizing this citation I must point out that curiosity is not, properly speaking, an object of choice at all. I have used the word “object” to indicate what is chosen, not to indicate the psychic fact present at the time of the choice. And I have said that the motive is the vital part of the object.

Hence curiosity should not be called the motive. No man chooses curiosity as an object, either in the abstract or in the concrete. Curiosity is a fundamental impulse of human nature; we may elect to satisfy the impulse in any given instance; in other words, we may choose the appropriate object.

In the case of the boy letting loose the bull in the crowd, the object is to see what will happen under the given circumstances. This is what appeals to the boy. Something else might have appealed to him in performing the action. He might have had the deliberate wish to injure certain persons present against whom he harbored resentment. Or his sympathies might have been with the bull, which had been the victim of bad treatment, and to which he wished to grant its liberty. Were the crowd in question a band of ruffians intent upon lynching, he might have been moved by the desire to assist, in a somewhat irregular way, in the re-establishment of law and order. But even if his real object is only to see what will happen, there is no reason to put it on a par with the object in view when a boy spins a top. “To see what will happen” is the vaguest of phrases, and covers a multitude of disparate objects. He who does things to see what will happen has, at least, a very general knowledge of the kind of thing likely to happen, if a given experiment is made. A boy does not hold his finger in the candle-flame to see what will happen. He who does things to see what will happen, in really complete ignorance of what is likely to happen, may be set down as too much of a fool to be the subject of moral judgments.

It is obvious that an act may be done with many different objects in view—I mean real objects, motives. I give money to a beggar whose case is one to inspire pity. My motive, my “vital” object, may be to relieve the man. But it may equally well be to get rid of him, to gratify my self-feeling by becoming the dispenser of bounty, or to inspire admiration in the onlooker. The intention, as I have used the word above, is to relieve the beggar, with such consequences of the act as may be foreseen at the time. Within the limits of this intention, the motive may vary widely, and may, in a given instance, be either admirable or contemptible.

It may be claimed, in answer to this, that the real intention is, in every case, what I have called the motive; that, in the first case, it was to relieve suffering; in the second, to get rid of an annoyance; in the third to satisfy vanity; in the fourth, to be admired.

The word “intention,” thus used, is equivalent to “motive.” Popular usage gives some sanction to this confusion of the words. We say of a man who has done a questionable act: “His intentions were good,” or, “His motives were good.” Still, popular usage does not always regard the two expressions as equivalent. To revert to the case of the unhappy Flex. It does not seem inappropriate to say that the use of a man as a stepping-stone was a part of his master’s intention. It does appear inappropriate to call it the motive or a part of the motive of the whole transaction.

Intention and motive are convenient words to designate the whole object chosen and the part of the object which accounts for the choice of the whole. That it is important to distinguish between the two is palpable.

The intention gives some indication of character. We know something about a man when we know what kinds of objects he will probably set before himself as aims. But we know more when we know why he chooses these objects rather than others; when we can analyze the complex and can discover just what elements in it attract him.

With an increase of our knowledge comes an increased power of control. Until we know a man’s motives, we do not really know the man; and until we know the man, our efforts to influence him must be rather blind.

The search for motives appears to carry us in the direction of the systematization and simplification of the embarrassing wealth of objects which are actually the goal of human desires and volitions. Man may desire a boundless variety of objects. His motives in desiring them may, conceivably, be comparatively few.

It should be apparent that both intention and motive have ethical significance. We have our opinion of men capable of harboring certain intentions. But we recognize that some men may harbor them with better motives than others. And we can see that a man’s intention may be bad, and yet his motive, considered in itself, be good. How we are to rate the man, morally, becomes rather a nice question.