GUIDE TO THE PHILOSOPHY 1938 - 1947.pdf - Rare Books at ...

ETHICS
far as the individual is concerned, the end is precisely
this state of equilibrium. Is it ever completely achieved?
Obviously it is not. There is, then, for Spencer, no
absolute standard of good. Ultimate good is an unrealized,
possibly an unrealizable, goal, just because complete
equilibrium is never realized and may never be realizable.
Meanwhile, however, whatever conduces to this end is
good. Human beings being various, and the contingencies
of life uxiforseeable, scientific ethics cannot lay down
exact rules for guidance as to how the end is to be achieved;
it can only indicate the general direction, explain why it
should be followed, and point out that, in so far as it is
followed we shall experience pleasure. In thus insisting
upon the provisional nature ofall ethical rules and principles
Spencer agrees with Aristotle.
Spencer's Account of Altruism and Explanation of
Society, The scheme is, so far, a purely egoistic one.
The Darwinian principle of Natural Selection announced
struggle as the law of life, and the survival of the individual
as its end. But creatures evolved by the method of struggle,
and acknowledging only the law of self-survival, cannot
be credited with the desire to promote the welfare also,
presumably, envisaged in terms of survival of other
beings. Spencer has, therefore, to meet the difficulty
which all forms of subjectivist ethics encounter of explaining
the existence ofwhat are normally regarded as altruistic
sentiments, and the operation of what are apparently
disinterested motives. The difficulty is met within the
framework of the general evolutionary theory upon the
following lines.
Spencer propounded a celebrated formula for evolutionary
progress in terms of an advance from the more
simple to the more complex. Evolution, he says, is "a
process whereby an indefinite, incoherent, homogeneity is
transformed into a definite, coherent, heterogeneity*'.
Thus the jellyfish is comparatively structureless and homogeneous,
while man is a complicated vertebrate whose