The Foundations of Morality

From time immemorial, many philosophers and poets have held that the sufficient ethical guide for man was to “follow the laws of nature.”

Taken literally, the advice is unnecessary and absurd. It is impossible to violate the laws of nature; man cannot help obeying them.

The definitive word on the theory that man “ought” to follow the laws of nature, or that he should take whatever happens in “nature” as his moral guide, was said by John Stuart Mill in his essay on Nature (written in 1854 but not published until 1874, after his death).

The word Nature, Mill points out, has two principal meanings: it either denotes the entire system of things, with the aggregate of all their properties, including the relations of cause and effect, or it denotes things as they would be if there were no human intervention.

In the first sense, the doctrine that man ought to follow nature is meaningless. Man has no power to do anything else. All his actions are necessarily in conformity with or “obedience” to one or more of nature’s physical or mental laws. The other sense of the term, the doctrine that man ought to follow nature—i.e., ought to make the spontaneous course of things the model of his own voluntary actions—Mill held to be not only irrational but immoral.

It is irrational because all human action whatever consists in altering the spontaneous course of nature, and all useful action consists in improving it. It is immoral because nature can be wanton, destructive, and cruel:

In sober truth, nearly all the things which men are hanged or imprisoned for doing to one another, are nature’s every day performances. Killing, the most criminal act recognized by human laws, Nature does once to every being that lives; and in a large proportion of cases, after protracted tortures such as only the greatest monsters whom we read of ever purposely inflicted on their living fellow-creatures. If, by an arbitrary reservation, we refuse to account anything murder but what abridges a certain term supposed to be allotted to human life, nature also does this to all but a small percentage of lives, and does it in all the modes, violent or insidious, in which the worst human beings take the lives of one another. Nature impales men, breaks them as if on the wheel, casts them to be devoured by wild beasts, burns them to death, crushes them with stones like the first Christian martyr, starves them with hunger, freezes them with cold, poisons them by the quick or slow venom of her exhalations, and has hundreds of other hideous deaths in reserve, such as the ingenious cruelty of a Nabis or a Domitian never surpassed. All this Nature does with the most supercilious disregard both of mercy and of justice, emptying her shafts upon the best and noblest indifferently with the meanest and worst; upon those who are engaged in the highest and worthiest enterprises, and often as the direct consequence of the noblest acts; and it might almost be imagined as a punishment for them. She mows down those on whose existence hangs the well-being of a whole people, perhaps the prospects of the human race for generations to come, with as little compunction as those whose death is a relief to themselves, or a blessing to those under their noxious influence.

Such are Nature’s dealings with life. Even when she does not intend to kill, she inflicts the same tortures in apparent wantonness. In the clumsy provision which she has made for that perpetual renewal of animal life, rendered necessary by the prompt termination she puts to it in every individual instance, no human being ever comes into the world but another human being is literally stretched on the rack for hours or days, not unfrequently issuing in death. Next to taking life (equal to it according to a high authority) is taking the means by which we live; and Nature does this too on the largest scale and with the most callous indifference. A single hurricane destroys the hopes of a season; a flight of locusts, or an inundation, desolates a district; a trifling chemical change in an edible root starves a million of people. The waves of the sea, like banditti, seize and appropriate the wealth of the rich and the little all of the poor with the same accompaniments of stripping, wounding, and killing as their human antitypes. Everything, in short, which the worst men commit either against life or property, is perpetrated on a larger scale by natural agents. Nature has Noyades more fatal than those of Carrier; her explosions of fire damp are as destructive as human artillery; her plague and cholera far surpass the poison cups of the Borgias. Even the love of “order” which is thought to be a following of the ways of Nature, is in fact a contradiction of them. All which people are accustomed to deprecate as “disorder” and its consequences, is precisely a counterpart of Nature’s ways. Anarchy and the Reign of Terror are overmatched in injustice, ruin, and death, by a hurricane and a pestilence. . . .

Nature cannot be a proper model for us to imitate. Either it is right that we should kill because nature kills; torture because nature tortures; ruin and devastate because nature does the like; or we ought not to consider at all what nature does, but what it is good to do. If there is such a thing as a reductio ad absurdum, this surely amounts to one. If it is a sufficient reason for doing one thing, that nature does it, why not another thing? If not all things, why anything? . . .

Conformity to nature has no connection whatever with right and wrong.

All improvement in positive law depends on the retention of that ideal, as all improvement in positive morality depends on the retention, and the purification and perfection, of our ethical ideals.