The Foundations of Morality

I wish to express my gratitude to the Institute for Humane Studies for making this new edition possible.

No changes have been made from the original edition of 1964 except to correct a few typographical errors. This does not mean that my ideas on ethics have undergone no change whatever in the last nine years, but simply that these have not been important enough to justify rewriting and resetting.

Moral philosophers often have second thoughts. The ideas of Bertrand Russell underwent such frequent and radical changes that in 1952 he wrote to two anthologists (Sellers and Hospers) who reprinted an essay of his published in 1910: “I am not quite satisfied with any view of ethics that I have been able to arrive at, and that is why I have abstained from writing again on the subject.” (Later, however, he did.)

I have no such violent reversals to report. I cannot think of a single change, for example, that I would make in my views as summarized in the final chapter. Yet if I were writing the book afresh, there would no doubt be changes in emphasis and in minor points. In discussing the ultimate goal of ethics I would use the word “happiness” less frequently and more often substitute “satisfaction” or “well-being” or even simply “good.” In fact, I would give less attention to trying to specify the ultimate goal of conduct. As social cooperation is the great means of achieving nearly all our individual ends, this means can be thought of as itself the moral goal to be achieved.

If I have anywhere written a sentence which seems to imply that individuals are or should be always actuated by exclusively egocentric or eudemonic motives, I would now modify or withdraw it. I would emphasize even more strongly than I do in the section which runs from page 123 to page 127 that though the ideal rules of morality are those best calculated to serve the interest of everyone in the long run, there will nevertheless be occasions when these rules will call for a real sacrifice of his immediate interests by an individual, and that when they do so this sacrifice must be made because of the overriding necessity of maintaining these rules inviolate. This moral principle is no different from the universally acknowledged legal principle that a man must abide by a valid contract even when it proves costly for him to do so. The rules of morality constitute a tacit social contract.

Is the moral philosophy advocated in these pages “utilitarian” or not? In the sense that all rules of conduct must be judged by their tendency to lead to desirable rather than undesirable social results, any rational ethics whatever must be utilitarian. But when the word is used it seems most often to arouse in the minds of readers some specific nineteenth-century writer’s views, if not a mere caricature of them. I found it extremely discouraging to have my ideas characterized in one so-called scholarly journal as “straight utilitarianism” (whatever that may mean) even though I had pointed out (p. 359), however facetiously, that there are probably more than thirteen “utilitarianisms,” and in any case had unequivocally rejected the “classical” ad hoc utilitarianism implicit in Bentham, Mill and Sidgwick, and espoused instead a “rule-utilitism” as earlier propounded by Hume. The review just cited only reinforced the conviction I expressed (also on page 359) that the term Utilitarianism is beginning to outlive its usefulness in ethical discussion. I have called my own system Cooperatism, which seems sufficiently descriptive.

Henry Hazlitt

August, 1972.