The Synthetic Philosophy of Herbert Spencer: Principles of ethics by Herbert Spencer

Author:Herbert Spencer
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Appleton

An equally disastrous, or still more disastrous, effect remains to be named. The policy, if persistently pursued, leads on to communism and anarchism. If society in its corporate capacity undertakes beneficence as a function— if, now in this direction and now in that, the inferior learn by precept enforced by example, that it is a State-duty not simply to secure them the unhindered pursuit of happiness but to furnish them with the means to happiness; there is eventually formed among the poorer, and especially among the least deserving, a fixed belief that if they are not comfortable the government is to blame. Not to their own idleness and misdeeds is their misery ascribed, but to the badness of society in not doing its duty to them. What follows? First there grows up among numbers, the theory that social arrangements must be fundamentally changed in such ways that all shall have equal shares of the products of labour—that differences of reward due to differences of merit shall be abolished: there comes communism. And then among the very worst, angered that their vile lives have not brought them all the good things they want, there grows up the doctrine that society should be destroyed, and that each man should seize what he likes and "suppress," as Ravachol said, everyone who stands in his way. There comes anarchism and a return to the unrestrained struggle for life, as among brutes.

Such then are the ultimate results of not discriminating between justice and beneficence, and between the instrumentalities proper for carrying on the two.

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