The Principles of Ethics: In Two Volumes

22. Political Rights—So-Called

Ethics_V2_151-200.indd 193 1/27/12 12:04 PM CHAPTER 22 Political Rights-So-Called 342. Every day yields illustrations of the way in which men think only of the proximate and ignore the remote. The power of a locomotive is currently ascribed to steam. There is no adequate consciousness of the fact that the steam is simply an intermediator and not an initiator-that the initiator is the heat of the fire. It is not perceived that the steam engine is in truth a heat engine, differing from other heat engines (such as those in which gas is employed) only in the instrumentality employed to transform molecular motion into molar motion. This limitation of consciousness to direct relations and ignoring of indirect relations, habitually vitiates thinking about social affairs. The primary effect produced by one who builds a house, or makes a road, or drains a field, is that he sets men to work; and the work, more prominent in thought than the sustenance obtained by it, comes to be regarded as itself a benefit. The imagined good is not increase in the stock of commodities or appliances which subserve human wants, but the expenditure of the labor which produces them. Hence various fallacies-hence the comment on destruction by fire that it is good for trade; hence the delusion that machinery is injurious to the people. If instead of the proximate thing, 193 Ethics_V2_151-200.indd 194 1/27/12 12:04 PM 194 The Ethics of Social Life: Justice labor, there were contemplated the ultimate thing, produce, such errors would be avoided. Similarly is it with currency fallacies. Coins, which may be exchanged for all kinds of desired things, come themselves to be connected in men's minds with the idea of value, rather than the things they will purchase; which, as satisfying desires, are the truly valuable things. And then promises to pay, serving in place of coins, intrinsically valueless though they are, are, by daily experience of their purchasing power, so associated with the idea of value that abundance of them becomes identified in thought with wealth; and there results the belief that it only needs a profusion of banknotes to insure national prosperity: errors which would be avoided were the reasoning carried on in terms of commodities, instead of being carried on in terms of these symbols. This usurpation of consciousness by the proximate and expulsion from it of the remote-this forgetting of the ends and erecting the means into ends, is again shown us in education. The time was when knowledge anciently acquired having ceased to be current, the learning of Latin and Greek, in which that knowledge was recorded, became indispensable as a means to acquirement of it; and it was then regarded as a means. But now, long after this ancient knowledge has been rendered accessible in our language, and now, when a vastly larger mass of knowledge has been accumulated , this learning of Latin and Greek is persisted in; and, moreover, has come to be practically regarded as the end, to the exclusion of the end as originally conceived. Young men who are tolerably familiar with these ancient languages, are supposed to be educated; though they may have acquired but little ofwhat knowledge there is embodiedin them and next to nothing of the immensely greater amount of knowledge and immensely more valuable knowledge which centuries of research have established. 343. With what view is here made this general remark, thus variously illustrated? With the view of preparing the way for a further illustration which now concerns us. Current political Ethics_V2_151-200.indd 195 1/27/12 12:04 PM Political Rights-So-Called 195 thought is profoundly vitiated by this mistaking of means for ends, and by this pursuit of the means to the neglect of the ends. Hence, among others, the illusions which prevail concerning "political rights." There are no further rights, truly so-called, than such as have been set forth. If, as we have seen, rights are but so many separate parts of a man's general freedom to pursue the objects of life, with such limitations only as result from the presence of other men who have similarly to pursue such objects, then, if a man's freedom is not in any way further restricted, he possesses all his rights. If the integrity of his body is in no way or degree...