Kant says that if you are kind to your brother because you are fond of him, you have no moral
merit: an act only has moral merit when it is performed because the moral law enjoins it.
Although pleasure is not the good, it is nevertheless unjust--so Kant maintains-that the virtuous
should suffer. Since this often happens in this world, there must be another world where they are
rewarded after death, and there must be a God to secure justice in the life hereafter. He rejects all
the old metaphysical arguments for God and immortality, but considers his new ethical argument
irrefutable.
Kant himself was a man whose outlook on practical affairs was kindly and humanitarian, but the
same cannot be said of most of those who rejected happiness as the good. The sort of ethic that is
called "noble" is less associated with attempts to improve the world than is the more mundane
view that we should seek to make men happier. This is not surprising. Contempt for happiness is
easier when the happiness is other people's than when it is our own. Usually the substitute for
happiness is some form of heroism. This affords unconscious outlets for the impulse to power,
and abundant excuses for cruelty. Or, again, what is valued may be strong emotion; this was the
case with the romantics. This led to a toleration of such passions as hatred and revenge; Byron's
heroes are typical, and are never persons of exemplary behaviour. The men who did most to
promote human happiness were--as might have been expected--those who thought happiness
important, not those who despised it in comparison with something more "sublime." Moreover, a
man's ethic usually reflects his character, and benevolence leads to a desire for the general
happiness. Thus the men who thought happiness the end of life tended to be the more benevolent,
while those who proposed other ends were often dominated, unconsciously, by cruelty or love of
power.
These ethical differences are associated, usually though not invariably, with differences in politics.
Locke, as we saw, is tentative in his beliefs, not at all authoritarian, and willing to leave every
question to be decided by free discussion. The result, both in his case and in that of his followers,
was a belief in reform, but of a gradual sort. Since their systems of thought were piecemeal, and
the result of separate investigations of many different questions, their political views tended
naturally to have the same character. They fought