Herbert Spencer's Principle of Equal Freedom: Is It Well Grounded?

• Author: Bragues, George
• Position: Critical essay

During the mid- to late nineteenth century, Herbert Spencer was the most widely read philosopher in the world. A large part of his appeal was owing to his ambition of providing a complete and comprehensive account of human reality based on scientific principles. This project culminated in the articulation of a moral code oriented around the principle of equal freedom.

In this paper, I analyze Spencer's attempted proof of this principle and conclude that it is fundamentally flawed. To be sure, his reasoning does stand up against the more obvious objections predicated on his advocacy of the Lamarckian theory of evolution and his alleged succumbing to the ought-is problem. However, his derivation of the principle of equal freedom privileges the egoistic imperatives that drove the evolution of the human species. Spencer also goes astray by insisting upon the historical inevitability of his moral teaching. But if corrected for these defects, Spencer's moral theory can be made viable.

The Search for a Rational Basis of Morality

Philosophers have been seeking a rational basis for morality ever since Socrates began his inquiries into the human condition nearly two and a half millennia ago. Especially since the seventeenth century, however, philosophers have gone about this quest by devising formulas. They have endeavored, that is, to identify a fundamental postulate defining a procedure that can be applied to give moral guidance on every conceivable circumstance in which human interaction might generate conflict or concern. Guiding this pursuit has been the expectation that philosophers will be able to input the relevant variables into the formula and generate a moral determination as the output. A formula, too, holds out the hope of eliminating ad hoc, ideological, and self-serving considerations from moral reasoning. Beyond that, the simplicity offered by a formula promises to remove the abstruseness and casuistry' that have all too often complicated ethical analysis. On the approach, morality would thus be akin to a good scientific theory, at least insofar as its maxims would be summed up by a simple idea with great explanatory power.

Examples of this quest for a moral formula are not hard to come by. The two major post-seventeenth-century strands of moral philosophy, the utilitarian and deontological, essentially represent alternative formulas. The utilitarian claims that morality equals those acts that maximize the pleasure or preferences of the greatest number of individuals. Meanwhile, the deontologist, who takes his bearings from Immanuel Kant, equates morality to a logically universalizable maxim or, as that philosopher's position is more commonly expressed nowadays, to the principle that human beings are always to be treated as ends rather than as means. Formulas predicated on a social contract, in which morality is equated with the rules to which rational persons would consent, have also been set forth in different forms by Thomas Hobbes ([1651] 1968), Jean-Jacques Rousseau ([1762] 1978), John Rawls (1971), and David Gauthier (1986). Another influential stream of moral philosophy offers the formula of rights, whether it be the Locke-influenced version of the rights to life, liberty, and property or the more expansive menu of claims inspired by the United Nations Declaration of Human Rights of 1948. Nor should we forget the most recently proposed formula to have gained widespread adherence, derived from another formula defined by a social contract: John Rawls's difference principle, according to which inequalities in outcomes can be justified only if these inequalities work to the benefit of the less-advantaged groups in society.

A common feature of these formulas is that the arguments put forward in their favor do not include the giving of scientific evidence. Although each of these moral formulas claims to embody the rationality and universality of science, none is defended as following from natural laws grounded in observation and experiment. Standing in the way of this approach has been the prospect of committing the naturalistic fallacy. On this argument, developed by G. E. Moore ([1903] 2004) and W. D. Ross ([1930] 2002), it is a logically invalid move to derive "ought" from "is"--or, put another way, to generate moral conclusions from the facts of nature. As a result, contemporary' philosophers have felt compelled to rely upon intuition, self-evident propositions, reflective equilibrium, human psychological necessities, and currently undisputed assumptions in order to render morality into a rational enterprise without the aid of a scientific foundation.

But do we really have to forego science in this manner? Are we really precluded from invoking science to ground a theory of morals? Herbert Spencer did not think so. Undeterred by the is-ought problem, the nineteenth-century British philosopher advanced a moral system explicitly defended on scientific grounds. Memories of Spencer faded throughout the twentieth century, except among a few sociologists and historians of ideas (Peel 1971; Jones 1980). Nevertheless, he merits our attention in the twenty-first century if only because of the extraordinary range of his erudition. His works encompass not only ethics but also politics, economics, psychology, sociology, education, aesthetics, biology, theology, and metaphysics. Largely owing to this breadth, Spencer was the world's most popular philosopher during his heyday, the late nineteenth century, being more widely cited than other luminaries of the period, including John Stuart Mill and Karl Marx (Google Books 2019). However, Spencer's fame diminished during the twentieth century, mostly because he came to be associated with social Darwinism (Hofstadter 1955). That association is arguably unfair.1 The growing recognition of this unlairness and the rise of evolutionary psychology may help explain why interest in Spencer's work has experienced something of a revival (Gray 1996; Francis 2007; Taylor 2007; Oiler 2010; Mingardi 2013). In truth, Spencer's social thought is best understood as the systematic application of the principle of equal freedom. He deemed this core moral postulate to override any direct employment of the state to enhance the evolutionary fitness of the human population.

The principle of equal freedom states that "each has freedom to do all that he wills provided that he infringes not the equal freedom of any other" (Spencer 1897, 46). Spencer employs this principle as an axiom from which numerous conclusions are deduced to inform the design of political institutions as well as public policies. But this method raises the question: Is the principle of equal freedom properly established? The answer to this question is no.

Spencer's Inductive-Deductive Method of Philosophical Synthesis

The initial challenge that arises in looking to science for a moral touchstone is that there is really no specific discipline called "science" from which to begin one's inquiries. Both in Spencer's time and more so in ours, there exist "sciences" in the plural. They range from astronomy and chemistry through to geology and study physical nature in addition to subjects that focus on human nature, such as criminology, economics, and anthropology. "Science," as Spencer notes, "means merely the family of the Sciences--stands for nothing more than the sum of knowledge formed of their contributions" (1912, 117). How exactly, then, is a scientific investigator of morals to traverse this multiplicity of subjects and select the relevant elements to support a formula?

Spencer was well aware of this problem. "Science," he says, "consists of truths existing more or less separate and does not recognize these truths as entirely integrated" (1912, 117). He was cognizant, too, that the success of the sciences had increasingly displaced philosophy's jurisdiction over numerous domains of inquiry, leaving philosophy a shadow of its former noble self, struggling to retain a vital intellectual function. Thus, Spencer asks, "Where remains any subject-matter for Philosophy?" (1912, 117). Yet precisely because the success of the sciences expresses itself in the uncoordinated emergence of ever more specialized modes of inquiry, Spencer sees an opportunity for philosophy. Its primary task in a scientific culture is now to unify the sciences. Philosophy would in this task retain its time-honored role of providing a comprehensive vision of reality. "That which remains as the common element ... of Philosophy ... is--knowledge of the highest generality" (1912, 117). Now, however, attaining this understanding is to be accomplished by integrating the findings of the sciences rather than by speculating about a realm above and beyond the sciences. As Spencer puts it, "Science is partially-unified knowledge; Philosophy is completely-unified knowledge" (1912, 119).

In endeavoring to construct a philosophy that achieves this unity, Spencer zeroed in on four sciences. Underlying this emphasis is a commitment to the theory of evolution, for Spencer a sine qua non of any scientific account of the human condition. Not surprisingly, then, the first science in Spencer's architectonic is biology, which is meant to supply an evolutionary explanation of the bodily aspects of human nature. In Spencer's eyes, biology illuminates the physiological functions and how they evolve in relation to the external circumstances to which they must be adjusted if a life-form, Homo sapiens included, is going to subsist. The second science in Spencer's philosophic synthesis is psychology. It comes into play as soon as we move from the bodily impulses of pleasure and pain that biology covers to the mental representation and elaboration of those feelings in emotions, ideas, reflection, and deliberation. The third science is sociology, which reckons with the fact that human beings have evolved by coming together in forms of association that serve to further...