This brief discussion is sufficient, perhaps, to show what ignorance and narrowness are necessary to consider seriously the contraposition of the ‘Jesuit’ principle, ‘the end justifies the means’, to another seemingly higher moral, in which each ‘means’ carries its own moral tag like merchandise with fixed prices in a department store. It is remarkable that the common sense of the Anglo-Saxon Philistine has managed to wax indignant at the ‘Jesuit’ principle and simultaneously to find inspiration in the utilitarian morality, so characteristic of British philosophy. Moreover, the criterion of Bentham-John Mill, “the greatest possible happiness for the greatest possible number”, signifies that those means are moral, which lead to the common welfare as the higher end. In its general philosophical formulations Anglo-Saxon utilitarianism thus fully coincides with the ‘Jesuit’ principle, ‘the end justifies the means’. Empiricism, we see, exists in the world only to free us from the necessity of making both ends meet.
Herbert Spencer, into whose empiricism Darwin inculcated the idea of ‘evolution’, as a special vaccine, taught that in the moral sphere evolution proceeds from ‘sensations’ to ‘ideas’. Sensations conform to the criterion of immediate pleasure, while ideas permit one to be guided by the criterion of future, lasting and higher pleasure. Thus, the moral criterion here too is ‘pleasure’ and ‘happiness’. But the content of this criterion acquires breadth and depth depending upon the level of ‘evolution’. In this way Herbert Spencer too, through the methods of his own ‘evolutionary’ utilitarianism, showed that the principle, ‘the end justifies the means’, does not embrace anything immoral.
It is naive, however, to expect from this abstract ‘principle’ an answer to the practical question: what may we, and what may we not do? Moreover, the principle, the end justifies the means, naturally raises the question: and what justifies the end? In practical life as in the historical movement, the end and the means constantly change places. A machine under construction is an ‘end’ of production only that upon entering the factory it may become the ‘means’. Democracy in certain periods is the ‘end’ of the class struggle only that later it may be transformed into its ‘means’. Not embracing anything immoral, the so-called ‘Jesuit’ principle fails, however, to resolve the moral problem.
The ‘evolutionary’ utilitarianism of Spencer likewise abandons us halfway without an answer, since, following Darwin, it tries to dissolve the concrete historical morality in the biological needs or in the ‘social instincts’ characteristic of a gregarious animal, and this at a time when the very understanding of morality arises only in an antagonistic milieu, that is, in a society torn by classes.
Bourgeois evolutionism halts impotently at the threshold of historical society because it does not wish to acknowledge the driving force in the evolution of social forms: the class struggle. Morality is one of the ideological functions in this struggle. The ruling class forces its ends upon society and habituates it into considering all those means which contradict its ends as immoral. That is the chief function of official morality. It pursues the idea of the ‘greatest possible happiness’ not for the majority but for a small and ever-diminishing minority. Such a regime could not have endured for even a week through force alone. It needs the cement of morality. The mixing of this cement constitutes the profession of the petty-bourgeois theoreticians and moralists. They dabble in all colours of the rainbow but in the final instance remain apostles of slavery and submission.