Let us then define the problem of the objective reference of the
valuational judgments by stating, as distinctly as may be, the
conditions by which ethical and economic deliberation, respectively, are
prompted. A study of these conditions will make it easier to see in what
way the judgments reached in dealing with them can be objective.
When will an end, presenting itself in consciousness in the manner
indicated in our brief analysis of the judgment-process, become the
center of attention, thereby checking the advance, through investigation
of the possible means, to final overt action? This is the general
statement of the problem of the typical ethical situation. Manifestly
there will be no ethical deliberation if the imaged end at once turns
the attention toward the environment of possible means, instead of first
of all itself becoming the object instead of the director of attention;
there will be no suspension of progress toward final action, excepting
such as may later come through difficulty in the discovery and
co-ordination of the means. However, there are cases in which the
emergence of the end forthwith is followed by a check to the reflective
process, and the agent shrinks from the end presented in imagination as
being, let us say, one forbidden by authority or one repugnant to his
own established standards. The end may in such a case disappear at once;
very often it will insistently remain. On this latter supposition, the
simplest possibility will be the development of a mere mechanical
tension, a "pull and haul" between the end, or properly the impulses
which it represents, and the agent's habit of suppressing impulses of
the class to which the present one is, perhaps intuitively, recognized
as belonging. The case is the common one of "temptation" on the one side
and "principle" or "conscience" on the other, and so long as the two
forces remain thus in hard-and-fast opposition to each other there can
be no ethical deliberation or judgment in a proper sense. The standard
or habit may gain the day by sheer mechanical excess of power, or the
new impulse, the temptation, may prevail because its onset can break
down the mechanical resistance.
Out of such a situation as this, however, genuine ethical deliberation
may arise on condition that standard and "temptation" can lose something
of their abstractness and their hard-and-fast opposition, and develop
into terms of concrete meaning. The agent may come to see that the end
is in some definite way of really vital interest and too important to be
put aside without consideration. He may, of course, in this fall into
gross self-sophistication, like the drunkard in the classical instance
who takes another glass to test his self-control and thereby gain
assurance, or he may act with wisdom and with full sincerity, like
Dorothea Casaubon when she renounced the impossible task imposed by her
departed husband. In the moral life one can ask or hope for complete
exemption from the risk of self-deception with as little reason as in
scientific research. But however this may be, our present interest is in
the method, not in particular results of ethical reflection. Whether
properly so in a particular case or not, the imaged end may come to
seem at least plausibly defensible on grounds of principle which serve
to sanction certain other modes of conduct to which a place is given in
the accepted scheme of life; or the end may simply press for a
relatively independent recognition on the very general ground that its
emergence represents an enlargement and new development of the
personality.[109] The end may thus cease to stand in the character of
blind self-assertive impulse, and press its claim as a positive means of
future moral growth, as bringing freedom from repressive and enfeebling
restraints and as tending to the reinforcement of other already valued
modes of conduct. On the other hand, the standard will cease to stand as
mere resistance and negation, and may discover something of its hidden
meaning as a product of long experience and slow growth, and as perhaps
a vital part of the organization of one's present life, not to be
touched without grave risk.
Now, on whichever side the development may first commence, a like
development must soon follow on the other, and it is the action and
reaction of standard and prospective or problematic end upon each other
that constitutes the process of ethical deliberation or judgment. Just
as in the typical judgment-process, as sketched above, so also here
predicate and subject _develop each other_, when once they have given
over their first antagonism and come to the attitude of reasoning
together. The predicate explains itself that the subject or new end may
be searchingly and fairly tested; and under this scrutiny the subject
develops its full meaning as a course of conduct, thereby prompting
further analysis and reinterpretation of the standard. But this is not
the place for detailed analysis of the process;[110] here we are
concerned only to define the type of situation, and this we may now do
in the following terms: The indispensable condition of ethical judgment
is the presence in the agent's mind of at least two rival interesting
ends or systems of such ends. In the foregoing, the subject of the
judgment is the new end that has arisen; the predicate or "standard" is
the symbol for the old ends or values which in the tension of the
judgment-process must be brought to more or less explicit
enumeration--and, we must add, reconstruction also. Indeed, it is
important, even at this stage of our discussion, to observe that
Predicate and Standard are not equivalent in meaning. The predicate, or
predicative side, of judgment is the imagery of control in the process,
which, as we have seen, develops with the subject side; while the term
"Standard" connotes the rigid fixity which belongs to the inhibiting
concept or ideal in the stage before the judgment-process proper can
begin. The ethical judgment-process is, in a word, just the process of
reconstructing standards--as in its other and corresponding aspect it is
the process of interpreting new ends. Those who oppose measures of
social reform or new modes of conduct or belief on alleged grounds of
"immorality" instinctively feel in doing so that the change may make its
way more easily against a resistance that will candidly explain itself;
and, on the other side of the social judgment-process, the more
fanatical know how to turn to good advantage for their propaganda the
bitterness or contempt of those who represent the established order. On
both sides there are those who trust more in mechanical "pull and haul"
than in the intrinsic merits of their cause.
Thus it is by encountering some rival end or entire system of ends, as
symbolized by an ideal, that a new end emerging out of impulse comes to
stand for an agent, as the center of a problem of conduct, and so to
occupy the center of attention. And it thereby becomes an Object, as we
shall hold, which must be more fully defined in order that it may be
_valued_, and accordingly be held to warrant a determinate attitude
toward itself on the agent's part. We have now to define in the same
general terms the typical economic situation.
In economic theory as in common thought it is not the contemplated act
of applying certain means to the attainment of an end regarded as
desirable that functions as the logical subject of valuation. The thing
or object valued in the economic situation is one's present wealth,
whether material or immaterial, one's services or labor--whatever one
gives in exchange or otherwise sets apart for the attainment of a
desired end or, proximately, to secure possession of the necessary and
sufficient means to the attainment of a desired end. The object of
attention in the valuing process is here not itself an end of action. In
this respect the economic type of judgment is like the physical, for in
both the object to be valued is a certain means which one is seeking to
adapt to some more or less definitely imaged purpose; or a condition of
which one wishes, likewise for some special purpose, to take advantage.
The ultimate goal of all judgment is the determination of a course of
conduct looking toward an end, and our present problem may accordingly
be stated in the following terms: Under what circumstances in the
judgment-process does it become necessary to the definition and
attainment of an end as yet vague and indeterminate that the requisite
means, as in part already physically determined, should be further
scrutinized in attention and determined from the economic point of view?
Or, in a word: What is the "jurisdiction" of the economic point of view?
For ordinary judgements of sense-perception the presence in
consciousness of a single unquestioned end is the adequate occasion, as
our analysis (assuming its validity) has shown. For ethical judgment we
have seen that the presence of conflicting ends is necessary; and we
shall now hold that this condition is necessary, though not, without a
certain qualification, adequate, for the economic type as well. If an
imaged end can hold its place in consciousness without a rival, and the
physical means of attaining it have been found and co-ordinated, then
the use or consumption of the means must inevitably follow, without
either ethical or economic judgement; for, to paraphrase the saying of
Professor James, nothing but an end can displace or inhibit effort
toward another end. The economic situation differs, then, from the
ethical in this, that the end or system of ends entering into
competition with the one for the time being of chief and primary
interest has been brought to consciousness through reference to those
"physical" means which already have been determined as necessary to this
latter end. The conflict of ends in the economic situation, that is to
say, is not due to a direct and intrinsic incompatibility between them.
Where there manifestly is such incompatibility, judgment will be of the
ethical type--as when building the house involves the foreclosure of a
mortgage, and so, in working an injury to the holder of the site, may do
violence to one's ideal of friendship or of more special obligation; or
when an impulse to intemperate self-indulgence is met by one's ideal of
social usefulness. In cases such as these one clearly sees, or can on
reflection come to see, in what way an evil result to personal character
will follow upon the imminent misdeed, and in what way suppression of
the momentary impulse will conserve the entire approved and established
way of life. Very often, however, the conflicting ends are related in no
such mutually exclusive way. Each may be in itself permissible and
compatible with the other, and, so far as any possible ethical
discrimination can determine, there is no ground for choice between
them. Thus it is only through the fact that both ends are dependent
upon a limited supply of means that one would, for example, ever bring
together and deliberately oppose in judgment the purpose of making
additions to his library and the necessity of providing a store of fuel
for the winter. Both ends in such a case are in themselves indeed
permissible in a general way, but they may very well not both of them be
economically possible, and hence, for the person in question and in the
presence of the economic conditions which confront him, not, in the last
analysis, both ethically possible. When there is a conflict between two
ends that stand in close organic relation in the sense explained above,
the problem is an ethical one; when the conflict is, in the sense
explained, one of competition between ends ethically permissible--not at
variance, either one, that is, with other ends _directly_--for the whole
or for a share of one's supply of means, the problem is of the economic
type.[111]
There are three typical cases in which economic judgment or valuation of
the means is necessary, and the enumeration of these will make clear the
relation between the ethical and the economic types of judgment: (1)
First may be mentioned the case in which ethical deliberation has
apparently reached its end in the formation of a plan of action which,
so far as one can see, on ethical grounds is unobjectionable. A definite
"temptation" may have been overcome, or out of a more complex situation
a satisfactory ethical compromise or readjustment may have been
developed with much difficulty. Now, there are very often cases in which
such a course of action still may not be entered on without further
hesitation; for, if the plan be one requiring for its working out the
use of material means, the fact of an existing limitation of one's
supply of means must bring hitherto unthought of ends into conflict with
it. There are doubtless many situations in which one's moral choice may
be carried into practice without consideration of ways and means, as
when one forgives an injury or holds his instinctive nature under
discipline in the effort to attain an ascetic or a genuinely social
ideal of character. But more often than the moral rigorist cares to see,
questions of an economic nature must be raised after the ethical
"evidence is all in"--questions which are probably more trying to a
sensitive moral nature than those more dramatic situations in which the
real perils of self-sophistication are vastly less, and the simpler,
sharper definition of the issue makes possible a less difficult, though
a more decisive and edifying, victory. (2) In the second place are those
cases in which the end that has emerged is without conspicuous moral
quality, because, although it may represent some worthy impulse, it has
not been obliged to make its way to acceptance against the resistance of
desires less worthy than itself. This is the ideal case of economic
theory in which "moral distinctions are irrelevant," and the economic
man is free, according to the myth, to perform his hedonistic
calculations without thought of moral scruple. The end ethically
acceptable in itself, like the enriching of one's library, must, when
the means are limited, divert a portion of the means from other uses,
and will thus, _through reference to the indispensable means_, engage in
conflict with other ends quite remotely, if in the agent's knowledge at
all, related with itself. (3) Finally we reach the limit of apparent
freedom from ethical considerations in the operations of business
institutions, and perhaps especially in those of large business
corporations. Apart from the routine operations of a business which
involve no present exercise of the valuing judgment, there are
constantly in such institutions new projects which must be considered,
and which commonly must involve revaluation of the means. In this
revaluation the principle of greatest revenue is supposed to be the sole
criterion, regardless of other personal or social points of view from
which confessedly the measure might be considered. But such a
supposition, however true to the facts of current business practice it
may be, we must hold to be an abstraction when viewed from the
standpoint of the social life at large, and hence no real exception to
our general principle. The economic and the ethical situations differ,
as types, only in the closeness of relation between the ends that are in
conflict and in the manner in which the ends are first brought into
conflict--not in respect of the intrinsic nature of the ends which are
involved in them.[112] It is this difference which, as we shall see,
explains why ethical valuation must be of ends, and economic valuation,
on the other hand, of means.
We have yet to see _in what way_ valuation of the means of action can
serve to resolve a difficulty of the type which has thus been designated
as Economic. The question must be deferred until a more detailed
analysis of the economic judgment-process can be undertaken. It is
enough for our present purpose to note that the subject of valuation in
this process _is_ the means, and to see that under the typical
conditions which have been described some further determination of the
means than the merely physical one of their factual availability for the
competing ends is needed.[113] Physically and mechanically the means are
available for each one of the ends or groups of ends in question; the
pressing problem is to determine for which one of the ends, if any, or
to what compromise or readjustment of certain of the ends or all of
them, the means at hand are in an economic sense most properly
available.[114]
From this preliminary discussion of the ethical and economic situations
we must now pass to discuss the objectivity of the judgments by which
the agent meets the difficulties which such situations as these present.
We shall seek to show that these judgments are constructive of an
objective order of reality. It will be necessary in the first place to
determine the psychological conditions of the more commonly recognized
experience of Objectivity in the restricted sphere of sense-perception.
There might otherwise remain a certain antecedent presumption against
the thesis which we wish to establish even after the direct argument had
been presented.[115]