Writing about ethics has tended to take one of two directions. On the
one hand we have description of conduct in terms of psychology, or
anthropology. On the other a study of the concepts right and wrong, good
and bad, duty and freedom. If we follow the first line we may attempt to
explain conduct psychologically by showing the simple ideas or feelings
and the causal connections or laws of habit and association out of which
actions arise. Or anthropologically we may show the successive stages of
custom and taboo, or the family, religious, political, legal, and social
institutions from which morality has emerged. But we meet at once a
difficulty if we ask what is the bearing of this description and
analysis. Will it aid me in the practical judgment "What shall I do?" In
physics there is no corresponding difficulty. To analyze gravity enables
us to compute an orbit, or aim a gun; to analyze electric action is to
have the basis for lighting streets and carrying messages. It assumes
the uniformity of nature and takes no responsibility as to whether we
shall aim guns or whether our messages shall be of war or of peace.
Whereas in ethics it is claimed that the elements are so changed by
their combination--that the _process_ is so essential a factor--that no
prediction is certain. And it is also claimed that the ends themselves
are perhaps to be changed as well as the means. Stated otherwise,
suppose that mankind has passed through various stages, can mere
observation of these tell me what next? Perhaps I don't care to repeat
the past; how can I plan for a better future? Or grant that I may
discover instinct and emotion, habit and association in my thinking and
willing, how will this guide me to direct my thinking and willing to
right ends?
The second method has tended to examine concepts. Good is an eternal,
changeless pattern; it is to be discovered by a vision; or right and
good are but other terms for nature's or reason's universal laws which
are timeless and wholly unaffected by human desires or passions; moral
nature is soul, and soul is created not built up of elements,--such were
some of the older absolutisms. Right and good are unique concepts not to
be resolved or explained in terms of anything else,--this is a more
modern thesis which on the face of it may appear to discourage analysis.
The ethical world is a world of "eternal values." Philosophy "by taking
part in empirical questions sinks both itself and them." These doctrines
bring high claims, but are they more valuable for human guidance than
the empirical method?[65]
"The knowledge that is superhuman only is ridiculous in man." No man can
ever find his way home with the pure circle unless he has also the art
of the impure. It is the conviction of this paper that in ethics, as in
knowledge, thoughts without contents are empty; percepts without
concepts are blind. Description of what has been--empiricism--is futile
in itself to project and criticize. Intuitions and deductions a priori
are empty. The "thoughts" of ethics are of course the terms right, good,
ought, worth, and their kin. The "percepts" are the instincts and
emotions, the desires and aspirations, the conditions of time and place,
of nature, and institutions.
Yet it is misleading to say that in studying the history of morals we
are merely empiricists, and can hope to find no criterion. This would be
the case if we were studying non-moral beings. But moral beings have to
some degree guided life by judgments and not merely followed impulse or
habit. Early judgments as to taboos, customs, and conduct may be crude
and in need of correction; they are none the less judgments. Over and
over we find them reshaped to meet change from hunting to agriculture,
from want to plenty, from war to peace, from small to large groupings.
Much more clearly when we consider civilized peoples, the interaction
between reflection and impulse becomes patent. To study this interaction
can be regarded as futile for the future only if we discredit all past
moral achievement.
Those writers who have based their ethics upon concepts have frequently
expressed the conviction that the security of morality depends upon the
question whether good and right are absolute and eternal essences
independent of human opinion or volition. A different source of
standards which to some offers more promise for the future is the fact
of the moral life _as_ a constant process of forming and reshaping
ideals and of bringing these to bear upon conditions of existence. To
construct a right and good is at least a process tending to
responsibility, if this construction is to be for the real world in
which we must live and not merely for a world of fancy or caprice. It is
not the aim of this paper to give a comprehensive outline of ethical
method. Four factors in the moral life will be pointed out and this
analysis will be used to emphasize especially certain social and
constructive aspects of our concepts of right and good.
I
The four factors which it is proposed to emphasize are these:
(1) Life as a biological process involving relation to nature, with all
that this signifies in the equipment of instincts, emotions, and
selective activity by which life maintains itself.
(2) Interrelation with other human beings, including on the one hand
associating, grouping, mating, communicating, cooeperating, commanding,
obeying, worshiping, adjudicating, and on the psychological side the
various instincts, emotions, susceptibilities to personal stimulation
and appropriate responses in language and behavior which underlie or are
evoked by the life in common.
(3) Intelligence and reason, through which experience is interrelated,
viewed as a whole, enlarged in imagination.
(4) The process of judgment and choice, in which different elements are
brought together, considered in one conscious universe, evaluated or
measured, thereby giving rise reciprocally to a self on the one hand and
to approved or chosen objects on the other.
(1) Life. Life is at least the raw material of all values, even if it is
not in itself entitled to be called good without qualification. For in
the process of nourishing and protecting itself, the plant or animal
selects and in the case of higher animals, manipulates; it adapts itself
to nature and adapts nature to itself; it shows reciprocal relation of
means to end, of whole to part. It foreshadows the conscious processes
in so many ways that men have always been trying to read back some
degree of consciousness. And life in the animal, at least, is regarded
as having experiences of pleasure and pain, and emotions of fear, anger,
shame, and sex, which are an inseparable aspect of values. If it is not
the supreme or only good, if men freely sacrifice it for other ends, it
is none the less an inevitable factor. Pessimistic theories indeed have
contended that life is evil and have sought to place good in a will-less
Nirvana. Yet such theories make limited appeal. Their protest is
ultimately not against life as life but against life as painful. And
their refutation is rather to be intrusted to the constructive
possibilities of freer life than to an analysis of concepts.
Another class of theories which omit life from the good is that which
holds to abstractly ontological concepts of good as an eternal essence
or form. It must be remembered, however, that the idea of good was not
merely a fixed essence. It was also for Plato the self-moving and the
cause of all motion. And further, Plato evidently believed that life,
the very nature of the soul, was itself in the class of supreme values
along with God and the good. The prize of immortality was [Greek: kalon]
and the hope great. And with Aristotle and his followers the good of
contemplation no less truly than the good of action had elements of
value derived from the vital process. Such a mystic as Spinoza, who
finds good in the understanding values this because in it man is
"active," and would unite himself with the All because in God is Power
and Freedom. The Hebrew prophet found a word capable of evoking great
ethical values when he urged his countrymen to "choose life," and
Christian teaching found in the conception of "eternal life" an ideal of
profound appeal. It is not surprising that with his biological interests
Spencer should have set up life of greatest length and breadth as a
goal.
The struggle of the present war emphasizes tremendously two aspects of
this factor of life. National life is an ideal which gets its emotional
backing largely from the imagery of our physical life. For any one of
the small nations involved to give up its national life--whatever the
possibilities of better organized industry or more comfortable material
conditions--seems to it a desperate alternative. Self-defense is
regarded by the various powers at war as a complete justification not
merely for armed resistance or attack but for ruthless acts. And if we
are tempted to say that the war involves a prodigal waste of individual
life on a scale never known before, we are at the same time compelled to
recognize that never before has the bare destruction of life aroused
such horror.
For never before has peace set its forces so determinedly to protect
life. The span of human life has been lengthened: the wastefulness of
accident and disease has been magnified. The dumb acquiescence with
which former generations accepted the death of infants and children and
those in the prime of life has given way to active and increasingly
successful efforts to preserve. The enormous increase in scientific
study of biology, including eugenics, reflects not only an advance of
science but a trend in morality. It is scarcely conceivable that it
should grow less in absolute importance, whatever crises may temporarily
cause its depreciation relatively to other values.
One exception to the growing appreciation calls for notice--the interest
in immortality appears to be less rather than greater. The strong belief
in life beyond the grave which since the days of ancient Egypt has
prevailed in the main stream of Western culture seems not only to be
affected by the scientific temper of the day, but also to be subject to
a shift in interest. This may be in part a reaction from
other-worldliness. In part it may be due to loss of fervor for a
theological picture of a future heaven of a rather monotonous sort and
may signify not so much loss of interest in life as desire for a more
vital kind of continuance. It is not true that all that a man hath will
he give for his life, yet it is true that no valuing process is
intelligible that leaves out life with its impulses, emotions, and
desires as the first factor to be reckoned with.
(2) The second factor is the life in common, with its system of
relations, and its corresponding instincts, emotions, and desires.
So much has been written in recent years on the social nature of man
that it seems unnecessary to elaborate the obvious. Protest has even
been raised against the exaggeration of the social. But I believe that
in certain points at least we have not yet penetrated to the heart of
the social factor, and its significance for morals.
So far as the moral aspect is concerned I know nothing more significant
than the attitude of the Common Law as set forth by Professor Pound.[66]
This has sought to base its system of duties on relations. The relation
which was prominent in the Middle Ages was that of landlord and tenant;
other relations are those of principal and agent, of trustee, etc. An
older relation was that of kinship. The kin was held for the wergeld;
the goel must avenge his next of kin; the father must provide for
prospective parents-in-law; the child must serve the parents. Duty was
the legal term for the relation. In all this there is no romanticism, no
exaggeration of the social; there is a fair statement of the facts which
men have recognized and acted upon the world over and in all times.
Individualistic times or peoples have modified certain phases. The
Roman law sought to ground many of its duties in the contract, the will
of the parties. But covenants by no means exhaust duties. And according
to Professor Pound the whole course of English and American law today is
belying the generalization of Sir Henry Maine, that the evolution of law
is a progress from status to contract. We are shaping law of insurance,
of public service companies, not by contract but by the relation of
insurer and insured, of public utility and patron.
Psychologically, the correlate of the system of relations is the set of
instincts and emotions, of capacity for stimulation and response, which
presuppose society for their exercise and in turn make society possible.
There can be no question as to the reality and strength of these in both
animals and men. The bear will fight for her young more savagely than
for her life. The human mother's thoughts center far more intensely upon
her offspring than upon her own person. The man who is cut dead by all
his acquaintance suffers more than he would from hunger or physical
fear. The passion of sex frequently overmasters every instinct of
individual prudence. The majority of men face poverty and live in want;
relatively few prefer physical comfort to family ties. Aristotle's
[Greek: philia] is the oftenest quoted recognition of the emotional
basis of common life, but a statement of Kant's earlier years is
particularly happy. "The point to which the lines of direction of our
impulses converge is thus not only in ourselves, but there are besides
powers moving us in the will of others outside of ourselves. Hence arise
the moral impulses which often carry us away to the discomfiture of
selfishness, the strong law of duty, and the weaker of benevolence. Both
of these wring from us many a sacrifice, and although selfish
inclinations now and then preponderate over both, these still never fail
to assert their reality in human nature. Thus we recognize that in our
most secret motives, we are dependent upon the rule of the general
will."[67]
The "law of duty," and I believe we may add, the conception of right, do
arise objectively in the social relations as the common law assumes and
subjectively in the social instincts, emotions, and the more intimate
social consciousness which had not been worked out in the time of Kant
as it has been by recent authors. This point will receive further
treatment later, but I desire to point out in anticipation that if right
and duty have their origin in this social factor there is at least a
presumption against their being subordinate ethically to the conception
of good as we find them in certain writers. If they have independent
origin and are the outgrowth of a special aspect of life it is at least
probable that they are not to be subordinated to the good unless the
very notion of good is itself reciprocally modified by right in a way
that is not usually recognized in teleological systems.
(3) Intelligence and reason imply (_a_) considering the proposed act or
the actually performed act as a whole and in its relations. Especially
they mean considering consequences. In order to foresee consequences
there is required not only empirical observation of past experience,
not only deduction from already formulated concepts--as when we say that
injustice will cause hard feelings and revolt--but that rarer quality
which in the presence of a situation discerns a meaning not obvious,
suggests an idea, "injustice," to interpret the situation. Situations
are neither already labeled "unjust," nor are they obviously unjust to
the ordinary mind. Analysis into elements and rearrangement of the
elements into a new synthesis are required. This is eminently a
synthetic or "creative" activity. Further it is evident that the
activity of intelligence in considering consequences implies not only
what we call reasoning in the narrower sense but imagination and
feeling. For the consequences of an act which are of importance
ethically are consequences which are not merely to be described but are
to be imagined so vividly as to be felt, whether they are consequences
that affect ourselves or affect others.
(_b_) But it would be a very narrow intelligence that should attempt to
consider only consequences of a single proposed act without considering
also other possible acts and their consequences. The second important
characteristic of intelligence is that it considers either other means
of reaching a given end, or other ends, and by working out the
consequences of these also has the basis for deliberation and choice.
The method of "multiple working hypotheses," urged as highly important
in scientific investigation, is no less essential in the moral field. To
bring several ends into the field of consideration is the characteristic
of the intelligent, or as we often say, the open-minded man. Such
consideration as this widens the capacity of the agent and marks him
off from the creature of habit, of prejudice, or of instinct.
(_c_) Intelligence implies considering in two senses all persons
involved, that is, it means taking into account not only how an act will
affect others but also how others look at it. It is scarcely necessary
to say that this activity of intelligence cannot be cut off from its
roots in social intercourse. It is by the processes of give and take, of
stimulus and response, in a social medium that this possibility of
looking at things from a different angle is secured. And once more this
different angle is not gained by what in the strict sense could be
called a purely intellectual operation, although it has come to be so
well recognized as the necessary equipment for dealing successfully with
conditions that we commonly characterize the person as stupid who does
not take account of what others think and feel and how they will react
to a projected line of conduct. This social element in intelligence is
to a considerable degree implied in the term "reasonable," which
signifies not merely that a man is logical in his processes but also
that he is ready to listen to what others say and to look at things from
their point of view whether he finally accepts it or not.
The broad grounds on which it is better to use the word intelligence
than the word reason in the analysis with which we are concerned are
two. (1) It is not a question-begging term which tends to commit us at
the outset to a specific doctrine as to the source of our judgments. (2)
The activity of intelligence which is now most significant for ethical
progress is not suggested by the term reason, for unless we arbitrarily
smuggle in under the term practical reason the whole activity of the
moral consciousness without inquiry as to the propriety of the name we
shall be likely to omit the constructive and creative efforts to promote
morality by positive supplying of enlarged education, new sources of
interest, and more open fields for development, by replacing haunting
fears of misery with positive hopes, and by suggesting new imagery, new
ambitions in the place of sodden indifference or sensuality. The term
reason as used by the Stoics and by Kant meant control of the passions
by some "law"--some authority cosmic or logical. It prepared for the
inevitable; it forbade the private point of view. But as thus presenting
a negative aspect the law was long ago characterized by a profound moral
genius as "weak." It has its value as a schoolmaster, but it is not in
itself capable of supplying the new life which dissolves the old
sentiment, breaks up the settled evil habit, and supplies both larger
ends and effective motives.
If we state human progress in objective fashion we may say that although
men today are still as in earlier times engaged in getting a living, in
mating, in rearing of offspring, in fighting and adventure, in play, and
in art, they are also engaged in science and invention, interested in
the news of other human activities all over the world; they are
adjusting differences by judicial processes, cooeperating to promote
general welfare, enjoying refined and more permanent friendships and
affections, and viewing life in its tragedy and comedy with enhanced
emotion and broader sympathy. Leaving out of consideration the work of
the religious or artistic genius as not in question here, the great
objective agencies in bringing about these changes have been on the one
hand the growth of invention, scientific method, and education, and on
the other the increase in human intercourse and communication. Reason
plays its part in both of these in freeing the mind from wasteful
superstitious methods and in analyzing situations and testing
hypotheses, but the term is inadequate to do justice to that creative
element in the formation of hypotheses which finds the new, and it tends
to leave out of account the social point of view involved in the
widening of the area of human intercourse. More will be said upon this
point in connection with the discussion of rationalism.
(4) The process of judgment and choice. The elements are not the sum.
The moral consciousness is not just the urge of life, plus the social
relations, plus intelligence. The _process_ of moral deliberation,
evaluation, judgment, and choice is itself essential. In this process
are born the concepts and standards good and right, and likewise the
moral self which utters the judgment. It is in this twofold respect
synthetic, creative. It is as an interpretation of this process that the
concept of freedom arises. Four aspects of the process may be noted.
(_a_) The process involves holding possibilities of action, or objects
for valuation, or ends for choice, in consciousness and measuring them
one against another in a simultaneous field--or in a field of
alternating objects, any of which can be continually recalled. One
possibility after another may be tried out in anticipation and its
relations successively considered, but the comparison is essential to
the complete moral consciousness.
(_b_) The process yields a universe of valued _objects_ as distinguished
from a subjective consciousness of desires and feelings. We say, "This
is right," "That is good." Every "is" in such judgments may be denied by
an "is not" and we hold one alternative to be true, the other false. As
the market or the stock exchange or board of trade fixes values by a
meeting of buyers and sellers and settles the price of wheat accurately
enough to enable farmers to decide how much land to seed for the next
season, so the world of men and women who must live together and
cooeperate, or fight and perish, forces upon consciousness the necessity
of adjustment. The preliminary approaches are usually hesitant and
subjective--like the offers or bids in the market--e.g., "I should like
to go to college; I believe that is a good thing"; "My parents need my
help; it does not seem right to leave them." The judgments finally
emerge. "A college education is good;" "It is wrong to leave my
parents"--both seemingly objective yet conflicting, and unless I can
secure both I must seemingly forego actual objective good, or commit
actual wrong.
(_c_) The process may be described also as one of "universalizing" the
judging consciousness. For it is a counterpart of the objective
implication of a judgment that it is not an affirmation as to any
individual's opinion. This negative characterization of the judgment is
commonly converted into the positive doctrine that any one who is
unprejudiced and equally well informed would make the same judgment.
Strictly speaking the judgment itself represents in its completed form
the elimination of the private attitude rather than the express
inclusion of other judges. But in the making of the judgment it is
probable that this elimination of the private is reached by a mental
reference to other persons and their attitudes, if not by an actual
conversation with another. It is dubious whether an individual that had
never communicated with another would get the distinction between a
private subjective attitude and the "general" or objective.
Moreover, one form of the moral judgment: "This is right," speaks the
language of law--of the collective judgment, or of the judge who hears
both sides but is neither. This generalizing or universalizing is
frequently supposed to be the characteristic activity of "reason." I
believe that a comparison with the kindred value judgments in economics
supports the doctrine that in judgments as to the good as well as in
those as to right, there is no product of any simple faculty, but rather
a synthetic process in which the social factor is prominent. A
compelling motive toward an objective and universal judgment is found in
the practical conditions of moral judgments. Unless men agree on such
fundamental things as killing, stealing, and sex relations they cannot
get on together. Not that when I say, "Killing is wrong," I mean to
affirm "I agree with you in objecting to it"; but that the necessity (a)
of acting as if I either do or do not approve it, and (b) of either
making my attitude agree with yours, or yours agree with mine, or of
fighting it out with you or with the whole force of organized society,
compels me to put my attitude into objective terms, to meet you and
society on a common platform. This is a _synthesis_, an achievement. To
attribute the synthesis to any faculty of "practical reason," adds
nothing to our information, but tends rather to obscure the facts.
(_d_) The process is thus a reciprocal process of valuing objects and of
constructing and reconstructing a self. The object as first imaged or
anticipated undergoes enlargement and change as it is put into relations
to other objects and as the consequences of adoption or rejection are
tried in anticipation. The self by reflecting and by enlarging its scope
is similarly enlarged. It is the _resulting_ self which is the final
valuer. The values of most objects are at first fixed for us by instinct
or they are suggested by the ethos and mores of our groups--family,
society, national religions, and "reign under the appearance of habitual
self-suggested tendencies." The self is constituted accordingly.
Collisions with other selves, conflicts between group valuations and
standards and individual impulses or desires, failure of old standards
as applied to new situations, bring about a more conscious definition of
purposes. The agent identifies himself with these purposes, and values
objects with reference to them. In this process of revaluing and
defining, of comparing and anticipation, freedom is found if anywhere.
For if the process is a real one the elements do not remain unaffected
by their relation to each other and to the whole. The act is not
determined by any single antecedent or by the sum of antecedents. It is
determined by the process. The self is not made wholly by heredity, or
environment. _It is itself creating for each of its elements a new
environment_, viz., the process of reflection and choice. And if man can
change the heredity of pigeons and race horses by suitable selection, if
every scientific experiment is a varying of conditions, it is at least
plausible that man can guide his own acts by intelligence, and revise
his values by criticism.
The self is itself creating for each of its elements a new
environment--this is a fact which if kept in mind will enable us to see
the abstractness and fallacies not merely of libertarianism and
determinism, but of subjectivism and objectivism. Subjective or "inward"
theories have sought standards in the self; but in regarding the self as
an entity independent of such a process as we have described they have
exposed themselves to the criticism of providing only private, variable,
accidental, unauthoritative sources of standards--instincts, or
emotions, or intuitions. The self of the full moral consciousness,
however,--the only one which can claim acceptance or authority--is born
only in the process of considering real conditions, of weighing and
choosing between alternatives of action in a real world of nature and
persons. Its judgments are more than subjective. Objectivism in its
absolutist and abstract forms assumes a standard--nature, essence,
law--independent of process. Such a standard is easily shown to be free
from anything individual, private, or changing. It is universal,
consistent, and eternal, in fact it has many good mathematical
characteristics, but unfortunately it is not moral. As mathematical,
logical, biological, or what not, it offers no standard that appeals to
the moral nature as authoritative or that can help us to find our way
home.