What practical conclusion, if any, follows from this interpretation of
the moral consciousness and its categories? Moral progress involves both
the formation of better ideals and the adoption of such ideals as actual
standards and guides of life. If our view is correct we can construct
better ideals neither by logical deduction nor solely by insight into
the nature of things--if by this we mean things as they are. We must
rather take as our starting-point the conviction that moral life is a
process involving physical life, social intercourse, measuring and
constructive intelligence. We shall endeavor to further each of these
factors with the conviction that thus we are most likely to reconstruct
our standards and find a fuller good.[86]
Physical life, which has often been depreciated from the moral point of
view, is not indeed by itself supreme, but it is certain that much evil
charged to a bad will is due to morbid or defective conditions of the
physical organism. One would be ashamed to write such a truism were it
not that our juvenile courts and our prison investigations show how far
we are from having sensed it in the past. And our present labor
conditions show how far our organization of industry is from any decent
provision for a healthy, sound, vigorous life of all the people. This
war is shocking in its destruction, but it is doubtful if it can do the
harm to Great Britain that her factory system has done. And if life is
in one respect less than ideals, in another respect it is greater; for
it provides the possibility not only of carrying out existing ideals but
of the birth of new and higher ideals.
Social interaction likewise has been much discussed but is still very
inadequately realized. The great possibilities of cooeperation have long
been utilized in war. With the factory and commercial organization of
the past century we have hints of their economic power. Our schools,
books, newspapers, are removing some of the barriers. But how far
different social classes are from any knowledge, not to say
appreciation, of each other! How far different races are apart! How easy
to inculcate national hatred and distrust! The fourth great problem
which baffles Wells's hero in the _Research Magnificent_ is yet far
from solution. The great danger to morality in America lies not in any
theory as to the subjectivity of the moral judgment, but in the conflict
of classes and races.
Intelligence and reason are in certain respects advancing. The social
sciences are finding tools and methods. We are learning to think of much
of our moral inertia, our waste of life, our narrowness, our muddling
and blundering in social arrangements, as stupid--we do not like to be
called stupid even if we scorn the imputation of claiming to be "good."
But we do not organize peace as effectively as war. We shrink before the
thought of expending for scientific investigation sums comparable with
those used for military purposes. And is scholarship entitled to shift
the blame entirely upon other interests? Perhaps if it conceived its
tasks in greater terms and addressed itself to them more energetically
it would find greater support.
And finally the process of judgment and appraisal, of examination and
revaluation. To judge for the sake of judging, to analyze and evaluate
for the sake of the process hardly seems worth while. But if we supply
the process with the new factors of increased life, physical, social,
intelligent, we shall be compelled to new valuations. Such has been the
course of moral development; we may expect this to be repeated. The
great war and the changes that emerge ought to set new tasks for ethical
students. As medievalism, the century of enlightenment, and the century
of industrial revolution, each had its ethics, so the century that
follows ought to have its ethics, roused by the problem of dealing
fundamentally with economic, social, racial, and national relations, and
using the resources of better scientific method than belonged to the
ethical systems which served well their time.
Only wilful misinterpretation will suppose that the method here set
forth is that of taking every want or desire as itself a final
justification, or of making morality a matter of arbitrary caprice. But
some may in all sincerity raise the question: "Is morality then after
all simply the shifting mores of groups stumbling forward--or backward,
or sidewise--with no fixed standards of right and good? If this is so
how can we have any confidence in our present judgments, to say nothing
of calling others to an account or of reasoning with them?" What we have
aimed to present as a moral method is essentially this: to take into our
reckoning all the factors in the situation, to take into account the
other persons involved, to put ourselves into their places by sympathy
as well as conceptually, to face collisions and difficulties not merely
in terms of fixed concepts of what is good or fair, and what the right
of each party concerned may be, but with the conviction that we need new
definitions of the ideal life, and of the social order, and thus
reciprocally of personality. Thus harmonized, free, and responsible,
life may well find new meaning also in the older intrinsic goods of
friendship, aesthetic appreciation and true belief. And it is not likely
to omit the satisfaction in actively constructing new ideals and working
for their fulfilment.
Frankly, if we do not accept this method what remains? Can any one by
pure reason discover a single forward step in the treatment of the
social situation or a single new value in the moral ideal? Can any
analysis of the pure concept of right and good teach us anything? In the
last analysis the moral judgment is not analytic but synthetic. The
moral life is not natural but spiritual. And spirit is creative.