Part 25

In the last resort, then, the predicate of the ethical judgment is the whole system of the recognized habits of the agent, and each judgment-process is in its outcome a readjustment of the system to accommodate the new habit that has been seeking admission. Both the old habits and the new impulse have been modified in the process just as the intension of a class term and the particular "subsumed" under the class are reciprocally modified in the ordinary judgment of sense-perception. We are once more able to see that the process of ethical judgment or valuation is not a process of subsumption or classification, of _ascertaining_ the value of particular modes of conduct, but on the contrary a process of determining or _assigning_ value. Each judgment process means a new and more or less thoroughgoing redetermination of the self and hence a fixation of the ethical value of the conduct whose emergence as a purpose gave rise to the process. The moral experience is not essentially and in its typical emergencies a _recognition_ of values with a view to shaping one's course accordingly, but rather a determining or a _fixation_ of values which shall serve for the time being, but be subject at all times to re-appraisal.

If the present discussion were primarily intended as a contribution to general ethical theory, it would be a part of our purpose to show in detail that any formulation of an ethical ideal in contentual "material" terms must always be inadequate for practical purposes and hence theoretically indefensible. This, as we believe, could be shown true of the popularly current ideal of self-realization as well as of hedonism in its various forms and the older systems of conscience or the moral sense. These all are essentially fixed ideals admitting of more or less complete specification in point of content and regarded as tests or canons by appeal to which the moral quality of any concrete act can be deductively ascertained. They are the ethical analogues of such metaphysical principles as the Cartesian God or the Substance of Spinoza, and the logic implied in regarding them as adequate standards for the valuation of conduct is the logic whereby the Rationalist sought to deduce from concepts the world of particular things. The present desideratum in ethical theory would appear to be, not further attempts at definition of a moral ideal of any sort, but the development of a logical method for the valuation of ideals and ends in which the results of more modern researches in the theory of knowledge should be made use of--in which the concept of self should play the part, not of the concept of Substance in a rationalistic metaphysics,[142] but of such a principle as that of the conservation of energy, for example, in scientific inference.[143]

We have, then, in each readjustment of the activities of the self a reconstruction in knowledge of ethical reality--a reconstruction which at the same time involves the assignment of a definite value to the new mode of conduct which has been worked out in the readjustment. We conclude, then, that the ethical experience is one of continuous construction and reconstruction of an order of objective reality, within which the world of sense-perception is comprised as the world of more or less refractory means to the attainment of ethical purposes. In this process of construction of ethical reality current moral standards play the same part as concepts already defined--that is to say, the agent's present habits--do in the typical judgment of sense-perception. They play the part of symbols suggestive of recognized and heretofore habitual modes of action with reference to conduct of the type of the particular instance that is under consideration, serving thus to bring to bear upon the subject of the judgment sooner or later the entire moral self. The outcome is a new self, and so for the future a new standard, in which the past self as represented by the former standard and the new impulse have been brought to mutual adjustment. Our position is that this adjustment is essentially experimental and that in it the _general principle_ of the unity and expansion of the self must be presupposed, as in inductive inference general principles of teleology, of the conservation of energy, and of organic interconnection of parts in living things are presupposed. The unity and increase of the self is not a test or canon, but a principle of moral experimentation.[144]

Finally, we must note one further parallel between ethical judgment and the judgment of sense-perception and science. However the man of science may, as a nominalist, regard the laws of nature as mere observed uniformities of fact and particulars as the true realities, these same laws will nevertheless on occasion have a distinctly objective character in his actual apprehension of them. The stubbornness with which a certain material may refuse to lend itself to a desired purpose will commonly be reinforced, as a matter of apprehension, by one's recognition of the "scientific necessity" of the phenomenon. As offering resistance the thing itself, as we have seen, becomes objective; so also does the law of which this case may be recognized as only a particular example--and the other type of objectivity experience we need not here do more than mention as likewise possible in one's apprehension of the law as well as of the "facts" of nature. Both types of objectivity attach to the moral law as well. The standard that restrains is one "above" us or "beyond" us. Even Kant, as the similitude of the starry heavens would suggest, was not incapable of a faint "emotion of the heteronomous," and authority in one form or another is a moral force whose objective validity as moral, both in its inhibiting and in its sanctioning aspects, human nature is prone to acknowledge. The apprehension of objectivity is everywhere, as we have held, emotional. One type of situation in which the moral law takes on this character is found in the interposition of the law to check a forward tendency; the other is found in the instant of transition from doubt to the new adjustment that has been reached. In the one case the law is "inexorable" in its demands. In the other case there are two possibilities: If the adjustment has been essentially a rejection of the new "temptation," the law which one obeys is one no longer inexorable, but sustaining, as a rock of salvation. If the adjustment is a distinctly new attitude, the sense of the objectivity of the principle embodied in it will commonly be less strong, if not for the time being almost wholly wanting; but in the moment of overt action it will in some degree wear the character of a firm truth upon which one has taken his stand.

This general view of the logical constitution of the moral experience may suggest a comparison with the fundamental doctrine of the British Intellectualist school. The Intellectualist writers were very largely guided in their expositions by the desire of refuting on the one hand Hobbes and on the other Shaftesbury and Hutcheson. Against Hobbes they wished to establish the obligatory character of the moral law entirely apart from sanction or enactment by political authority. Against the Sentimentalists they wished to vindicate its objectivity and permanence. This twofold purpose they accomplished by holding that the morality of conduct lies in its conformity to the "objective nature of things," the knowledge of which, in its moral aspects, is logically deducible from certain moral axioms, self-evident like those of mathematics. Now this mathematical analogy is the key to the whole position of the Intellectualist writers. By so conceiving the nature of knowledge these men seriously weakened their strong general position. Mathematics is just that species of knowledge which is most remote from and apparently independent of any reference to conduct, and the Intellectualists, by choosing it as their ideal, were thereby rendered incapable of explaining the obligatoriness of the moral law. An adequate psychology of knowledge would have obviated this difficulty in their system.

The occasion for economic judgment is given, as we have seen, in a conflict between ends not incompatible, in view of any ascertainable conditions of the agent's nature as an empirical self, but inhibitory of each other in view of what we have described as conditions external to the agent. Thus the lawyer in our illustration found his plan of compromise thwarted by the existence of such sociological conditions as would make the practice of his profession, in the manner intended, impossible, and so cut off his income. Similarly the peasant in a European country finds that (for reasons which, more probably, he does not understand) he can no longer earn a living in the accustomed way, and emigrates to a country in which his capital and his physical energies may be more profitably employed. So also in the everyday lives of all of us ends and interests quite disparate, so far as any relation to each other through our psychical capacities is concerned, stand very frequently in opposition, nevertheless, and calling for adjustment. We must make a choice between amusement or intellectual pursuits or the means of æsthetic culture, on the one hand, and the common necessaries of life on the other, and the difficulty of the situation lies just in absence of any sort of "spiritual affinity" between these ends. There is no necessary ratio between the satisfaction of the common needs of life and the cultivation of the higher faculties--no ratio for which the individual can ever find a sanction in the constitution of his empirical self through the direct method of ethical valuation. The common needs must have their measure of recognition, but no attempted ethical valuation of them can ever come to a result convincingly warranted to the "energetic" self by psychological conditions. The economic situation as such is in this sense (that is, from the standpoint of any recognized ethical standards) unintelligible. It is this ethical unintelligibility that often lends a genuine element of tragedy to situations which press urgently and in which the ends at issue are of great ethical moment. It is no small matter to the emigrant, for example, that he must cut the very roots by which he has grown to the sort of man he finds himself to be. His whole nature protests against this violence, and questions its necessity, though the necessity is unmistakable and it would be quite impossible for him not to act accordingly. Nevertheless, tragic as such a conflict may well be, it does not differ in any logically essential way, does not differ in its degree of strictly logical difficulty, from the ethically much less serious economic problems of our everyday life.

Now, we have already defined the economic act for which economic judgment is preparatory as being, in general terms, the diversion of certain means from a present use to which they have been devoted to a new use which has come to seem in a general way desirable.[145] Thus, in the cases just mentioned, the lawyer contemplates the virtual purchase of his new career by the income which his profession might in years to come afford him, the emigrant seeks a better market for his labor, and the pleasure-seeker and the ambitious student and the buyer of a commodity in the market propose to themselves, each one, the diversion from some hitherto intended use of a sum of money. Manifestly it is immaterial from our logical point of view whether the means in question which one proposes to apply in some new way are in the nature of physical and mental strength, or materials and implements of manufacture ready to be used, or means of purchase of some sort wherewith the desired service or commodity may be obtained at once. The economic problem, to state it technically, is the problem of the _reapplicability of the means_, interpreting the category of means quite broadly.

In a word, then, the method of procedure adapted to the economic type of situation is that of valuation of the means, not that of direct valuation of the ends. This method is one of valuation since, like the ethical method, it is determinative of a purpose, but it accomplishes this result in its own distinctive way. The problem of our present analysis will accordingly be how this method of valuation of the means is able to help toward an adjustment of disparate or unrelated ends which the ethical method is inadequate to effect.

Let us assume that a vague purpose of foreign travel, for example, has presented itself in imagination, and that the preliminary stage of ethical judgment has been passed through, with the result that the purpose, in a more definite form than it could have at first, is now ready for economic consideration. In the first place the cost of the journey must be determined, and this step, in terms of our present point of view, is simply a methodological device whereby certain ends which the standards involved in the stage of ethical judgment could not suggest or could not effectually take into co-operation with themselves in their determination of the end are brought into play. Ascertaining the means suggests these disparate ends, these established modes of use of the means, with the result that the agent's "forward tendency" is checked. Shall the necessary sums be spent in foreign travel or shall they be spent in the present ways--in providing various physical necessities and comforts, or for various forms of amusement, or in increasing investments in business enterprises? These modes of use do not admit of ethical comparison with the plan of foreign travel, and the agent's interest must therefore now be centered on the means.

It is in this check to the agent's forward tendency that the logical status of the means is evinced. As merely so much money the means could only serve to further the execution of the purpose that is forming, since under the circumstances it could only prompt immediate expenditure. Like the subject in factual judgment, the means in economic judgment have their problematic aspect which as effectually hinders the desired use of them as could any palpable physical defect. This problematic aspect consists in the fact of the present established mode of use which the now-forming purpose threatens to disturb, and it is the agent's interest in this mode of use that turns his attention to the valuation of the means.

It need hardly be pointed out that in the economic life we find situations exactly corresponding to those of "conscience and temptation" and mechanical "pull and haul" which were discriminated in the ethical sphere and marked off from judgment properly so called. Indeed it seems reasonable to think, on general grounds of introspection, that these methods of decision (if they deserve the name) are, relatively speaking, more frequently relied upon in the economic than in the moral life. The economic method of true judgment is roundabout and more complex and more difficult than ethical, and involves a more express recourse to those abstract conceptions which for the most part are only implicitly involved in valuation of the other type. The economic type of valuation, in fact, differs from the ethical, not in an absolute or essential way, but rather in the explicitness with which it brings to light and lays bare the vital elements in valuation as such. In general, then, the economic process would seem necessarily to embrace three stages, which will first of all be enumerated and then very briefly explained and discussed. These are: (1) a preliminary consideration of the means necessary to attain the end--which must be vague and tentative, of course, for the reason that the end as imagined is so, as compared with the fulness of detail which must belong to it before it can be finally accepted; (2) a consideration of the means, as thus provisionally taken, in the light of their present devotion to other purposes, this present devotion of them being the outcome, in some degree at least, of past valuation; (3) final definition of the means with reference to the proposed use through an adjustment effected between this and the factors involved in the past valuation.

1. In the first stage as throughout, it must be carefully noted, the means are under consideration not primarily in their physical aspect, but simply as _subject to a possible redisposition_. Thus it is not money as lawful currency receivable at the steamship office for an ocean passage, nor tools and materials and labor-power technically suitable for the production of a desired object, that is the subject of the economic judgment. The problem of redisposition would of course not be raised were the means not technically adaptable to the purpose, nor on the other hand can the means in the course of economic judgment, as a rule, escape some measure of further (factual) inquiry into their technical properties; but the standpoints are nevertheless distinct. Again, it must be noted that the means in this first stage will be only roughly measured. The length of one's stay abroad, the size of the house one wishes to build, the purpose whatever it may be, is still undefined--these are in fact the very matters which the process must determine--and in the first instance it is "money in general" or "a large sum of money" with reference to which we raise the economic problem. The category of quantity is in fact essentially an economic one; it is essentially a standpoint for determining the means of action in such a way as to facilitate their economic valuation. The reader familiar with the writings of the Austrian school of economists will easily recall how uniformly in their discussions of the principle of marginal utility these writers assume outright in the first place the division of the stock of goods into definite units, and then raise the question of how the value of a unit is measured. The stock contains already a hundred bushels of wheat or ten loaves of bread--apparently as a matter of metaphysical necessity--whereas in fact the essential economic problem is this very one of how "wheat at large" comes to be put in sacks of a certain size and "bread in general" to be baked in twelve-ounce loaves. The subdivision of the stock and the valuation of the unit are not successive stages, but inseparably correlative phases of the valuation-process as a whole. The outcome may be stated either way, in accordance with one's interest in the situation.

2. But the unmeasured means as redisposable in an as yet undetermined way bring to consciousness established measured uses to which the means have been heretofore assigned in definite amounts. In this way the process of determining a definite quantum as redisposable (which is to say, of attaining to a definite acceptable plan of conduct) can begin. How, then, does this fact of past assignment to uses still recognized as desirable figure in the situation? In the first place the past assignment may have been (1) an outcome of past economic valuation, (2) an unhesitating or non-economic act executive of an ethical decision, or (3) an act of more or less conscious obedience to "conscience" or "authority." In either case it now stands as a course of conduct which at the time was, in the way explained above, _sanctioned_ to the agent, to the "energetic" self, by the means and conditions recognized as bearing upon it. In this sense, then, we have, in this recognition of the past adjustment and of the economic character which the means now have in virtue of it, what we may term a judgment of "energy-equivalence" between the means and their established uses. For to the agent it was the essential meaning of the sense of sanction felt when the means were assigned to these uses that the "energetic" self would on the whole be furthered thereby--and this in view of all the sacrifices that this use would entail, or in view of the sacrifices required for the production of the means, if the case were one in which the means were not at hand and could only be secured by a more or less extended production process.

In the illustration we have been considering, it will be observed, there is an extensive schedule of present uses which the new project calls in question and from which the means must be diverted. This is in fact the commoner case. A new use of money will affect, as a rule, not simply a single present mode of expenditure, but will very probably involve a readjustment throughout the whole schedule of expenditure which our separate past valuations of money have in effect co-operated in establishing. So likewise if we wish to use part of a store of building materials or of food, or of any other subdivisible commodity, we encounter an ordered system of consumption rather than a single predetermined use which we have not yet enjoyed. Where this is the case the whole process of valuation is greatly facilitated, but this is not essential. The means in cases of true economic valuation may be capable of but a single use, like a railroad ticket or a perishable piece of fruit, or of a virtually endless series of uses, like a painting or a literary masterpiece. Whether the means figure as representing but a single use or stand for the conservation of an extensive system, their economic significance is the same. They are the "energy-equivalent" of this use or system of uses considered as an act or system of acts of consumption in furtherance of the self. Their past assignment meant then and means now simply this, that the "energetic" self would thereby gain more than it would lose through the inevitable sacrifices. This is the economic significance of the means in virtue of which they are now problematic to the extent of checking, for a time at least, forward tendency toward the desired end.[146]

3. The judgment of energy-equivalence, then, defines the inhibiting economic aspect of the means, and moreover defines it for the means as subdivided and set apart for a schedule of uses if this was the form of the past adjustments to which reference is made. The problem of the third stage of the process is that of "bringing subject and predicate together," as we have elsewhere expressed it--that is, of determining, in the light of the economic character of the means as just ascertained, what measure of satisfaction, if any, may be accorded to the new and as yet undefined desire. The new disposition of the means, if one is to be made, must bring to the "energetic" self a degree of furtherance and development which shall be sensibly as great as would come from the established method of consumption. The means, as economic, are means to the conservation of the old adjustment, and any new disposal of them or of any portion of them for a full or partial execution of the new purpose must make out at least as good a case. It must appear that the new disposition is not only physically possible, but also economically necessary in the light of the same principle of expansion of the self as sanctioned the disposition now in force. It must make the self in some way more efficient--whether more strong and symmetrical in body, more skilled in work, more clear of brain, or more efficient in whatever other concrete way may be desired.