Report: Principles
Bahm: Why be Moral?
Chapter
II - INDIVIDUAL ETHICS
Chapter
III - SELF AS PHYSICAL
Chapter
XXXI - SOCIETY AS ORGANIC
Chapter
XXXIII - SATISFACTION AS AESTHETIC
Chapter
XXXIV - SATISFACTION AS COSMIC
Chapter
XXXV - SATISFACTION AS ORGANIC
==============================
Why be Moral? (1992) (excerpt)
Archie
J. Bahm
============================================================
CONTENTS
Preface
INTRODUCTION I. What is Ethics
PART I. SELF
* II. Individual Ethics
* III. Self as Physical
* IV. Self as Social
* V. Self-Interest
* VI. Self as Value
* VII. Self-Improvement
* VIII. Self-Obligation
* IX. Self as Agent
* X. Self as Free
* XI. Self as Soverign
* XII. Self as Owner
* XIII. Self as Just
* XIV. Self as Conscientious
* XV. Self as Intelligent
* XVI. Self as Organic
PART II. SOCIETY
* XVII. Social Ethics
* XVIII. Society as Dependent Upon Individuals
* XIX. Society as Interdependence of Groups
* XX. Social Policy
* XXI. Social Values
* XXII. Social Improvement
* XXIII. Social Obligation
* XXIV. Social Action
* XXV. Social Freedom
* XXVI. Social Sovereignty
* XXVII. Social Ownership
* XXVIII. Social Justice
* XXIX. Social Conscience
* XXX. Social Intelligence
* XXXI. Society as Organic
PART III.
SATISFACTION
* XXXII. Final Ethics
* XXXIII. Satisfaction as Aesthetic
* XXXIV. Satisfaction as Cosmic
* XXXV. Satisfaction as Organic
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
Crime rates are increasing, with no end to such increases in sight. The power of traditional religions to inspire moral conduct continues to decline, with nothing visible to stop such decline. Wars, i.e., little wars, persist even when there is no world war; and military budgets grow despite capacities for overkill. Politicians, legislators, administrators, police and judges seem ever tempted by bribery, and expos‚s of corruption in “the highest places” create doubts about whether honesty in government is possible.
Industrial pollution, planned obsolescence, misleading advertising, deceptive labeling, crooked insurance adjusting, unfair wages, crime syndicates, illegal gambling, forced prostitution, hijacking, tax loopholes for the wealthy and faked claims by welfare clients all exemplify prevailing trends. Distrust extends from government and the military to news media, clergy, authors, teachers, parents (“anyone over thirty”), other races, men (“male chauvinist pigs”), and now women (as I write, a report has reached me that several local women have beaten up a man). Few areas in life remain untouched by growing demoralization. Are we being sucked into a moral vacuum? Is this our way to the end of ethics?
If we look to scientists for help, we find many of them claiming helplessness and innocence. Some say that “Science is, or ought to be, completely value-free. So it cannot, and ought not, deal with values or ethics. Pure scientists are responsible for theories, but not for their applications, whether constructive or destructive.” Some scientists, namely anthropologists, have reached, and teach, a conclusion: cultural relativism, including moral relativism. “Rights and wrongs are relative to cultures; there are no universal rights or wrongs.”
Recent philosophies, such as Existentialism, advocate relativism of the moment. Idealizing authenticity as not permitting one’s existenz or momentary act of will, to be imposed upon by anything, not by laws of government, not by laws of logic or reasoning, not by mores, not by other wills (“Hell is other people”), and not even by one’s own previous promises. To admit submission to any ethical principle would be “to be inauthentic.” Is ethics ending in the name of “authenticity?”
Rights and duties are correlative; that is, if one person has a right, then other persons have duties to respect that right. But after World War II, some rebellious youths proclaimed “a new freedom,” namely, “freedom from responsibility.” This means freedom from duties. What then happens to the correlative rights? Is this another way of ending ethics?
But both those who despair at demoralization and those who gloat over destroying a moral trap do not understand ethics. Misunderstanding of ethics is widespread, and much of it is culturally induced. Confusions abound at many levels. A major purpose of this volume is to help clear up some of these confusions.
The end, the goal, or the purpose of ethics is to attain what is best. Acts are right because they are intended to produce the best results for oneself in the long run. A self is naturally and essentially social, something which selfish people often overlook. Any adequate self-interest theory must show how self-interests are sometimes best served through social interests.
Why be moral? Because this is what you most want to be. That is, you want what is best for yourself. This is what you want most. Ethical principles are discovered, and moral practices are designed, in the first place, as ways of behaving which are most conducive to attaining what is best. This is the end, the proper end, of ethics.
Why, then, do we develop dislikes for moral rules, standards, laws and institutions? First, we do not know the reasons for, i.e., the goods anticipated from, establishing them. If we knew the benefits expected for all, including ourselves, we would have less cause for dissent.
Secondly, institutions develop cultural lag. Laws designed to solve one problem often remain on the books long after the problem itself has disappeared. When formalism sets in and then disorganization, people suffer compulsions without receiving benefits. Then institutions, designed to make life better, actually make it worse. Failure to keep our institutions efficient is an evil, and to consent to such inefficiency is itself immoral. We ought to dislike deficient mores and institutions. Why? Because they function as immoralities. Moral rules, standards, laws and institutions themselves ought to be accepted or rejected depending upon whether or not they serve the end of ethics.
At stake in the foregoing are two views of ethics. The first claims that ethics consists of undesirable duties imposed upon us by others. The second holds that ethics consists of internal interests which naturally seek fulfillment and the wise choices and prudent actions which aim at maximizing such fulfillment. In this view, ethics is concerned with what is good and how to get it, or with what one ought to do in order to get the most out of life.
The first view originates, unfortunately, in early childhood, when loving parents protect their children from harm by restrictions, the reasons for which the children do not understand. They learn that ethics means “Don’t do this.” “Stop doing that.” “Do as I tell you.” “Go to bed now.” Children who advance to Sunday School sometimes find religious ethics also stated in negative terms: “Thou shalt not....” Schools with regulations, empty streets with stop signs, police who apprehend us for violating laws we did not know existed, add to our education that ethics consists of “don’ts,” of laws, of commands, and of demands made upon us by other people, often by people we do not know, such as ancient religious writers, distant legislators, administrators, specialists.
When negativity of commands combined with a negative conscience seems to demand duties and responsibilities without benefit of rights and privileges, “ethics” is a word for something evil, and something to be avoided or evaded when we cannot rid ourselves of it altogether. But what we ought to eradicate is this mistaken conception of oughtness.
The second view can be stated as a description of the way people behave relative to values and obligations when they behave naturally. I do not wish to convey the idea that the first view is not also acquired naturally, because we naturally try to protect our children from harm and they naturally resent restrictions when they do not understand the intended benefits. But even when freed from all social restrictions people still act ethically naturally in the sense that they naturally seek what they believe to be good, better or best for themselves. So, when faced with a choice between two alternatives, one of which appears better than the other, what ought one to do? Choose the better. Why? Just because it is better.
Oughtness consists in the power which an apparently greater good has over an apparently lesser good in compelling our choices. It is this apparently greater good which is the source of oughtness. There is no other source. There may be other explanations of this source, but however the explanation is conceived, inherent in it in some way is the view that what one ought to do is what is best for oneself in the long run. Social and religious ethics are extensions of personal ethics. How one is naturally, even essentially, social will be explained in the text, as will how altruism, concern for the welfare of others, often results in what is best for oneself and thus is an important part of the way one most wants to be. One ought to want to know the difference between wise and foolish self-interest. So long as wise self-interest is recognized as the end of ethics, ethics will never end.
Beginning definition. Simply stated, “ethics” pertains to what is good and how to get it. By “good” we mean either “good things” or “goodness,” or both, for goodness is something which all good things have in common. By “how to get it” we mean either, or both, “how, in fact, do we attain goodness” and “what ought we to do in order to obtain it.”
To ask “How in fact are goods achieved?” involves inquiring into the nature of things. That is, things (i.e., everything, including human beings and their experiences) have natures such that when influenced in one way they yield one result and when influenced in other ways produce different results. If understanding of the natures of things and how they work may be called “science” and “technology,” then the more we know about each science and technology, the greater our understanding of them. Hence, our knowledge of all sciences, such as physics, biology, psychology, epistemology, logic and sociology, should provide a foundation, supplementing our own practical experiences, for knowing “how to get what is good.”
To ask, “What ought I to do in order to obtain what is good?’ is to become involved in two kinds of “oughts”: “conditional” and “actual.” A “conditional ought” is a feeling of obligation to do something if I want to produce a certain result. Conditional oughts may be deduced directly from one’s scientific knowledge, assuming this knowledge to be accurate and adequate. For example, if I know that water boils at 100 degrees Celsius, and if I want to boil some water, then I ought to heat that water to 100 degrees Celsius. In this example, two different kinds of “ifs,” or conditions, appear. One has to do with my knowledge of the fact, i.e., how water boils; the other with my wants or needs. As long as no actual necessity occurs, neither condition makes any actual demand upon me. Merely conditional oughts involve no actual obligation. They do not compel us to act. An “actual ought,” on the other hand, is a genuine must. It occurs as a recognition of an actual need expressing itself as a feeling of compulsion. If an urgent need for sterilized water occurs in a medical lab, then I develop feelings of obligation to obtain such water. Such feelings constitute an actual ought which involves at least two conditional oughts: I ought to know when water boils and I ought to act in such a way as to boil the water. The same conditional oughts which produce in us no feeling of compulsion in the absence of need become transformed into parts of an actual ought when need actually arises. Failure to realize that the word “ought” has both of these meanings is a source of much misunderstanding about ethics.
Ethics has a negative side also. That is, it pertains to bads and how to avoid them, and thus to “ought nots.” Unfortunately, a child’s first acquaintance with oughts and ethics tends to be negative. Those interested in children’s welfare try to prevent them from harming themselves and consequently advise, or compel, them restrictively: “Don’t do that.” “Thou shalt not....” “It’s against the law.” Moral codes appear more often as sets of tabus than as guides to positive achievement. When a child does not understand why they are restricted, they often interpret moral commands not only as external authority but also as quite arbitrary. Many never outgrow their childish notions of ethics and obligations as entirely social and entirely negative. Yet actually, good is primary; evil acts are those that destroy or endanger goods. One who seeks what is good automatically desires to avoid what is evil or that which endangers achievement of that good. A negative side of ethics exists only when and because a positive side is presupposed.
In sum then, “ethics,” according to our beginning definition, pertains to what is good and how to get it, and what is bad and how to avoid it, or to oughtness, i.e., what ought to be done to achieve what is good and what ought not be done to avoid what is evil, both actual and potential. Furthermore, I propose that every interest in what is good and how to get it, and in what is bad and how to avoid it, is thereby automatically “ethical.”
“Codes” versus “Principles.” Much confusion about ethics inheres in the distinction between codes and principles. Many believe that ethics consists mainly, if not entirely, of codes. Reasons for such a belief are many. Children learn duties of etiquette, the “Ten Commandments,” school and community regulations, and traffic laws. The more groups that persons join the more codes they become acquainted with: laws of school, church, clubs, community, county, state, nation, banking, commerce, profession, labor union, and military, including building codes, sanitation codes, traffic codes, criminal codes, etc. When we believe that “ethics” consists primarily of codes which restrict one, we are inclined to withdraw from, resent, and even reject, ethics. Thus, unfortunately, ethics, which deals primarily with what is good and how to get it, comes to be misinterpreted as a set of evils, necessary evils perhaps, but evils which should be avoided if possible. A basic thesis of this essay is that principles, not codes, constitute the foundations of both ethical theory and practice.
Ethical principles also are assertions about oughts. But they state “Why ought?” rather than “ought” merely. Ethical principles explain rather than command. Like all principles, they should be soundly based in experience. Yet confusion regarding codes and principles exists, in part, because both occur in varying levels of generality. For example, “one should obey this stop sign” is an item in a more general code item, “one should obey all stop signs,” which is an item in a more general code item, “One should obey all public ordinances.” When a code item, “One should obey all stop signs,” is explained by the principle, “Because this is the best way to prevent accidents,” he may find this principle explained by the more general principle, “So that one will not endanger one’s own life,” which may be explained still further by the more general principle, “So that one will live longer,” which may be explained further by the more ultimate principle, “Because life is good and a longer life is better.” Confusion occurs because principles can easily be restated as codes: e.g., when one explains the code item, “One should obey all ‘Stop’ signs,” by the principle, “Because this is the best way to prevent accidents,” he may, impatiently, simply assert the code item: “Prevent accidents.” Without minimizing the practical need for codes, we here emphasize that the distinction between them, between what one ought to do and why one ought to do it, needs to be kept in mind if one is to understand the nature of ethics. The purpose of ethical inquiry is, first of all, to discover, as far as possible, the most ultimate principles of explanation or the most ultimate reasons why one ought to do anything.
“Theory” versus “Practice.” Another issue facing anyone wishing to define “ethics” is whether it consists entirely, or primarily, in theories or practices. Many studies in ethics have been devoted entirely to a history of ethical theories or to types of ethical theory. On the other hand, some studies in ethics, anthropology, sociology and history treat ethics as if it consisted entirely in the customs, conventions, mores and folkways of various peoples. Surely neither of these emphases adequately represents the whole picture. The view presented here claims that “ethics” properly extends over both of these areas. But, granting such extension, one then faces the problem of how theory and practice are related in ethics. Does one depend upon the other? Which came, or should come, first? Which is more fundamental?
Advocates of the view that practice is primary point out that, historically or prehistorically, centuries of practice preceded the first theory. The development of theory as such, including ethical theory, came very late in human history. Furthermore we need merely recall that the biological and physiological nature, which all persons share, involve certain needs which have to be fulfilled. We should expect that these common needs tend to beget common behavior patterns. We can even observe some similarities between persons and animals in these respects. If we note, additionally, that human beings are somewhat alike psychologically and sociologically, we realize that we can expect as a consequence still other common behavior patterns. Also, children learn how to behave before they become able to discover why, and certainly before they can theorize about why. Many people participate in some mores for a whole lifetime without ever finding out, or even inquiring into, why these mores exist. Ethical theories, according to this viewpoint, appear as attempts to generalize about existing ways of behaving or to rationalize, i.e., to think up reasons for justifying, them. Practice comes first; a person does not discover theory about action until his action gets him into trouble. Thus, that ethical practices exist before, and thus without depending upon, ethical theory should be obvious.
Advocates of the view that theory is primary, however, cite other evidence. They contend, first of all, that we should be concerned with what the theory is about, not with the time and place or language in which it is formulated. Ethical theory was implicit in humanity’s first actions, even though not explicitly formulated; it had to be, if the action was ethical. Just as, in physics, the recently-formulated law of gravity has always operated, so also, in ethics, the not-so-recently-formulated principle of reciprocity has always operated. And, even though our currently accepted formulae may be relatively recent, primitive people tried, in their own primitive ways, to formulate theories -- many of which have come down to us in the form of myths. Just as children, in learning not to fall, must develop some, no matter how crude and imprecise, conception or theory about what causes them to be drawn toward the ground, so children, in learning that they cannot slap without expecting to be slapped back, formulate at last a crude idea about why they cannot do so. Granted that primitive and childish theories are primitive and childish, they do not therefore, cease to be theories.
However, some advocates of the view that theory is primary will say that the foregoing discussion has been misdirected. Ethical theory pertains not so much to how we do act as to how we should act. Even if it were granted that common behavior patterns develop prehistorically without anyone formulating a theory about them, such practices did not become “ethical” until someone formulated ideals as to how one ought to act. And theory is implicit in the formation of the first ideal. What is an “ideal?” Ideals are unreached goals which, if and when reached, become actual, actualized, or realized. Ideals involve ideas, but not ideas merely. Ideals are ideas of goods we have not yet attained and which we believe that, because they are goods, or betters or bests, they ought to be achieved. If we have an idea but do not believe that it represents a good which we ought to seek, then that idea is not an ideal for us. When we acquire more ideals than can be achieved, then we become “unrealistic.” One believes one ought to do more than one can do, and then, if one thinks about the matter, tends either to dream about becoming able to do more than one can do or to idealize not having more ideals than can be fulfilled. In any case, ideals do not arise when one is satisfied. Ideals involve dissatisfaction, or awareness of incomplete satisfaction, with things as they are. Theory about human nature does not become “ethical,” according to this view, until such behavior involves ideals, with accompanying feelings of obligation to achieve them, and it is the “theory” -- the conceptions implicit in what one believes is required to achieve them -- which makes an act being “ethical.” If one conceives ideals as “norms” or “standards” of achievement which ought to be aimed at, “ethical theory” comes to be thought of as consisting in description of such norms. The goal of ethical theory is, then, a clear statement of such norms, standards, ideals, or oughts. Primarily, “ethics” consists in concern for what persons ought to do, not merely with what persons do regardless of such oughts.
We turn now to a third view, one which advocates that “ethics,” adequately conceived, involves devotion to both practice and theory. It partly agrees with each of the foregoing views because each has asserted something fundamental. But it also condemns both as mistaken to the extent that each holds that its own emphasis upon what is primary implies denial of what the other view contends is primary. Theory and practice interact and depend upon each other, for theory is nothing if it fails to be theory about practice, and practice, whenever it involves recurrences, can be generalized or theorized about. Also, ideals and practices interact and depend upon each other. For ideals not only arise out of our practical frustrations but have their goals in, or can be realized only in, other actualized practices. All practice motivated by endeavor to improve is, thereby, a product of ideals. Ideals themselves, especially to the extent that they prove unworkable, tend to become modified through attempts at practice; and to the extent that we successfully realize our ideals, practice becomes modified by them. The truest perspective, according to this third view, sees theory and practice as organically related, and believes that understanding both and thus, more generally, “ethics,” can be adequate only to the extent that their mutual interdependence and cyclical succession in playing a predominant or primary role is recognized.
“Individual” versus “Social.” Another oft-debated issue needs to be settled before our comprehension of the scope of “ethics” is clear. Distinction has been made between “individual ethics” and “social ethics.” Some contend that the term “ethics” applies properly only to the social. Others claim that “ethics” is primarily individual. Still others maintain that the term extends over both areas of life, and some of these believe that its primary problems should be located in the interaction between them.
Those who contend that “ethics” is social only point to the fact that the English word “ethics” evolved from the Latin (ethicus) or Greek (ethikos) terms meaning “custom.” “Ethics” refers to customs, mores (whence “morality”), conventions, institutions, laws. “Ethics” deals with how people treat each other, not with how they act when they are alone. Terms denoting the major problems of ethics, such as norms, standards, codes, justice, rights, duties, obligations and responsibilities, all have to do with relationships between persons. Duties consist in what we owe others; rights consist in what others owe us. The terms “rightness” and “wrongness” apply to our conduct when it has consequences for others; what we do in our own private lives is our own business and may be spoken of as “non-moral” or “non-ethical” or outside the realm of ethics proper.
Those who claim that “ethics” is primarily “individual” cite as evidence other terms and other problems which seem more, or most, basically crucial to the nature of ethics. “Ethics” centers about the problem of choice, and choice is decidedly personal. Only intentional or voluntary acts are ethical; and intention is personal, not social. Freedom of choice involves freedom of will, and will is individual, not social. The statement of Jesus, “As a man thinketh in his heart, so is he,” has been quoted to emphasize the personal and inner nature of genuine rightness (as against external or “social” and even showy “righteousness”). No term stands closer to the core of ethics than “conscience,” and surely conscience is individual, not social. One’s conscience may compel him to go against the mores, to revolt against social tyrannies, whether they appear in the form of kings, institutions, laws or moral codes. Whereas those who believe that morality resides in the mores must judge all rejection of the mores as “immoral,” the conscientious rebel revolts because he believes that his first duty is to be “true to himself.” Many ethical philosophies which differ regarding the ultimate nature and locus of oughtness nevertheless agree that it is individual, not social: for example, Rationalism, as represented by Descartes, advocates following “the inner light of reason” present in all of us, not the unreasoning crowd; Romanticism, including Existentialism, insists that one should follow one’s own vital impulses, resisting mechanization of life by submitting to dead customs; Yoga and most of Buddhism, including Zen, see the achievement of life’s goal, and hence fundamental oughtness, as entirely a self-help affair, and all social concerns as undesirable distractions which ought not to be permitted; and the Taoism of Lao Tzu idealizes shunning everything social as man’s chief ought. Finally, such terms as “virtue” “character” and “wisdom” refer to individual rather than to social traits.
We come now to the third view, i.e., that of those maintaining that “ethics” extends over both “individual” and “social” areas of life. It holds that those who claim ethics to be primarily individual are fundamentally correct, since without individuals and their interests no ethics could exist. Yet they are mistaken to the extent that they believe that ethics can be exclusively individual, since it conceives individuals as inherently social by nature. It believes that those who contend that ethics is social only are correct in recognizing the social nature of ethics but mistaken to the extent that they deny or minimize the individual foundation of all ethical endeavor. This third view does not conceive ethics as merely a collection of two relatively independent areas, called “individual ethics” and “social ethics.” Rather it conceives the two as organically related because the interdependence and interaction between individual and social aspects of life continues to be a constant condition of life and, consequently, of ethics. Although it may continue to employ the term “individual ethics,” it does so only because it conceives “self” to be essentially social. As we shall show later, many sources and goals of each human being seem to be inherently social. Also, when the term “social ethics” is employed, it takes on an additional meaning by referring to the interests of, and oughtness relative to, groups as groups and institutions as institutions. Some groups and institutions have both rights and duties relative to other groups and institutions, as well as to individuals; and a person acting as an agent for them has duties as an officer to pursue their welfare.
This third view does not ignore or deny the existence of simpler ethical oughts as envisaged by each of the first two views. It presupposes them and builds upon them. But it also believes that we not only do, but ought to, see as a primary locus of ethical decisions those areas in life where individual and social interests interact. That is, not only should a person be aware of mores and follow them when appropriate, and be aware that one’s intentions, choices and conscience are one’s own, but also a person should understand that the kind of person that one is depends on how sensitively and wisely one acts in those areas where one must decide between one’s more personal interests and one’s interests in the groups or institutions in which one serves as a member or officer. As life becomes more civilized and more complexly interdependent, each person spends more time functioning as a member of more, and of more specialized, groups through each of which one’s welfare may be promoted or retarded and in which one must constantly decide how much effort one will devote to it. It is in these areas of decision, where the individual and social aspects of lives interact, that our moral vitality may be strengthened or dissipated. Yet if we fail to be spontaneously aware of both our actual interdependence and of the complex and ever-shifting responsibilities required to maintain a pliable and efficient individual-social organism, then our individual and our social, as well as our individual-social, values may be expected to suffer.
This third view obviously arises out of, and grows as a response to, the cosmopolitan conditions of our own time. Cosmopolitanism is not new in human history, but the accelerating tempo of increasing complexities of our interdependence is a peculiarity of our own century. The simpler ethical perspectives represented by the first two views, which may seem complex enough in themselves, should not be despised, for they still work and are best suited to certain social conditions. In being superseded, they become incorporated into, rather than nullified by, the insights believed required by this third view.
We shall not explore here the future issues as to the extent that either “social” or “individual-social” ethics extend beyond the human, to animals (as with vegetarians), to plants, to other planets and to the gods or God. Nor need we inquire here how far our responsibilities extend into the future of mankind or, for that matter, into its past. Yet surely any adequate definition of the scope of “ethics” will remain open to dealing with questions of this sort.
Why Be Moral? The answer to the foregoing question, although involving many aspects, may be stated very simply. Even though the full significance of the answer may not be apparent at first glance, the answer may be stated clearly. Why be moral? Because this is what you most want to be.
The typical reader will tend to resist, if not entirely reject, this assertion, because the term “moral” popularly connotes external morality, as illustrated by codes which function as commands by others preventing one from doing what one wants to do. To the extent that morality seems to be imposed on us from the outside, it not only seems unwanted but appears, consciously or unconsciously, as an evil. As long as morality consists in something that frustrates one’s desires, then it is not what one wants, and certainly not what one wants most. In fact, the less one has to do with it the better.
On the other hand, if one discovers that the sources and foundation and goal of morality are all inner first, and outer only secondarily, and thus that the popular conception of morality as external is superficial, then one may be ready to reconsider one’s typical attitude. As indicated above in our beginning definition, ethics has to do with what is good and how to get it. Now getting what is good is what one wants. And getting what is good is what one most wants. So ethics is concerned not merely with what is good but also with what is better and, especially, with what is best. Its ultimate goal is to achieve the most good or “the highest good” ( summum bonum). If so, then we can deduce that “being moral” is the same as “doing what you most want to do.” Or, to say the same thing in other words, “Morality is simply the best way of living.” (Durant Drake, Problems of Conduct, revised, p.5, Houghton Mifflin Co., Boston, 1914, 1921, 1935.)
However, even though one may want what is best, one may not know what is best. Whoever asks, “What is best?” is faced with several questions. Best for whom? Myself? Others? God? Best for how long? Now? For a lifetime? Forever? Best of what kinds? Physical health? Wealth? Spiritual values? Does “best” mean dealing with each of the foregoing questions separately, or with all of them at once, or with them both somewhat independently, somewhat as all alike, and somewhat interdependent? Suppose that a person decides that “best” means “best for oneself.” Does one then know what is best for oneself? Only if he understands himself and his interests. He may know what he wants at a particular moment. He may have a strong desire which seems to demand satisfaction. It may seem at the moment to be his only desire or certainly his strongest desire and thus as what he most wants. Yet if he endures his passion for only a few minutes he tends to become aware that he has other desires also, some of which support and some of which conflict with his passionate desire. If and when he becomes able to stop and reflect about the conflicts among his own desires, he raises within himself the question: “What do I really want?”
When doubts about his real nature and genuine wants get the better of him, he will ask others (unless they have already told him). If he receives but a single answer which satisfies him, he can go on in quest of what is best for himself. If however, as seems more common, he receives conflicting replies, his problem deepens. Today, each of the sciences has its contributions to make, telling him that his nature and interests consist primarily in the physical and chemical, or in the biological, or in the physiological, or in the psychological, or in the economic, or political, or material, or recreational, or linguistic aspects of his life. Furthermore, in each of the fields many different schools of thought prevail which compete for his attention and conversion. As fields divide and subdivide into specialties and subspecialties, those answers which will require the services of the subspecialist increasingly try to attract, and succeed in attracting, attention.
If he happens to be wise enough to look above specifics to some overall view, he may hear the appeals of “religious” sectarians advocating ancient nostrums, but these become both less satisfactory as they fail to incorporate consistently the more recent discoveries and less convincing as he becomes aware of the multiplicities of different “religions” each of which authoritatively provides its own, somewhat different, solution. If he turns to philosophy, he finds its history too long and complex to digest with ease and his contemporaries hopelessly divided into warring factions and progressively devoted to specialized sections. The conflicts he discovers among the sciences and “religions” and philosophies become conflicts within himself and tend to confuse rather than to clarify for him what he really is and what he actually most wants. He may realize that, the further he searches, the more “lost” he becomes. Yet he cannot give up, unless the problem grows too big for him and he just stops thinking.
Finally, one’s struggle with the problem of the nature of oneself is a part of one’s effort to discover what is best for oneself. If one cannot get what is best for oneself without knowing what is best, then one ought to seek to find out. When one accepts this to be a fact, one realizes that a study of ethics not only is itself an ethical obligation but that it may be one’s most important obligation. In fact, if one believes that a study of ethics can assist one in knowing what one really is and what is best for one and what one has to do in order to attain it, then such a study tends to be a part of what one most wants to do.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
The division of this volume into three parts, entitled “Self,” “Society” and “Satisfaction,” represents three emphases which need differentiation even though they remain interdependent and mutually supplementary. Each part begins with an introductory chapter, “Individual Ethics,” “Social Ethics” and “Final Ethics,” summarizing and surveying the problems being faced. “Individual Ethics” pertains to what is good for the individual self. “Social Ethics” deals with what is good for society. “Final Ethics” aims at comprehending and achieving final, full or complete satisfactions which, as we shall discover, involve two aspects, the one being concerned with what is good for all (all that exists), here termed “cosmic,” and the other with the allness or completeness of the good experienced, here termed “aesthetic,” both of which may be experienced as aspects of “what one most wants.” Some ethicists focus so exclusively upon one or the other of these three areas that they leave the impression, sometimes intentionally, that ethics consists only of one and excludes the others. Failure to distinguish and interrelate all of the most general phases of ethics leaves the false impression that ethics is a confused subject. One virtue of the present approach consists of its endeavor to include and interrelate all three of these aspects of “what’s good and how to get it.”
Part I focuses attention persistently upon what is good for the individual self. The natural and normal, as well as the ideal and obligatory, aim of each person is to seek what is good, or best, for oneself. Hence, for purposes of “Individual Ethics,” we may say that “acts are right because they are intended to produce the best results for oneself in the long run.” (See my Philosophy: An Introduction, p. 312, John Wiley & Sons, New York, 1953, and “Rightness Defined,” Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, December, 1947, p. 266). Or, alternatively we may say that “acts are right because they are intended to lead to self-realization.” Although either or both of these statements may seem clear immediately, their full meaning can be understood only after such terms as “best results,” “self-realization,” “intentions,” “long run,” and especially “self” have been examined.
The term “self” is at once the most obvious and the most obscure of the terms involved. Everyone knows what “self” is, until one stops to think about it, inquire about it, or define it. On the one hand, nothing is more central to a person’s thinking and acting. It is the one who thinks and acts. It is that which does whatever one does. It is both agent or actor and the receiver of the acts of others -- both subject and object -- at all times. It is that which desires, wants, wishes, intends, decides, chooses, accepts, rejects, commits. It is that which is aware that it is wanted or rejected, used or discarded, appreciated or despised. It is that which seeks to preserve itself, defend itself, improve itself, and which may or may not become “selfish.” The existence and nature of one’s own self is so obvious that it seems foolish to raise questions about it. In fact, the existence of self is presupposed even in raising questions about it, for a self must exist if it is to raise questions about itself.
On the other hand, once one stops to think about oneself, many paradoxes arise almost immediately. For example, should I say that “I have a self” or that “I am a self?” Is the “I” in “I have a self” and in “I am a self” the same or different? By analogy, when I say “I have a desire” do I mean that “I” and desire are different or that “I” and my “desire” are the same? When I say “I desire,” do I mean that “I am desire” or that “My desire is a part of me?” Or, if I say that “I am reasonable” (or, for that matter, “unreasonable”), do I mean that “reason” (or “unreason”) is a part of me or merely that I possess reason (or “unreason”) and that the “I” which has these things is different from them? If they are parts of me, then is everything which I call “mine” really a part of me? Are my clothes, as “mine,” part of me? Or are some things which are “mine” part of me while other things which are “mine” not part of me? Where, then, do I draw the line between “me” and “not me” or between “I” and “not I” or between “self” and “not self?”
Is my “self” simple or complex? “The soul is simple,” many say. Is one’s “self” the same as one’s “soul?” If we distinguish between “soul” and “body,” or between “soul” and “mind,” or between “mind” and “body,” is the “self” the same as one or all of these, or different from some or all? If I say, “I have a soul,” do I mean that “I am a soul?” If I say, “I have a body,” do I mean that “I am a body?” If I say, “I have a mind,” do I mean that “I am a mind?” If I make two or three of these statements, is the “I” the same “I” in all; i.e., is the “self” complex in having and being both soul and body, or mind and body, or soul and mind, or soul and body and mind? Or is it different from each of these because each of these is different from the other? How can a “self” be both simple and complex at the same time? And if one seeks what is best for oneself in the long run, does one aim at what is best for one’s soul, or one’s body, or one’s mind, or oneself as being all three of these, or of oneself as different from one or all of them?
Even if we can settle the question of whether the self is simple or complex “at the same time,” what about the self at different times? If I say, “I have grown,” does this mean that I have changed? If I have changed, am I the same “self” before and after the change? If so, is such a change genuine? If not, then are all my beliefs about myself as changing false? If I cannot change, then how can I realize myself, or how can I do what is best for myself in the long run? If I cannot change, then I cannot improve, or, for that matter, become worse, or even cease to be. If I can and do change, then what happens to my “self” when it changes? Does it become different? If so, is it a “different self?” Do I have only one “self” or many “selves?” If many, then when I seek what is best for myself, which of my selves do I have in mind?
If my “self” is complex, does it really consist of many different selves, or is it “organic,” i.e., both one and many, both simple and complex, both a unity and at the same time a whole with genuinely different parts? May my many “selves” or the many parts of my “self” be in conflict with each other, or must they necessarily be consistent, compatible, harmonious? If they conflict, ought I seek to eliminate some parts so as to retain harmony, or should I seek to grow and expand myself by acquiring additional parts even at the cost of further disharmony? Is there some limit to the size and complexity of a self which is best for itself, or is a self essentially unlimited, and should it aim to ever expand itself endlessly? If one desires what is best for oneself in the long run, should one endeavor to simplify and harmonize oneself or to grow and extend oneself in new directions as much as one can?
Thus, although the answer to the question, “What am I?” at first seems so obvious as not to need asking, once the question has been raised and an answer attempted, the “self” seems to become an increasingly complex puzzle -- paradoxical, mysterious, multi-faceted, and marvelous. Yet, if one cannot intelligently intend to do what is best for oneself when one does not understand oneself, one must grapple with the problems of self-understanding.
The purpose of Part I is to explore many different aspects of self, each significant and obvious from a common sense viewpoint, and to raise questions and to suggest answers regarding ways in which each involves, and is involved in, what is best for self. In this process, most of the traditional problems of individual ethics will be introduced and examined. Although each chapter in Part I will emphasize a different aspect of self and its value, endeavor will be made, in a concluding chapter, to observe how all may, and do, participate organically or interdependently in the vital unity of one’s self and how settlement of questions regarding their interdependence constitutes a fundamental part of what is best for oneself.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
Do you have a body? Or are you a body? Is your body a part, or all, of you, or different from you? If your body is part of you, and if you desire what is best for yourself, must you not seek what is best for your body?
Now your body is not simple but itself has many parts. If your body is part of you, is each of the parts of your body also a part of you? Some parts seem rather obvious, such as your arms and legs and head and hands and feet and nose. But other parts, especially those hidden inside, may not be so obvious. The science of human physiology describes the parts of your body and how they grow, develop and function. Do all parts of your body described by physiologists constitute your self, even those which you have not yet learned about, such as, perhaps, your pineal gland, your metatarsals or your ventricles? If some parts of your body remain unknown to you, must not some of your self be unknown to you? If so, how can you intend to do what is best for yourself relative to those parts which you do not know about?
Your body is composed of cells -- tissue cells, nerve cells, blood cells (red and white corpuscles), gametes, etc. -- all of which may be essential to the existence of your body. Your cells have parts, such as nucleus, protoplasm, chromosomes, which consist of complex molecules. Your molecules consist of atoms and atoms of electrons, protons and various other particles. Are your molecules, atoms and electrons also parts of you? If not, where do you draw the line between which parts are and which are not you? Biochemistry analyzes the chemical constituents of your body and can aid in maintaining your health by making possible the manufacture of medicines, vitamins, hormones, and other dietary supplements. Pursuit of physical health may be facilitated by greater knowledge of physiology and physiological chemistry which explain what is needed to keep the parts, and the whole, of your body functioning properly. Since the principles discovered by these sciences operate in your body, do these very principles themselves constitute a part of your self?
Turning from chemistry to physics, we may note that all of the general laws of physics hold for our physical bodies. Our bodies have weight, mass and size, and involve principles of mechanics, optics and electronics, for example. Are your mass and weight and size, as yours, parts of you? Some women seem to be especially concerned about their size and weight. If you want what is best for your self, ought you to seek your best weight and size, or what is best for your weight and size?
Biology, by giving us insight into heredity and evolution, reveals other questions about the nature of our selves. As biological beings, we have been produced by amazingly complex processes of evolution, which involve “struggle for existence” and “survival of the fit.” We enjoy a precarious existence, both as individuals, in danger of death, and members of a species, which may become extinct. We bear hereditary characteristics, which make us humans rather than horses, mammals rather than oviparians, vertebrates rather than crustaceans, multi-celled rather than single-celled beings. To say, “I am human” signifies, biologically speaking, that I differ from members of more than a million other species in intricate complexes of ways. Hence, I am inescapably limited by, but also magnificently endowed by, my hereditary potentialities. When one aims at what is best for oneself, surely one’s conception of such best should be conditioned by an understanding of both one’s capacities and limitations as a biological being. Does, or should, what is best for oneself as a member of the human species include an interest in survival of the species, even over and above one’s survival as an individual?
If you happen to be a prospective mother, expecting childbirth soon, do you regard your fetus as a part of you? Do you feel your self identified with it? Or did it become, immediately after conception, a separate being? If you identify yourself with your child before birth, will you continue to do so after birth? For how long? Forever? Or until it becomes antagonistic to you? If you seek what is best for your self, to what extent must you also seek what is best for your child?
Biologists explain that the biological traits of a child tend to be determined equally (i.e., approximately, with chance variations due to relative dominance and recessiveness of traits) by both parents. If you have a child, to what extent do these traits, as yours, constitute parts of you? As they become transmitted to your child, do parts of you live on in your child? If you should die, would some parts of you still exist as long as your child lives? If you have more children, will more of you continue to exist in them? If you have grandchildren and great grandchildren, etc., will some of you continue through them? Does your self multiply its parts as you have more children?
Or, since each additional generation which joins your genes with those from other sources diminishes the percentage of your own genes in your grandchildren and great grandchildren, do you gradually diminish, become less significant, and eventually perish through such dilution? (If inbreeding prevents such dilution, ought you to promote or prevent inbreeding?) Although we have focused our attention upon biological aspects of self, we may note that our children are also, in a fundamental sense, social, and thus our expansion and perpetuation through them requires them, as other persons, to be means to our own ends. To the extent that we remain identified with our children we owe it to ourselves to take care of them for thereby we are caring for ourselves also.
Reversing the direction of our attention from our children to our parents, to what extent did we preexist in them? If our parents have other children, our siblings, do we, consequently, have a partial, if somewhat indirect, identity with them? What about our preexistence in our grandparents, and great grandparents, and more distant ancestors? When did I begin? How far back in biological history did I already partly exist? Does any reverence which I may have for my ancestors serve in part as a kind of reverence for my own previous self? When I desire what is best for myself, how much of my efforts should be devoted to that part of me which is located in my relatives, whether ancestors, siblings or descendants?
Not only do I say, “I am human,” but also, “I am an animal” and, “I am a living being,” thereby indicating awareness of sharing certain traits with all animals and still other traits with all living beings. The great Hindu ethical doctrine, “Ahimsa,” shared by many vegetarians in other cultures, considers all killing, especially of animals but even of plants, a form of violence to fellow living beings. The more closely one feels oneself identified with other forms of life, the more one seems to be eating oneself (being, in effect, a cannibal) when one consumes them. Where, really, does one’s self stop? To what extent ought one who is interested in oneself look after other living beings?
Sometimes we seem to identify ourselves with physical things outside our bodies. For example, when a person tries on a new suit or dress, one inquires, “How do I look?” About new clothes one may have some doubts, but one’s old clothes, those one is accustomed to wearing, one accepts as a part of one’s own normal appearance. Sometimes we oppose ourselves to our clothes, as when they itch or bind. When playing checkers, one automatically says, “I jumped you,” thus indicating a feeling of identification of oneself with one’s checkers. When the game is over, a person forgets, and may even deny, ever feeling identified with a checker. Thus it seems obvious that our conceptions of self change, quite rapidly at times. While playing checkers, one says, “I ought to have moved there first.” Is this an ethical “ought”? Yes. Although playing this particular game of checkers my not have deep significance for one’s long-range interests, to the extent that a person now feels identified with his side in the game he is faced with doing the best that one can for oneself as a player of this game where the object is, of course, to win.
With how many other physical things, such as my home, my land, my car, my tools, my functions, at times, are parts of me? Certainly when one develops facility as a skater, typist, carpenter or driver, one’s mechanical instruments, responding sensitively and automatically to one’s wishes, come to seem as parts of oneself, sometimes as much so as one’s fingers or limbs. When one puts them aside, of course, one thinks of them as separate from oneself; but while one uses them, and satisfies one’s desires through them, one seems to find oneself extended through them. For example, when one reaches for a stick, it seems to be something separate. But after he has grasped it and starts poking about among other things, he may feel himself, i.e., his own power, effectiveness and interests, functioning through and right up to the end of the stick. A person tends to be proud of his tools because he is proud of himself, and the more closely he identifies himself and his welfare with them, the better care he takes of them.
A farmer once described the extent of his land as follows: “I go two miles south and one mile west.” Feelings of identity with property may be very strong, especially if it has been “in the family for generations,” and if one has lived upon it for most of one’s life, and more especially if it has been carefully fenced in response to disputes with neighbors, or, if one has purchased property over a long period with hard-earned money and finally has obtained a clear title to it. Do you feel that you extend yourself every time you become an owner of something new, something additional which is now “your own”? Does your self extend geographically to your neighborhood, your city, your state, your nation, your continent, as when you say, “I am a Harlemite,” “I am a Detroiter,” “I am a Texan” or “I am an American?” How much of your time do you devote to thinking about the welfare of your community, city, state or national territory because you consider them as yours and thus your own interests as bound up with them?
If you have ever seriously discussed astronomy, you can recall that in thinking about “all those planets and stars out there,” you automatically began to think of “our earth” and of what would happen if “one of those bodies should collide with us.” If you kept at the subject very long, your thoughts about, and identification with, “our earth” shifted eventually to “our solar system” and perhaps finally to “our galaxy,” but, by contrast with it, your interest in your earth and dangers to its existence seemed, during such a discussion, quite close to your own personal interests. Your welfare obviously depends upon its continuance, and you may even have thought about what we ought to do in order to try to keep it on its course if it should tend gradually to move too far from or too close to, the sun.
Now, although we may be carrying geographical and astronomical extensions of self-concepts too far, awareness of how we feel about ourselves under such circumstances can be very instructive regarding how our self-ideas expand and contract rapidly. If you can recall, also, that your expanded interests were felt as involving goods for yourself, or of yourself and as involving a grandeur from which those who fail to appreciate astronomical interests are excluded, you may discover how increased value of, and for, yourself can come into being. Persons unable to appreciate their own cosmic nature and interests lack something of the richness of which life is capable. Anyone who, in aiming at what is best for oneself, wants to live life to its fullest, shortchanges oneself to the extent that one misses enjoyment of such astronomical values. Not only an astronomer, but also an ethicist, may be expected to say that, unless one is too busy with other, more important values, one ought to pursue and enjoy, so far as one can, those values available only through understanding and appreciating one’s cosmic situation.
Another, perhaps more intimate, portion of self as physical is that investigated by physiological psychology. Your brain, nervous system, sensory end-organs, conditioned reflexes, memory, imagination, emotions, feelings and sensations may be thought of as constituting parts of your self. The more fully you identify yourself with your feelings, emotions or vision, the more their values seem bound up with your self. Regarding each, then, you may have oughts, such as, for example, you ought to be careful not to puncture your eyeball, or to read too long in a dim light, or to fail to correct your vision with glasses when needed. If long-range goods can be derived from developing habits of solving problems automatically, interest in the nature of, and techniques for, learning becomes a significant ought. If conscience can be acquired as conditioned reflexes, training your nervous system, and conscience, may be a most useful kind of asset.
In the foregoing survey of aspects of self as physical, we have stressed the numerous kinds and the vastness of the extent of things with which you may feel identified. But with regard to each you may have noticed also that, at times, you feel opposed to each of these kinds. You may separate soul and body and regard your body as a carnal carcass imprisoning your soul; if you conceive yourself as a soul which may be freed from its body, you may believe yourself opposed to your body. You may doubt whether your molecules, atoms or electrons are really parts of you. They may come and go, as we eat and excrete, for presumably our chemical contents undergo a complete change once every seven years. How can you identify your enduring self with these passing elements which remain invisible anyway? Even your blood cells, which you wash down the drain after bleeding, may seem to make no real difference in your self. You may regard excess fat, which contributes to your weight, not really part of your self. Long and bitter conflict with a parent, sibling or child may create irreconcilable feelings of enmity. Animals and plants more often seem like different species. A car that will not start, a hammer that strikes your finger, a neighborhood that fatigues your nerves, a territory too vast for you to see, travel through or even comprehend, can hardly always be thought of as part of you. Your sun seems very far away, so hot that it burns your skin, and your own earth may seem to batter you with intolerable heat or snow or wind. Even your own intimate emotions may overwhelm you, as when you are crippled or shaken with fear.
Hence, your self seems not only complex but variable. Even merely as physical, you exist as a complex variable. When seeking what is best for yourself in the long run, how should you decide in regard to the extent that you should feel identified with, or opposed to, each and all of the foregoing factors? Is it better to expand whenever you can? Is it better to contract as often as possible? Is it better to remain stable than to fluctuate? Is it better to adapt yourself pliably to changing circumstances as they arise and to opportunities for greater values as they come and go? That is, in addition to specific oughts pertaining to the many parts of your self as physical, are there some general oughts regarding keeping your self-ideas stable or flexible? Too rapid fluctuation of self-feelings may create confusion. Too rigid conceptions may make you unadaptable. The more complex and variable you find yourself to be, the more you will welcome discovery of reliable general principles for guiding your judgment. If so, then to attain assurance regarding what is best for you is a fundamental part of what you most want to do.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
Even though “ethics” pertains not merely to “society” but also to “the individual,” nevertheless the social aspects of each individual self are central to “individual ethics.” Many different ways in which each self is inherently social may be explored with benefit. Some of these will be examined in the present chapter, and divided, somewhat arbitrarily, into three groups entitled “Self-Ideals,” “Sources of Self” and “Cultural Riches.”
Self-Ideals. You commonly think of yourself, and describe yourself, in terms of your group memberships and social roles. For example, when you give your name, saying “I’m John Jones,” you automatically identify yourself with the Jones family, at least with your parents and possibly with a whole host of Joneses. If the name “Jones” happens to meet with approval, i.e., “The great Jones family,” you may feel yourself thereby honored. Or, if it has gained an unsavory reputation, you may feel yourself chagrined. Consequently, to the extent that you feel identified with the Joneses you will try to elevate their reputation by defending them against slander or by helping them improve their actual conditions so as to warrant a better rating. You may feel yourself compelled to act discreetly so that their collective reputation, in which you share, may be enhanced.
Recall what happens to you whenever you join a group. After joining you describe yourself in a way which you could not properly do before: “I’m a Boy Scout.” “I’m a seventh grader.” “I’m an alumnus of Washington high School.” “I’m a student at State University.” When you travel away from your school, city, state or nation, you become known as a representative of that group and, especially when visitors from such a group are rare, you acquire significance as a representative of the whole group and find yourself expected to play your role fittingly. When in a foreign land, you tend to forget your family difficulties, your interschool rivalries, your interstate conflicts, your interdenominational differences, and find your “I-am-an-American” feelings pervading your whole nature. You discover yourself to be a “Yanqui” or “Gringo” in Latin America, an “Imperialist” or “Capitalist” in Communist countries, and “Occidental” in the Orient and a “White” in Africa. How you feel that you ought to act flows from your acceptance, willingly or unwillingly, of the role you find yourself playing, or forced to play. Fear of foreigners, which is a common experience, may overwhelm you. But the discovery that you are feared or hated or admired because you stand out as representative of your national group can help to make you aware of how much your citizenship means to you as a self.
When you attain status in a business or profession, you acquire recognition, and recognize yourself, as functioning in the ways required. You become, and you are, a carpenter or an accountant or a nurse. Your developed skill is embodied in you and thus determines you as substantially a being with such status. The very tools involved in your skill, be it a hammer, a slide rule or a hypodermic needle, become both symbolic and actual extensions of your nature. You may leave one profession or corporation and join another. But while you actually function in it, such functioning entails a substantiality which constitutes a living part of you. As long as it does, you have a natural interest both in the welfare of your profession and in your own excellence, efficiency and rating in it, and this interest constitutes a part of your personalty and your desire relative to it determines part of what you regard as best for yourself in the long run. One faces, here as elsewhere, the question as to what extent one should permit one’s professional interests to dominate one’s personality. Some do this, some have to do this, more than others. But the question of how much one should devote to one’s professional, as against one’s familial, community, religious, recreational and other interests, itself persists as a recurring ethical question.
Turning from the foregoing samples of kinds of group memberships which tend to modify conceptions of self, we may observe how specific roles within groups affect one’s personality. Whenever one who is elected to, or selected for, an office (such as clerk, sergeant, receptionist, manager, secretary, president, judge, dean, administrative assistant, director, custodian) accepts his appointment, he naturally assents in trying to fulfill the duties of his office. In doing so, he discovers, even when he does not undergo a training program, certain ideals of achievement which grow naturally out of the functions of his office. When, as a responsible functionary, he strives to accomplish these, he finds himself not only making the judgments, decisions and demands required by his office, but also that he accepts them as his own judgments, decisions and demands, at least to the extent that he feels himself identified with his office. The more fully one devotes himself to his job, the more deeply he feels that what is good for the office is good for himself. Its oughts become his oughts, his fears of harm to the office are felt as his own fears, and his success for his office becomes experienced as his own success. Although one ought not to permit his interest in any office to crowd out other interests essential to his life, such as those in his family and community and physical health, one who has failed to respond to the thrill of realizing himself as a responsible officer lacks one of the greatest of human values.
A person appreciates his social role as more significant when it carries with it a rank or rating, especially one in which he is recognized as a bit superior to his fellows in some important respect. In fact, the closer his office is to the core of his welfare, the more important to him does such a rating seem. Regardless of whether one is, for example, an employee, a manager, a technician or a mother, the more one realizes that one’s efficiency as a functionary pays psychic as well as cash dividends, the more one will strive for excellence.
One can more truly recognize the importance of his position when he knows, and knows that others know, that they are dependent upon him. Although one ought not to accept more responsibility for the welfare of others than he can bear, the more responsible he becomes, the more both he and others have to recognize his actual importance. A raise in rank which does not carry with it increase in actual responsibilities has a hollow character about it, which does not long escape notice and evaluation. One who wins a prize which he does not deserve may enjoy a surface happiness, but he must, when honest with himself, despise himself at least a bit for any false pretence which accepting it or displaying it entails. Delinquency in children and habitual thievery by adults results naturally from their having been denuded of self-respect, of being dispossessed or any social stature which they feel is so worth defending that they cannot risk losing it. When one discovers how essential to his welfare is the attainment of a responsible office and of excellence in performing its functions, the more fully does he realize that this is part of what he most wants to do.
Sources of Self. Distinguishing between having complex and variable ideas of self as social and the social origins of our ideas and ideals of self, we turn now to explore the latter. We are not born human, except as members of a biological species, but we become human after birth through the socializing influences of others upon us. Human beings are essentially social animals, and socialization, and thus humanization, occurs after one is born. Not only must a helpless infant be cared for by others, if it is to live at all, but its early conditionings, its pattern of responses, and the kinds of things it is permitted or encouraged to do all result from it’s interaction with others. A person learns to speak and how to act and even what to want by observing and imitating others, for “one can no more organize his personality than he can be born without a mother.” (Ellsworth Farris, The Nature of Human Nature, p. 279, McGraw-Hill Book Co., New York, 1937).
Social psychologist L.L. Bernard presents, in Part III of his Introduction to Social Psychology (pp. 342-343. Henry Holt and Co., N.Y., 1926), an excellent account of how personality normally develops through imitation. “The first model which the young child copies in his personality integrating process is ordinarily his mother. . . . He copies her acts of affection, such as caressing with his hands, kissing, pressing his cheeks against the mother’s cheeks, cooing in response to her cooing, smiling, and even a little later responding to signs of fear and anxiety. . . . He adopts her tone of voice, forms of expression, gestures, even carriage, and attitudes of sincerity and insincerity, her benevolence, devices of lying evasion. . . . The child by his third or fourth year is a simplified miniature of the mother. If the child is a daughter, she has the same taste in clothes, the same company manners, the same social prejudices, judgments, techniques, virtues and absurdities.”
After stressing the importance of the mother model, because it lays a foundation for all the rest, Bernard compares typical mother and father models and advantages and disadvantages of each, and notes “the necessity of turning from the mother to the father as a model,” the “incompleteness of the father model,” and the availability of other outside models, such as the postman, the delivery man, the fireman, the policeman, the bus driver, nurses and teachers. Older brothers and sisters and gang leaders exercise a tremendous molding influence, but these too give way eventually, as do all actual models, to ideals. Ideal models may appear quite early in life, in fairy tales and fables, stories of heroic figures, or accounts of the lives of Jesus and the saints. History, biography and fiction provide additional examples for admiration and emulation. But despite the great value of live or ready-made characters for vicarious integration of personality, a person gradually outgrows all of them and imaginatively constructs one’s own ideal, whether vague or clear, including parts selected from many earlier heroes. Yet even when one has broken away from, and grown beyond, all models provided by others, one’s own ideal has been constructed out of them. It is one’s own, but it is none the less fundamentally social in its origin.
Another important aspect of the social origins of your self has been discovered and described in detail by philosopher George Herbert Mead. (Mind, Self, and Society. University of Chicago Press, Chicago, 1934.) Distinguishing, as we all do, between “I” and “me,” he notes that consciousness of “me” arises as a consequence of the attitudes and actions which other persons take toward us. A child, like an animal, at first acts without being aware of himself as a self. He just acts, waving his hand, looking, babbling. He looks at other things without being aware that he is looking or that there is a “he” which looks. But when someone acts toward him, looks at him, tickles him, waves at him, chucks his chin, the child then discovers himself as something which is acted upon, or looked at, tickled, waved at and chucked. Only by becoming aware of his reaction to the actions of others does his own self-awareness emerge into being.
Furthermore, the kind of self-conception which arises from self-awareness is a product of those ways in which others act toward us. Thus, we depend upon others for their actions upon us in order to develop not only self-awareness but each detail of our self-conception. The kind of self we become is thus itself a product of the attitudes which others take toward us. We find ourselves not merely growing to fit ourselves to the demands of an adult office, as previously mentioned, but always, and from the very beginning of our lives, we constantly react to, and in the light of, the attitudes and expectations which others have about us. A person “enters his own experience as a self or individual, not directly or immediately ... but only in so far as he first becomes an object to himself only by taking the attitudes of other individuals toward himself....” (Ibid, pp. 140, 142, 143).
Thus far, we have considered only the “me” or object in the “I”-”me” or subject-object situation. “I” am the agent, or the actor, but “I” come into my awareness first not as an actor but as a reactor, as that which responds to the actions of others upon “me.” Thus “me” arises first into awareness, and “I” emerges afterwards as that which reacts to the treatment of “me.” “The ‘I’ is the response of the organism to the attitudes of the others; the ‘me’ is the organized set of attitudes of others which one himself assumes. The attitudes of others constitute the organized ‘me,’ and then one reacts toward that as an ‘I.’” (Ibid, p. 175.) Afterwards, both “I” and “me” grow and evolve as we discover how others react to our reactions to them, and as we try out all sorts of ventures regarding how we would like to have others think of us and discover, accidentally or pragmatically, what kind of selves we have by how much we can “get away with” in dealing with others.
Although we cannot here follow Mead further into the detailed evidence which he assembles for his view, and we may not be able to accept his view as the whole story, nevertheless after examining his evidence we can hardly avoid the conclusion that self-concepts, both concepts of self as object and of self as subject, depend upon others for their origin and development and, indeed, for their maintenance -- for as we grow up, mature and age, and as we change our groups and social roles, our self-concepts also change somewhat. Now if all this is true, then when we try to get what is best for ourselves in the long run, we do so in light of the selves we believe we have -- beliefs which we owe to others. Of course, once we discover that our self-concepts are due to others, then we may conclude that a most fundamental ought is to locate ourselves, in so far as we can, in those environments in which our potentialities for growth will receive a most favorable stimulus through the opinions and attitudes and actions of others toward us.
Cultural Riches. Self-ideas originate in and become molded by not merely interaction between persons in groups but also by “culture” or from socially inherited traits resulting from living together. “Culture” consists of all ideas about how to do things, the language required to convey those ideas, and the tools and techniques involved in doing them. Such ideas include beliefs about the nature of self and its goals as well as about the universe and all other things in it. They include ideas of how to do and how to be and how to think and feel, as well as how not to do or be or think or feel. Culture includes all tools, not only hand tools, but also houses, factories, cities, and whatever material objects, ideas and techniques for producing and using them, which still exist. It embraces all of the sciences and the humanities, histories, philosophies and religions, the arts such as literature, painting, poetry, drama, dance and music, and games. It consists of everything supervening upon our biological inheritance, and even the effects upon such inheritance of controlling and modifying ideals.
Anyone acquainted with cultural variations knows they produce differences in the behavior patterns, the ideals and the viewpoints of people. The more broadly one travels the more obvious becomes the truism that every person is a product of his culture. The more widely divergent cultural ideals make greater differences in conceptions of the nature of self, its worth, its potentialities and its goals. Most people still have little choice in the matter, but when one does discover that some cultural ideals seem more useful, fruitful or satisfying than others, one acquires an obligation to oneself to try to adopt the superior traits. Most of the cultural traits that one acquires from others embody results of centuries of effort and ingenuity. No person, merely as a biological animal, has the ability to produce, or reproduce, the whole, or even very little, of human cultural history by himself. We accept our cultural heritage as ours so naturally that we can hardly imagine the myriads of independent discoveries, and the toil, sweat, anxiety, and toll of life and death, required by the trial-and-error processes involved in producing it. Each cultural trait is a value graciously (i.e., without our deserving it) provided for us. We accept our endowment of cultural riches so unquestioningly that we cannot imagine what it would be like to be without them (for the very structure of our imagining “what it would be like without them” is itself culturally conditioned).
Acquisition of most other cultural traits depends upon the cluster of traits called “language” -- which itself is one of the miracles constituting human nature. A person is not merely an anthropoid mammalian, not only a social animal; a person is a linguistic animal or a symbolizing animal. (See Ernst Cassirer’s Essay on Man, Yale University Press, New Haven, 1944.) The symbols required for communicating and cooperating in groups, for inheriting our culture and for thinking abstractly become primary constituents structuring our minds. Not only our self, but also our mind (not to be confused with brain) “arises in the social process;” and “the language process is essential for the development of self” (Mead, op. cit., pp. 134, 135) and its mind. The difference between a child and an adult is more than physiological, even more than sociological; it is linguistic. By structuring your mind and shaping your self-concepts, language participates in making you what you are. If so, then, of course, if you desire what is best for your self, you naturally develop interest in your language -- not merely efficiency in the use of your “mother tongue” but, if you care to expand yourself so you can enjoy the inherited riches of other cultures conveyed best only through other languages, also in “foreign” languages. (High school and college requirements in “English” and “languages” are no arbitrary whims of educators but represent minimums needed for becoming “human” in our multi-lingual world.)
Our linguistically-shaped conceptions of our selves depend not merely upon words and sentences and grammatical syntax but upon the small and great systems of thought, such as the sciences and the humanities. Not only do we become scientists and humanists, but each of the sciences and of the humanities contributes its own share to the infinitely complex shapings of our minds. Nothing can be more revealing of the nature of yourself than a review of the cultural history of mankind.
Each contemporary Western person has been produced by several intricate series of long developments. The main trunk of Western civilization has two major taproots in the Hebraic and classical Greek traditions, which in turn fed upon earlier Egyptian, Babylonian and other more primitive cultures. The birth and growth and synthesizing of Christian thought, especially by Augustine, provided an enduring pattern for organizing great portions of our minds. After Arab contributions, the Medieval synthesis expanded and stabilized Christian mentality most effectively, yet too rigidly, because the Renaissance and Reformation, followed by the Enlightenment (with its Rationalistic, Empiricistic and Mechanistic phases), and Romanticism, German Idealism, Marxism, Evolutionism and Pragmatism, may be seen as successive steps away from that established framework. Each new step has added its own values to enrich our cultural outlooks. Each new national language had the virtue of stretching the human mind in its own unique ways. Every new philosophy and new religious sect developed its own variation of Western idealism. Although some of these may be incompatible with others, each has suggestions to offer which one can, like the aforementioned child who transcends actual models to construct one of its own, use to construct one’s own system of the universe, one’s own intellectual home for mankind. If you cannot find a ready-made system that answers your needs, then you have an obligation to yourself to construct from the better parts of each of your cultural sources one best suited to yourself.
Of course, Western civilization is only one of the three major civilizations through which the human mind has evolved. The others, the Hindu and the Chinese, have proved to be as rich and varied and as useful and satisfactory in their own ways as the European heritage is in its way. Fortunately, in addition to those traits found to be common to mankind everywhere, some aspects of human nature have been exploited and refined more fully in some cultures than in others. The more deeply we penetrate into the unique ideals of each culture the more we realize the profundity of the saying that “A person who knows only one culture knows none.” People whose training is limited to one culture can hardly begin to realize the significance of some of their own self-concepts until they have contrasted them with those which have emerged in a different culture. Not only, as Mead has said, does a self not discover itself until it becomes aware of itself as reacting to the actions of others, but also a culturally-conceived self does not begin to discover the culture-produced aspects of its self-conception until it becomes aware of alternatives to such conception. Once we realize that we may enrich ourselves, both our conceptions of ourselves and others and of kinds of values available to us as human beings, by drawing upon Hindu and Chinese cultures, then, assuming we are able, we have developed an obligation to ourselves to pursue these riches. If our children inherit a world culture enriched by all three major civilizations, we will seem to them as poverty-stricken minds to the extent that we have failed to attain at least a glimpse of these other traditional treasures.
Enough has been said in this chapter on “Self As Social” to illustrate the multifarious ways in which a self has its origin, its nature and its riches in the social and cultural aspects of life. Although socialization and acculturation involve evils also, something which will be discussed later, one who enjoys the needed capacity and opportunity can find what is best for oneself in the long run somewhat in proportion to embracing and embodying additional social responsibilities and wider cultural perspectives. And when persons advance far enough, they can first guide themselves into opportunities and capacities of their own choosing and then become producers of, not merely products of, culture.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
Gathering together the main ideas of the foregoing thirteen chapters, we try here to summarize the nature and purpose of social ethics. The purposes of Part II have been (1) to show how social ethics is a natural extension of individual ethics, (2) to explore the nature of groups, (3) to see how groups deal with typical ethical problems, and (4) to observe how interdependence, characterizing the nature of individuals, becomes more complicated and intricate as groups and group functions multiply.
Personality and Society. Although throughout Part II attention is focused primarily upon groups, concern to show how social ethics is a natural, even necessary, extension of individual ethics has remained obvious. As was pointed out repeatedly in Part I, the full nature of personality, of personal problems, and of personal ethics cannot be understood until it becomes clear how a person’s interests in one’s groups serve to enlarge and enrich one’s personality and how the ethical problems of one’s group function as additional and more complicated aspects of one’s own ethical nature. Hence each chapter, although devoted to exploring some phase of social ethics, functions also as an expanded examination of a similar phase of individual ethics.
For example, the policies of your groups do, or should, serve your own interests in such a way that their security makes you more secure and their improved reputation enhances your own self-esteem. A group has instrumental values for you whenever it promotes your welfare, and it may appear as having intrinsic good either as an object enriching your experiences of adoration or as an amplification of your own intrinsic good through your feeling identified with it. You may enjoy a measure of self-improvement through participating in your group’s improvements. A group’s obligations often function as additions to each member’s other obligations. When you identify yourself with your group, then when it acts as an agent, you experience its action as an enlargement of your own agency. You can feel freer when your groups are able to do what they want to do and what you want them to do. Your kinds and ranges of sovereignty and of ownership may be augmented through those of your groups. Your rights become multiplied through sharing in those of your groups, as are your opportunities for participating, as receiver and giver, in justice and grace. Your conscience becomes enlarged and more complicated through concern about your group’s duties, and your own intelligence may be magnified through participating in the benefits of your group’s achievements, survival powers and adaptabilities.
The other side of the coin must be equally reckoned with. For you depend upon your groups often more than your groups depend upon you, and you serve the interests of your groups as well as they serve yours. You may become insecure when you deviate from the group’s pattern as well as when your group is endangered. You may be humiliated not only when you deviate from your group’s pattern but also when your group is dishonored. You must serve as an instrumental good for your group if you are to continue as a member, and your own intrinsic value may be neglected and even diminished as a result of group action. The conflicts and other evils embodied in your groups exist as complications of your own personality conflicts. Your groups may contribute to, or even necessitate, your own deterioration, as evidenced by slum conditions and cultural conflict situations. Your groups’ obligations may be onerous and their effects on your obligations may increase your burden to the point of unbearability. Your may be compelled to act in ways that you prefer not to act as a consequence of being caught up in the actions of your groups, as when a citizen is drafted for military service. You may become unfreer both when your group fails to do what it wants to do and when it compels you to do what you do not want to do. Your own sovereignty may be limited by that of your groups, and your ownership may be reduced by taxes, confiscation, or prohibitions against acquisition. Your rights may be nullified, both by persons within your groups, by your groups’ decisions and actions and by other groups which maltreat your groups. Your duties become multiplied through sharing in those of your groups, as are your chances for being treated unjustly. You may suffer from the pangs of conscience due to your groups’ unfulfilled duties, and your own unintelligence may be caused in part by the formalisms and other failures of your groups.
Surely the chapters of Part II have illustrated many ways in which individual ethics is incomplete until your extended interests in his groups have been accounted for. Persons are, by nature, social animals, and social ethics is an extension of individual ethics.
Ethical Aspects of Groups. Each group has a nature and interests of its own, and although continuously depending upon the stability or instability of its members, has a kind or degree of independence in the sense that its own nature and interests coincide completely with those of no one of its members nor even with all of them together, for conflicts between its members constitute aspects of its own nature. To the extent that a group behaves as an entity, certain aspects of its nature appear to function somewhat analogously to those of individuals, and to the extent that intrinsic values appear to be at stake in the decisions made by, or for, the group, such a group may be said to be behaving ethically or even, to be an ethical being. Failure of interpreters to keep in mind that such partially independent ethical behavior is only a matter of degree will lead to their imaginatively creating a completely independent ogre which tends to disregard or thwart the interests of the members upon which it continuously and intimately depends. If the fundamental need for depicting a group’s nature, interests and ethical behavior as aspectival, rather than as a completely independent substance, is overlooked, the viewpoint expressed in this volume will have been misunderstood. The degree of independence of a group from its members is comparatively so small and the degree of dependence is so large that it is better not to speak of independence at all if the aspectival character of this independence cannot be kept in mind.
Just as individuals depend upon other individuals for parts of their nature and welfare, so groups depend upon other groups for parts of their nature and welfare. And just as individuals depend also upon subordinate parts, whether organs of their bodies, cells, atoms or subatomic particles, so groups depend upon subgroups, if any, upon individuals as members, and upon the subordinate parts of individuals; and as individuals depend in some ways upon their groups, so each group, except the highest group, depends in some ways upon the behavior of superior groups. This hierarchical character of group interdependencies involves many groups in several levels of ethical behavior. That is, each group has basic interest in the welfare of its members, and ought to take into account the welfare of its members not merely as members but also as individuals having other interests. Each group has an interest in its own welfare as a group, or as a functional entity with its own prospects for continuation and prosperity. Each group has an interest in its subgroups, if any, and in its relation to its peer groups, of various sorts and degrees of interrelatedness, and to its superior groups, if any. Each of these levels of interest needs to be kept in mind as we explore each of the several other aspects of a group’s ethical nature. For a fundamental part of the nature of each group is its action as a complex unity which retains a measure of integrity to the extent that no one of these levels of interest dominates over the others so completely that they suffer as a consequence. A group’s policies, goods, improvements, obligations, agency, freedom, sovereignty, ownership, justice, conscience and intelligence all involve all of the levels in its hierarchical nature. Social ethics, as a study, remains inadequate so long as any of these aspects and levels is neglected.
Social policy as pursuit of groupal self-interest, thus, is best conceived as multi-complex or multidimensional. Group health and integrity continue to be endangered by conflicts of interests among its members and between its levels of obligation. Problems entailed in a group’s evaluation of its own interests, much like those facing each individual with personality conflicts, present it with some of its most crucial ethical decisions. Each group needs to keep in mind both its central purposes and its peripheral tasks and opportunities, and to weigh the merits of proposals for action in terms of their comparative benefits relative to both types of interest. Oftentimes a group finds itself amid changing circumstances and faces the problem of modifying, evolving and redefining its nature and purposes somewhat. Evaluation of the reliability of the principle of reciprocity relative to prospective investments in services at each of its levels of interests continues to plague many group officials. Those groups which have been able to institutionalize their relations and codify ways of behaving at each level tend to reduce the number of decisions which must be remade recurrently. If they can avoid cultural lag, with consequent formalism and disorganization, and satisfy each level of interest adequately, they are fortunate in having established patterns of reciprocal behavior which optimize mutual benefits.
Social values and evils constitute bases for social ethics. Popularly, confusion of intrinsic with instrumental values, of economic values with prices, of mores with principles, of ideals with actualities, and each of these with the others, tends to result in uncertainty about, fear of, and antagonism toward, ethics. Those who resentfully interpret oughts, duties and obligations as external impositions upon persons by their groups naturally despise multiplication of groups as multiplication of evils. Anarchistic sentiments beget dreams of utopias completely without ethics, so conceived. But such childish notions stem from failure of members to achieve full participation in their groups’ goods and to share in responsibility for both understanding issues and in making decisions, as well as from failure to achieve clear analysis of the kinds of value aspects functioning as constituent components of group value situations. That groups have instrumental value, and instrumental evil, for individuals, few can doubt, though one needs to grow into responsible positions in many kinds and levels of groups in order to appreciate fully the variety, quantity and quality of such goods available to individuals. That groups also function as if having intrinsic good is obvious to those whose feelings of security depend upon not only feeling identified with the group and its welfare but also feel as if the group itself embodies great intrinsic good. Such persons also tend to project their feelings of good through ideas or icons symbolizing such good. Awareness of evil or of any lack of good naturally generates ideals of what the group would like if the evil were banished and the good perfected. Such ideals then function as conditional oughts, as standards to be striven for, or goals to be sought. Some such ideals arise spontaneously in members as difficulties occur; some become embedded in traditions, whether national, sectarian or familial, and may be typified in the struggles of mythical, legendary or actual heroes. People who cannot trace the goods projected into their ideals back to the intrinsic goods present in immediate experiences tend to become enslaved by them. Enlightenment about social goods is itself one of the greatest of social goods.
Social improvement and social degeneration are both possible and actual. Groups, even whole civilizations, begin and end, arise and decline, improve and degenerate. Social ethics is concerned with the improvement of groups and prevention of evils. Elimination of conflicts and promotion of cooperation as well as exploiting of natural resources for group welfare play central roles. Not least among the ways of improving groups is to first improve understanding of ways to improve groups. Since social ethics has to do with how to improve groups, a study of social ethics tends to become an important step in social improvement. Then knowledge of the many ways in which improvements may be initiated should aid and direct members to act accordingly.
Social obligation, as the obligations which groups have for choosing the greater over the lesser goods, or lesser over the greater evils, is multileveled. When only a single choice is presented to a group at one time, the problem is fairly simple. But when a group has obligations not only to its members, to itself as a group, and to peer groups and to hierarchically related groups but also to maintaining a healthy dynamic balance among these different obligations, its sense of obligation must remain very complex. Although, when narrowly conceived, a group’s obligations to itself may be thought of as in opposition to those of its members and to those of other groups with which it competes, broadly conceived, a group’s obligations to itself not only include its obligations to its members and to other groups but also to sustain efficient organic unity among these various obligations. Principles for choosing for a group interdepend with those for choosing by each individual, with additional complications when groups may grow or decrease by adding or losing members having intrinsic as well as instrumental goods which may be variable as well as, in some respects, incomparable.
Social action, which involves a group acting as an agent, is ethical whenever it is intended. A group can have no intentions apart from those of its members, even though not all of its members share in affirming each decision to act reached by its effective leaders. Conflicting intentions among members of a group sometimes prevent a group from deciding and acting, just as an individual may have a multiplicity of interests each of which one desires, and conditionally intends, to realize, but which prevent one from acting because one cannot make up one’s mind which of one’s conflicting interests to sacrifice. Groups are responsible, in several ways, for fulfilling their obligations which, ultimately, are obligations to achieve the greatest amount of intrinsic value for their members and which, intermediately, are obligations to employ the means available to them most efficiently. As groups become more complicated, many varieties of specialists develop and each becomes responsible for making some of the decisions for the group.
Social freedom is the ability of a group to do what it wants to do. Such freedom interdepends with the freedoms of its members and with the freedoms of other groups with which it is related. A group may be free or unfree to have more members, or fewer members, or more devoted members, or less demanding members. A group may be free or unfree to achieve its wants because it desires what cannot be had or has more wants than can be fulfilled because they conflict with each other. A group may be free or unfree to cooperate with or compete with peer groups, to join superior groups, or to enjoy the support of subgroups. If a group desires more independence than it can have, or more dependence than it can have, it is unfree. If it wants more improvements, more powerful agency, more sovereignty or ownership rights or even intelligence that it can have, it is unfree. Social freedom, too, is partly a matter of fitting a group’s wants to its opportunities and capacities as well as a matter of succeeding in improving both its capacities and its opportunities.
Social sovereignty is the power of a group to control itself rather than being controlled by some other group. Some sovereign groups are controlled by one of their members, some by a few of their members, some by many, if not all, of their members. Nowadays, complex societies tend to have different functions controlled in different ways, such that some are controlled by a single person, e.g., a specialist or by a president, some by a few, e.g., a committee or a congress of delegates, and some by many, as in popular elections. Democracy, as a system of group self-control, has evolved many forms, and the town-council type of democracy, which gave way to representative democracy, is now rapidly being replaced by speciocracy, government by specialist, whether elected or appointed. When persons participate in many levels of groups, the problem of attaining and maintaining healthy democracy recurs at each level. When the control of activities pertaining to a person’s interests at one level is endangered by the control system at another level, some of one’s power of self-control is thereby in jeopardy. We use the term “democracy of levels” to designate a system by which individuals and groups control themselves in such a way that their interests exercised through different levels of groups tend to receive equally adequate treatment. The need for attaining a democratic world government, which would be both a highest level of democracy and an additional level to a democracy of levels, appears to many as one of the most important ethical problems facing mankind today.
Social ownership, i.e. a group having something as its own, is of many kinds. In addition to a group owning, and being owned by, its members, most of what a group owns is spoken of as wealth. Wealth consists of whatever is useful in serving the wants of the group or, more ultimately, the desires of its members. Price, economic value, instrumental value and intrinsic value all interdepend in may ways, for, on the one hand, price should, ideally, represent economic value which should be related to instrumental value which should rest upon intrinsic value, but, on the other hand, the appreciation which a person enjoys in consuming some goods is influenced by the price. Group ownership, whether by private or public groups, increases the amount owned by individuals when more individuals share in such ownership but decreases the amount owned by individuals to the extent that more individuals are excluded from such ownership. Likewise, public group ownership increases the amount owned by individuals through sharing in such ownership but decreases the amount of individual ownership in the sense that an individual owns his wealth exclusively. Arguments for and against group ownership, generally, and public ownership, specifically, continue. Doubtless some kinds of wealth and some types of enterprise are better owned publicly and others better owned privately, and the same wealth or enterprise may be better owned publicly under certain circumstances and better owned privately when circumstances change in certain ways, or vice versa. Some groups, doubtless, ought to keep an experimental attitude toward their system of ownership and change from one to the other if such a shift promises better results.
Social justice occurs when groups get what they deserve, distributively or retributively; social injustice exists when groups obtain less than they deserve; and grace prevails when groups receive more than they deserve. Groups have rights and duties, as extensions of individual rights and duties, which have their bases ultimately in intrinsic goods. Groups have duties to their members, to themselves as groups, and to other groups, because their members have rights, they themselves have rights, and other groups have rights. Rights and duties of groups involve correlativity and appropriate functioning of the principle of reciprocity.
Social conscience here refers to the conscience of a group, which is inseparable from that of its members. A group’s conscience consists of its feelings of obligation. These may be directed toward its members, toward other groups, or toward harmonious and adequate fulfilling of its own desires. A group’s conscience may lead it to act or refrain from acting, to seek more freedom of choice or more freedom from choice, to desire more or less sovereignty, more or less public ownership, more or fewer rights and more or fewer duties, to achieve greater justice, or to become more intelligent. Conscience both depends upon all other value aspects of a group’s nature and all such aspects may depend for their achievement upon an effective conscience.
Social intelligence is the ability of a group to attain its ends, which, of course, includes aiding its members in achieving more of their own goals. A group’s intelligence is conditioned by facility of communication among members and between groups, by the quantity and quality of new ideas available as hypotheses for solving the group’s problems, by the attitude of willingness or unwillingness with which a group accepts a problem as its own, as solvable and as solvable by means of a particular proposed solution, by the total number of problems to which it can attend at one time, and by the rigidity or pliability of its system of organization. Too many groups suffer from cultural lag, which results in their institutions functioning inefficiently, and becoming formalistic and disorganized. An intelligent group is able to foresee growing obsolescence in its mores, laws and institutions and to revise them before the resulting evils become greater than the good which can be obtained from newer behavior patterns. Social intelligence thus involves ability and willingness on the part of a group to engage in social planning. Growth in complexity of social interdependencies has begotten a need for increased numbers of kinds of specialists in social planning. Whether or not such specialists are themselves intelligent and untyrannical will have great bearing upon how intelligent their groups can become.
Conclusion. Our survey of some of the ethical aspects of groups has shown them to be complexly interrelated with each other in ways which make them intricately interdependent. Social ethics, as a study of the concern which groups have for what is best for them and what all they ought to do in order to attain what is best, involves an understanding of these intricate interdependencies and an attempt to formulate general principles, holding for like situations, which may be utilized in deciding how to act in order to attain such best. Some aspects of social ethics remain relatively simple, as when much of the give and take in some contemporary families is like that in ancient families. But other aspects, involving intentional relations between two warring countries each having semi-private trading companies entangled in multi-leveled megalopolitan hierarchies as well as in both the peace and war states of each of the two multi-lingual countries, seem endlessly complex. Such complexity does not eliminate ethics; it merely makes it more complicated. That the solution of some practical ethical problems must be delegated to specialists seems obvious. Consequently, the ethics of training and managing such specialists constitutes an additional important problem in social ethics.
That social ethics interdepends with individual ethics surely must be clear by now. That both individual and social ethics may have still other dimensions, in whatever ways persons have rights and obligations relative to animals, for example, or the rest of the universe, will be dealt with in Part III. Inter-dependence between persons and groups is complicated further by their interrelations with the rest of the world.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
The Meaning of “Final”. The word “final,” from the Latin finis, like the word “finish,” connotes end, termination, perfection. As presupposed throughout the foregoing chapters, each intrinsic good, whether a feeling of pleasure, enthusiasm, satisfaction, or contentment, is experienced as an end-in-itself. In this sense, all ethics is final ethics, for all ethics is concerned with what one ought to choose and to do in order to achieve such ends in themselves. However, tradition favors another meaning of “final,” namely, the goal or end of life. That is, although each experienced intrinsic good is final in its own way, we have come to ask what is the meaning and value of life as a whole, and to seek to shape our answer in terms of some “supreme value” which is final in the sense that it is the end of life itself rather than the end experienced when satisfying a desire for a particular good such as an evening at the movies. The Latin words, summum bonum, “the highest good,” are commonly used to designate the goal of life itself. Thomas Aquinas spoke of “man’s last end,” distinguishing our most ultimate values from minor or intermediate ultimates.
If there is a most ultimate value of life, then surely attainment of it is what a person most wants. And those aspects of ethical principles and ethical behavior which are directed toward achievement of such a value constitute what are here called “final ethics.” If life has a most ultimate intrinsic good, then surely the attainment of it is one’s greatest self-interest, is the pinnacle of self-improvement, is one’s supreme obligation, is the primary message of one’s distorted conscience, is the goal of one’s intelligence.
However, even though there appears to be general agreement among people and among mature ethicists that life has a goal and that final ethics is the most important part of ethics, disagreements continue about whether such finality is one or many, whether it can be achieved within this life or only after death, whether it can be achieved only at the end of life or throughout life while it is being lived, and whether it consists merely in all the ordinary enjoyments or whether it is some special kind of intrinsic good. In the following chapters, we shall explore answers to these questions. In Chapter XXXIII, we shall inquire into the aesthetic or immediately experienced character of any supreme good. In Chapter XXXIV, we shall consider some implications of the aesthetic nature of the goal of life for conceptions of the nature of life and its goal, reviewing and evaluating some traditional views. In Chapter XXXV, we shall summarize our conclusions regarding the organic nature of final ethics, including its interdependence with the details of individual and social ethics. The problem remaining in the present chapter is to examine more fully the meaning of “final” as representing a person’s concern for the purpose or goal of life as a whole. We do this by exploring two other terms which are intimately related with final ethics, namely, “satisfaction” and “success.”
The Meaning of “Satisfaction.” Part III has been entitled “Satisfaction.” “Satisfaction,” from the Latin satisfacere, meaning to make (facere) complete (satis), conveys the idea of fulfillment, of doing enough, of attaining sufficiently, of achieving completion. Satisfaction, in this sense, is making something complete. Final satisfaction, the ultimate goal of ethics, is to make life as complete as it can be in the sense of achieving its fullest, including its highest, intrinsic good. In this broad meaning, the term “satisfaction” connotes realization of the goal of life.
Since we are now using the word “satisfaction” in a second and more general sense than that used in Chapters VIff, clarification of the difference seems needed. In Chapter VI, we distinguished between feelings of pleasure, enthusiasm, satisfaction and contentment, each of which is experienced as an intrinsic good. There “satisfaction” meant the fulfillment of desire, i.e., of any desire, no matter how trivial or significant, where the feeling of satisfaction may be distinguished from feelings of pleasure, enthusiasm and contentment, if one tries. Here “satisfaction,” i.e., “final satisfaction,” means achievement of the goal of life, however conceived. The latter meaning may be thought of as an extension or expansion of the former, as it is by Voluntarists. But it may also be thought of as the goal of life as conceived by Hedonists, Romanticists, Anandists and Organicists. And it tends to have both aesthetic and cosmic ingredients, as we shall point out in the following two chapters. “Final satisfaction” connotes consummation of life as a whole, insofar as that is possible. It is thus inclusive of all of its intrinsic good and of all of the personal, social and cosmic instrumentalities pictured as needed to make possible and actual such life and its consummation.
The Meaning of “Success”. “A person ought to try to succeed in life,” we say. Or, “The goal of life is success.” Part III has been difficult to entitle because so many different words are available, none of which quite captures all of the intended meaning. The term “success” is one of these words. It is another of those terms which is on everybody’s lips, which everyone understands without stopping to define it. But, again, we refer here to “success in life,” not just success in business or success in getting to dinner on time. We sometimes try to make this distinction clear by using such terms as “genuine success,” “complete success,” “ultimate success,” “final success.” What is meant is success in achieving the goal of life. Hence, the nature and purpose of ethics may be restated in this language: Ethics is concerned with what is good and how to get it, not just food and fun, money and marriage, excitement and security, but the good of life. The purpose of a study of ethics is to help one to understand how to succeed in life. Final ethics pertains to how to achieve complete success in life.
However, the term “success” also at times has a brass ring about it. It is used to refer to success in crime and war as well as in business conducted by foul means. Furthermore, it is not quite as popular around the world as in America, and, hopefully, this volume is intended for use by persons who are not limited merely to American tastes.
Success in life involves not merely getting what one wants but also wanting what one gets. It involves an aesthetic a well as a practical achievement. And since one’s feelings of achievement are perceived in terms of certain ideals of success, it entails some conception of the nature of life in the universe, and thus is inseparable from one’s conception of the cosmos. The following chapters may be interpreted as exploring questions about how to actualize full and final success in life.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
The present chapter on final ethics will be devoted to exploring the nature of aesthetic experience, how it relates to moral experience, the role it plays in religious experience, and ways in which moral and religious experience interdepend.
Aesthetic Experience and Moral Experience. “Experience is ‘aesthetic’ when it is enjoyed as complete in itself and ‘moral’ when it is felt as incomplete and as needing something more to complete it. Hence, ‘aesthetic’ and ‘moral’ are conceived as opposites.... This distinction between ‘aesthetic’ and ‘moral’ may be stated also in terms of intrinsic and instrumental values...an experience is itself an intrinsic value to the extent that it is experienced as complete in itself. Such an experience ‘aesthetic.’ An experience is itself an instrumental value to the extent that it experiences itself as a means to something more. Such an experience is ‘moral.’” (“Aesthetic Experience and Moral Experience,” The Journal of Philosophy, Vol. LV, Sept. 25, 1958, pp. 837-839.) “Instrumental value appears as leading on to something else, as having a goal beyond, as unfinished in the sense that it has a further contribution to make. Value is experienced as intrinsic, on the other hand, when its value is experienced as all there or when an interest in it is wholly satisfied in it or by it. In some ways, aesthetic intuition is the most perfect, most complete, most ultimate kind of intuition, for in it nothing more is needed.” (A.J. Bahm, Types of Intuition, p. 8, University of New Mexico Press, Albuquerque, 1961.)
Ethics, in being concerned with what is good and how to attain it, is future-oriented. The good being sought is not yet found. The goal aimed at has not yet been achieved. The purpose intended has not yet been realized. The choice being decided pertains to what one ought to choose to be done but has not yet done. One’s obligations consist in what one yet owes, and one’s duties consist in what one still ought to do. Interest in self-improvement is ethical because one can become better than one is or because some evil can be removed which has not yet been eliminated. Conscience is ethical because it consists in one’s concern for maintaining present welfare, or for attaining something better, in the future, whether immediate or remote. Ethical intelligence consists in the ability to attain what has not yet been attained. Ethics, thus, is greatly concerned about means to ends, and about what one ought to do in order to achieve those ends. The greater the future reward, or the farther distant it seems to be, or the harder one must work in order to attain it, the more conscientious one needs to be. And, conversely, the more conscientious a person appears to be, the greater, the more distant, or the more difficult to attain, the goal or value may be inferred to be. Whenever the goal is experienced as unattained and still in the future, it is experienced as moral. In this sense, most people are moral most of the time.
Aesthetics, which is concerned with aesthetic experience, regardless of whether such experience is characterized also by works of art, beautiful dreams, beatific visions, or yogic ananda, is present-oriented. That is “Aesthetic experience consists in intuition of intrinsic value.” (“Comparative Aesthetics,” The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, Vol. XXIV, Fall, 1965, p. 109.) The value experience is present, here and now. It is experienced as needing nothing more to complete it. It is not something being aimed at, but something being enjoyed. It is not something to be achieved, but something already actual. It is not something which one ought to do, but something which one is already doing, or being, or feeling. The aesthetic attitude is thus an appreciative attitude. It is focused upon the end-in-itself character of an experience rather than upon its means character. Its nature is constituted by being appreciative of what is present as the goal itself, rather than looking away from the present to some other goal. A painting may be judged beautiful, but this judgement occurs when one enjoys some aspect of the painting, or even its apparent whole, as an end-in-itself. Sometimes vivid colors, sometimes balanced forms, sometimes interesting themes, and sometimes a harmonious blend of all of these, organically unified, occupy the focus of attention. But it is the end-in-itself character of one’s experience which constitutes them aesthetic. This is the reason why both the satisfaction accompanying a delicious meal and the feeling of contentment permeating the “Amen” terminating a prayer of profound appreciation are experienced as aesthetic.
Final ethics is concerned with achieving the goal of life as a whole. Final aesthetics, so to speak, is concerned with appreciating the goal of life as a whole. Final satisfaction should be, when it is attained, an aesthetic experience. It consists in experiencing life itself as an end-in-itself, as an intrinsic good. Just as final ethics pertains to looking forward to fulfilling the purpose of life, so final aesthetics pertains to presently enjoying life as fulfilling, or as having fulfilled, its purpose. Hence, the ethical and the aesthetic, though conceived in one sense as opposites, interdepend and supplement each other. So final ethics and final aesthetics sustain each other and exist because they depend upon each other.
Although, in distinguishing aesthetic from moral experience, we have sharpened their difference for purposes of clarity, many, if not most, experiences partake of both moral and aesthetic aspects. That is, although some experiences seem to be primarily moral, they may also retain an element of the aesthetic; for when a person is moral, and concerned about the future, one often enjoys being moral, and appreciates the fact that one has such a concern. And although some experiences seem to be primarily aesthetic, they may also contain some elements of the moral; for when one is preoccupied with appreciating a painting which one regards as very beautiful, one may also entertain suggestions about how it might be improved, how one’s friend might enjoy it also, or how one would like to continue seeing it or return to see it again. Thus, the aesthetic and moral not only interdepend; they also intermingle in experiences. These facts, so often overlooked, have bearings upon the nature of religious experience, and have implications for the ethics of both religious beliefs and practices.
Aesthetic Experience and Religious Experience. “Religion consists in man’s concern for his ultimate value, and how to attain it, preserve it, and enjoy it.” (The World’s Living Religions, p. 16. For further details, see all of Chapter 1.) So conceived, religion is both ethical and aesthetic in character. Religion is essentially ethical in the sense that it is forward-looking. Religion is essentially aesthetic in the sense that what it looks forward to in enjoyment of the goal of life as an end-in-itself. Religion, understood in this way, is inseparable from final ethics and final aesthetics. Final ethics and final aesthetics together, as we have described them, constitute a philosophy of religious experience.
Let us here examine the view that religious experience is, or aims to be aesthetic. What is the purpose or goal of religion? It is the same as the purpose or goal of life. Religion is one’s concern for, i.e., both one’s beliefs about and one’s pursuit of, the goal of life. When achieved, the goal, to be enjoyed, must be appreciated as present. Before it is achieved, it must be conceived in some way or other, but that way always involves an aesthetic ingredient which, indeed, is the most important part of it. If being aesthetic consists in enjoying something as an end-in-itself, the goal of religious endeavor is depicted as some place, state or condition in which one is enjoying it as an end-in-itself. A study of the various religious ideals will reveal the universal presence, and importance, of aesthetic ingredients.
Consider, for example, various Christian views of what heaven is like. Those who derive their vision from Hebrew sources in the Old Testament depict it as a happy family, with a loving father, one’s beloved spouse, and one’s loved and loving children, brothers, and other relatives. Such happiness involves aesthetic experience. Some Christians, whose theological ideals have been influenced by the philosophy of Plato and Aristotle, whose theological ideals picture a person as an inherently imperfect image of a perfect being, conceive God, the Father, as man’s “Last End.” God alone is pure intrinsic good. “God alone is truly beautiful.” When persons realize their true condition, they desire to “see God,” to “look on his face,” to attain a beatific vision. Heaven, the goal of life, is a state in which one is permitted to enjoy eternal bliss; that is, to have an unending aesthetic experience of God’s pure intrinsic good, even though one does not deserve such a reward due to one’s own imperfection (“sinfulness”). Still other Christians, finding all schemes for structuring an afterlife defective, conclude: “I have no idea what it will be like, but I do know that when I get there I’m going to enjoy it.”
Consider, next, various Hindu ideals of nirvana. Typically conceived, nirvana is a quiescent state in which all of the miseries experienced in this world have disappeared. Since desire too often ends in frustration, it is regarded as our chief source of evil; hence in nirvana all desire has ceased. So also have ideas, forms, memories, and all distinctions; for these tend to arouse interest, desire, and suffering. But nirvana involves sat-chit-ananda, the being of blissful awareness. Ananda is enjoyment of pure intrinsic good. Nirvana is the state of such enjoyment. Advaita Vedanta conceives this state as resulting from elimination of selfhood, including self-awareness, when the “veil of ignorance” inhibiting atman from its awareness of its identity with Nirguna Brahman disappears. Sankhya-yoga regards the individual soul, purusha, when freed from all contact with the body and mind, prakriti, as existing in a state of eternal isolation, kaivalya, as pure blissless awareness. Here a paradox of religious ethics which we are about to discuss, i.e, the moral ending in the amoral, is carried even farther, i.e., the aesthetic purified of intrinsic good is regarded as even better than experience of pure intrinsic good.
Buddhist descriptions of nirvana vary, with the Theravadins as bhavanga, with the Madhyamikans as sunya, with Shin as living in the Pure Land, and with Zen as satori. Bhavanga is a flux of contentless and desireless awareness. Sunya, voidance of all distinctness, is experienced as “suchness,” the voidance of distinctness between distinctness and indistinctness, which leaves intuition of whatever is presented as ultimate value. Living in the Pure Land is, like living in heaven, perpetually blissful awareness of the utter graciousness of Amida in rescuing all sentient beings from a life of tormenting desires. Satori, also “suchness,” is alert, spontaneous appreciation of whatever is presented in experience as just what is wanted, without interest in planning for a better future. Jains, like Sankhya-Yogins, depict the aesthetic experience of eternally isolated souls as omniscient awareness of all detail in the universe, but without desire to use or improve anything.
The foregoing samples all illustrate the view that the goal of life, and of religion, is aesthetic. In explaining, for those who are not now enjoying such a goal, how to arrive there, each must give some account about what needs and ought to be done. Hence all religions also involve ethics and stress the importance of attention to ethical experience, i.e., to conscientiousness about doing what needs to be done in order to attain the goal. But most of them also involve a paradox, namely that the moral has its goal in the amoral. The ethical, which involves a sense of urgency for attaining an unattained goal, has as its goal an experience which is both goalless, in the sense that there is nothing to look forward to, and without a feeling of urgency. Religion is an urgent endeavor to eliminate urgency. Is one most religious when one has arrived in the goal, or has one then ceased to be religious? Is religion (from the Latin re-ligare, to bind back) a process of being brought back to an original quiescence conceived as the goal of life, or is it also a condition of being in the goal of life? Is religion only moral, or only aesthetic, or both moral and aesthetic? Many religions, in depicting the goal as aesthetic, i.e., and enjoying intuition of intrinsic goodness, idealize complete elimination of evil. Ethical experience, involving problems of choice between good and evil in shaping the future, involves evil; hence ethical experience and aesthetic experience are conceived as antithetical. The logic of such a view of the ethical and the aesthetic implies: “Let the end come quickly.” That is, we should seek to escape from the ethical into the aesthetic as quickly, or as efficiently, as possible. Unfortunately, the way is often long and hard, and those who look for shortcuts may easily deceive themselves. However, the long way may also be the wrong way, for in many religions, the goal may be found along the way, even only in the way. How this is so may be seen from the following six illustrations.
1. Hofus, the stonecutter. An ancient story, which I read as a child, has been unforgettable. It was about Hofus (Hafiz, etc.), a stonecutter who, wearying of his endless task, wished he might be a king, like the one passing by with servants, gorgeous clothing delicious food, and luxurious carriage. Suddenly, a voice spoke out, commanding him to be, and making him, a king. Hofus was happy, but not for long, As the sun beat down upon his company, they wilted and wearied and Hofus himself was miserable. Realizing that the sun was more powerful than he, he wished that he might be the sun. Again the voice spoke out, and Hofus became the sun. As the sun, he was proud of his power, which he shined forth fiercely. But as lakes dried up under the heat of his rays, evaporation produced clouds which hid the sun from the earth, thus demonstrating that a cloud is more powerful than the sun. Angered again, Hofus then wanted to be a cloud. Before he realized what he was doing, the voice spoke again, making Hofus a cloud,. As a cloud, he rained so hard that rivers overflowed and the land was washed away before its torrents, all except one great rock, which resisted all of Hofus’ efforts to dislodge it. Wishing then to be that immovable rock, Hofus became the rock. His pride in his present strength was short-lived, for soon along came a man with a hammer and chisel who started chipping away at his side. Then realizing that the man was more powerful than he, Hofus wished he were that man. Then, becoming a stonecutter again, Hofus was happy. This truncated version of an old story illustrates how one can be happier being what one is than what one would be if one were anything else. One who enjoys one’s present life as being as good as it can be has no need for wanting it to be different. (For a more recent story, see Russell H. Conwell, Acres of Diamonds.)
2. Jesus. Although the teachings of Jesus are too complex to reduce to simple statement, he did often put great emphasis upon appreciating the present, partly by trying to dissuade people from worrying about the future. “Care not for the morrow.” (Matthew 6:34.) “The kingdom of heaven is at hand.” (Matthew 10:7.) “Give us this day our daily bread.” (Matthew 6:11.) His central thesis was that “perfect love casteth out fear” (1 John 4:18), and that the way to the goal of life, the heavenly kingdom, is to replace fear of others and fear of the future by a love which, when embodied in one, is like a rebirth of life and confidence. If one does not embody such love, then one must look forward to the day when one may attain it; one should be moral. But if one already embodies such love, one finds the kingdom of heaven already within one. God is love, and when we embody love we embody God and dwell enjoyably in heaven. Such an experience is aesthetic; and those who do not have it should seek it. “Seek and ye shall find.” (Matthew 7:7.) What will you find? Confidence and present enjoyment. “Consider the lilies of the field, how they grow; they toil not, neither do they spin; and yet I say unto you that even Solomon in all his glory was not arrayed like one of these. Wherefore if God so clothe the grass of the field, which today is, and tomorrow is cast into the oven, shall not he much more clothe you, O ye of little faith?” (Matthew 6:28-30.) “Therefore take no though of the morrow.” (Matthew 6:34.) Although Christian orthodoxy, following Paul and the Patristics, placed heaven in a life after death, Jesus seems much more concerned about the heaven which is “at hand.” For God “is not the God of the dead, but of the living.” (Matthew 22:32.)
3. Gotama. Buddhism, more than any other religion except perhaps Taoism and Confucianism, emphasizes finding the goal in the way, which it calls “The Middle Way.” Other worldly aspects have been retained from earlier Hinduism and added from Chinese folklore, but the central message of Gotama to all who are suffering is to stop wanting what you are not going to get. “Desire for what will not be attained ends in frustration; therefore, to avoid frustration, avoid desiring what will not be attained.” (A.J. Bahm, Philosophy of the Buddha, p. 15.) One who seeks an unattainable goal of life not only will not find it but will have made oneself unhappy in the process. When persons believing in reincarnation quizzed him about a future life, he replied: If you want a next life and there is no next life, you will be frustrated. If you want a next life and there is a next life, you have no problem. If you want no next life and there is a next life, you will be frustrated. If you want no next life and there is no next life, you have no problem. The important thing, for happiness, is not whether there is or is not a next life but whether you are willing to accept it whichever way it comes. This willingness to accept things as they are, and are going to be, is the middle way. If you can find it, and stay in it, then “. . .to whatever place you go, you shall go in comfort; wherever you stand, you shall stand in comfort; wherever you sit, you shall sit in comfort; and wherever you make your bed, you shall lie down in comfort.” (The Book of the Gradual Sayings, Vol. IV, p. 200. Tr. by E.M. Hare, Luzac and Co., London 1955.) Such a life is lived in nirvana; its appreciation of the present as intrinsic value, i.e., of what one gets as just what one wants; is to find the goal of life by living it.
4. Krishna. Regardless of whether the message of the Bhagavad Gita, sacred scripture of the Hindus, was formulated by the man, Krishna, or by the editor, Vyasa, its aim is clear. No matter which of paths (marga or yoga) one takes toward the goal, one not only cannot reach the goal but one cannot make much progress along the path unless one does so with “disinterested interest” (nishkama yoga). Whether one endeavors to work one’s way by sweat and sacrifice (karma yoga), by loving devotion to parents and to deities (bhakti yoga), through study of the scriptures and philosophy (gana yoga), or through bodily self-control, such as breathing, postures, withdrawal of senses, and stilling the mind ( hatha, and raja yoga), the very zeal and anxiety of one’s endeavors prevent one from achievement. For the goal of life, nirvana, consists in blissful enjoyment of quiescent, i.e., desireless, being. Paradoxically, one who desires desirelessness cannot attain it unless one stops desiring. Hence the karma yogin must work for results without interest in rewards. The bhakti yogin must love selflessly without expecting to be loved. The gana yogin must learn that the knowledge he desires is a knowledge that is not knowledge, but a desireless, i.e, objectless and subjectless, awareness. The raja yogin must discipline himself so that he can fully realize that he is no individual self, and concentrate so much that nothing is left but pure concentration. Although the ideal goal is beyond this life, its attainability can be expected only if one already partially attains it in this life. Yogas are both moral and aesthetic. Yoga, as union with the ultimate, is purely aesthetic. But yoga as a path is moral. One who travels a path with complete disinterest has already arrived in ultimacy. The practice of nishkama yoga aims to find the goal in the way. (See my Union With The Ultimate [Patanjali’s Yoga Sutras], 1961.)
5. Lao Tzu. The greatest book in Chinese philosophical history is the Tao Teh King., attributed to Lao Tzu. Its naturalistic doctrine now called “Taoism,” advocates doing what comes naturally. “Whoever acts naturally is nature itself acting.” “All aiming is Nature’s aiming, and is nature’s way of being itself.” (A.J. Bahm, Tao Teh King by Lao Tzu, p. 77, 1958.) “Whoever acts unnaturally comes to an unnatural finish.” “The way to success is this: having achieved your goal, be satisfied not to go further.” “To be in accord with nature is to be achieving the goal of life. But to seek excitement is to invite calamity.” “There is no greater evil than desiring to change others. There is no greater misfortune than desiring to change oneself. . . . Only he who is satisfied with whatever satisfactions his own nature provides for him is truly satisfied.” ( Ibid. pp. 87-88.) He is “as unconcerned as the rolling ocean, without a care to bother him.” (Ibid., pp. 90.) “Therefore the intelligent man accepts what is as it is.” (Ibid., p. 104.) The goal of life is to be found by living life each day without trying to change it. To fail to appreciate such a way as the goal is to miss the goal of life.
[Kwing Hung: wrong!!]
6. Confucius. Whereas Lao Tzu pictured natural living as rural, and urban life as so artificial that it should be avoided, Confucius was a Taoist who regarded living in families, including large families, as also natural. Although noted for emphasizing the principle of reciprocity as naturally necessary to family harmony, he also idealized chih, wisdom, which “consists in actual achievement of contentment and enjoyment of profound confidence.” (Ibid., p. 114. See also my The World’s Living Religions, p. 189.) Chih is spontaneous yea-saying to whatever the situation demands. The attitude of the spontaneous yea-sayer is one of appreciation. One’s spontaneity is so instantaneous that one has no time to doubt. Hence the wise person’s response is more aesthetic than moral. When one’s spontaneity is habitually complete, one transcends morality. Zen, perhaps more obviously to many readers, idealizes such spontaneous yea-saying without being concerned to provide the elaborate set of reasons expounded by Confucius. Zen, a Taoized form of Buddhism, locates the goal of life in the present way perhaps more clearly than any other religion. (See my The World’s Living Religions, pp. 206-221, especially pp. 209-210.)
The goal of religion, then, is aesthetic, regardless of whether it appears attainable only in some life after death or only along the way. Although, when distinguishing between aesthetics and religion, we say that aesthetics is not religion and religion is not aesthetics, still, the religious and the aesthetic, as aspects of experience, interdepend. For, if the aesthetic is intuition of intrinsic good and if the goal of religion is aesthetic, then the religious certainly depends upon, for it partly consists in, the aesthetic. And the aesthetic, which appears in parts of life, is more fully realized when it is experienced as intuitive appreciation of life itself as a whole, i.e., as religious. From an Organicist viewpoint, it seems appropriate to say that a religious experience is more religious when it is more aesthetic, and an aesthetic experience is more aesthetic when it is more religious. Not every aesthetic experience is religious (e.g., one had while viewing artistic advertising design), and not every religious experience is aesthetic (e.g., one had when conscience-stricken about moral shortcomings); but when, dialectically, each involves the other more fully, each becomes more fully itself. One who appreciates life itself as a whole, including all its other appreciations, is more appreciative, i.e, more aesthetic, than one who does not. One who appreciates life itself as a whole, including all its other appreciations, has more fully reached the goal of religion, and hence is more religious, than one who does not. “Final satisfaction” is aesthetic and religious at the same time.
Ethics and Religion. In relating aesthetic experience, as intuition of intrinsic good, with moral experience, as a sense of incompleteness imbued with the feeling that one ought to do something to fill the want, and in relating aesthetic experience, as any appreciated enjoyment, with religious experience, as appreciation of the intrinsic good of life, as a whole, we have already indicated some of the relations between ethical experience and religious experience. There is more to ethical experience than to religious experience, for ethical experience includes multitudes of trivial and intermediate oughts, whereas it is those oughts which pertain to the ultimate goal of life as a whole which constitute part of religion. Some of our ethical experiences are also religious experiences. But also, there is more to religious experience than to ethical experience, because religious experience includes some trans-ethical aesthetics appreciations, when, or to the extent that, one has arrived in and enjoys living in the goal. Some of our religious experiences are also ethical experiences, i.e., those in which we feel an obligation to seek to achieve the goal of life; but some religious experiences are amoral, or fully aesthetic. Religion is complicated in many ways, and we have yet to see, in the following chapter, how ideals of the nature of self and the universe are essential to it as well as the ethical and aesthetic aspects discussed here.
Consider further the relations between ethics and religion by examining the distinction between ethical religion and religious ethics. Religion is ethical whenever it is concerned about obligations. Being ethical is religious whenever it is concerned about the goal of life. We can observe that some religions are more ethical than others in the sense that their doctrines and practices stress attention to the ethical more than to the aesthetic. They are more attentive to ultimate oughts and their achievement, i.e., about bringing the moral to the amoral more quickly and fully, without dwelling upon how much we have already achieved. And we can observe that some ethics, some ethical codes for example, are more religious than others in the sense that they emphasize attention to the goal of life more than to occupational commercial, architectural or other technical oughts.
However, too often we overlook the aspectival character of religion and ethics and the additional values which can come from knowingly experiencing them together. For an experience (and a life) which is obviously both aesthetic and moral is more aesthetic than one which is merely aesthetic; for if life involves both aesthetic and moral aspects, then, when an experience is both, it is more complete, or more of a whole, or more wholesome, than when it lacks the moral, which lack itself may be experienced as a kind of incompleteness. And an experience (and a life) which is obviously both moral and aesthetic is more moral than one which is merely moral; for one who continues looking forward without experiencing some attainment tends to have doubts, which are not only experienced as unaesthetic, even as anti-aesthetic (i.e., as intrinsic evil rather than merely absence of intrinsic good), but also as immoral, or anti-moral, not merely in the sense that one may feel that one ought not to doubt but also in the sense that the justification felt for one’s doubt constitutes a kind of ought-not regarding one’s hope of final attainment. Morality is not self-sustaining; for if one feels one ought to seek a goal without any assurance that the goal is attainable, one soon looses the feeling of oughtness. Aesthetic amorality is not self-sustaining; for needs arise no matter how persistently we ignore them, and hunger, disease, misery or death stalk the unwary, except in climates and societies which succor monks who themselves willingly abandon all interest in moral life. Those who are merely moral, i.e., who are anxious without justified hope, live miserably. Those who are merely aesthetic, i.e., enjoy life without striving, become lazy and destitute. Both tend to become both anti-moralistic and anti-religious. “The grapes are sour to those who cannot reach them.” Pessimism plagues both. Only by being both aesthetic and moral (i.e., religious), or at least somewhat aesthetic and somewhat moral, can one enjoy life at all.
We have not, in using the term “religious” in the foregoing, presumed any particular metaphysical scheme. Instead of beginning with theological presumptions, for example, and then deducting what they imply for aesthetic experience and ethical behavior, we have examined the ethical and the aesthetic first, and will try to draw some implications of our understanding of these for metaphysics, including theology. If the goal of life and of religion is to intuit the intrinsic goods of life, then every scheme for interpreting the nature of the universe must somehow account for how this is possible. Each of the world’s religions has done this, even if in different ways. But those which somehow manage to be both realistic, in the sense that their views are true, and idealistic, in the sense that they seem to warrant hope for goods that have not yet been realized, tend to be better, i.e. both more moral and more aesthetic, than those which demand realism without hope or hope without warrant. Generally speaking, those religions which enable their followers to experience the intrinsic value of life here and now provide warrant for hope. But also those which promise no more than testable experience justifies enable their followers to hope with confidence.
Religion is partly a matter of beliefs, which we will explore in the next chapter, but also partly a matter of attitude. Religion, in part, is a matter of yea-saying, of saying “Yes” to life as it is, for nay-saying is itself unpleasant, or unaesthetic, and results in both anti-moral and anti-aesthetic experience. Now, of course one must say “No” to evil; but there are those who would also say “No” to good. Whoever wants the world to be different than it is and can become is, in effect, saying ‘“No” to the good that is and will become. One thereby forfeits a part of one’s heritage of good. One is unethical in the sense that one chooses to experience evil when one might otherwise be experiencing good. Yea-saying is a way of transforming the ethical into the aesthetic, and so may be a part of what one most wants to do. If being more religious means being both more moral and more aesthetic relative to the intrinsic good of life as a whole, then being more religious may be a most important part of what one most wants to be.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
Final ethics is concerned with satisfaction in the sense of making life complete. Such satisfaction is aesthetically complete when life itself as a whole is experienced as being an intrinsic good, or as being an end-in-itself. Such satisfaction is cosmically complete when life is experienced as having its fullest, i.e., widest deepest and most inclusive, extent in the universe. The purpose of the present chapter is to explore the problem of how little or how much a life is involved with the rest of the universe. This is an ethical problem because you will not know what you ought to do in order to achieve the goal of your life unless you understand the nature of your life and the universe in which it exists. If you have any choice in the matter, and surely most readers do have some such choice, you will seek to understand more about the nature of both yourself and the universe so that you may then improve yourself in whatever ways you can, both within yourself and in your relations to the rest of the universe. You will want to ascertain how far you extend into the cosmos, both space-wise and time-wise and to discover the levels, if any, of identification and differentiation of yourself with otherness. How you will choose among many options will vary with your culture, with your education, and with the amount of dissatisfaction you feel with the picture preferred by most of your fellows. Regardless of what intellectual scheme you follow, you will feel that your efforts to understand are inadequate until both your life as a whole and the universe as a whole are taken into account. Such an effort is religious in the sense that it is concerned both with the goal of your life as a whole and its place in the universe as a whole. And your endeavor is experienced as ethical to the extent that you are searching for some good that you do not yet have. Each person, at some time or other, doubtless faces the question of how much time and effort one ought to spend in thinking things through, or in working out a philosophy of life by one’s own efforts. Some are so busy making a living, or enjoying sports, or caring for urgent miseries, that they do not have time for serious reflection. Some believe that others have already done the job adequately, or at least better than they can, so willingly accept instruction by others. Some feel that they are incapable of understanding the nature of ultimate reality, and some of these believe that it is beyond the wit of any person to do so. Appeal is made here to those who believe that persons can succeed or at least think that “it is better to have tried and failed than never to have tried at all”. The history of people’s efforts to understand, despite so many obvious mistakes, gives evidence of progress in insight. Now, with so many previous philosophies from all of the world’s civilizations to draw upon, opportunities for achievement are greater than ever before. Although the danger remains that the great ideas in the great books may be also great delusions, enough criticism of each is also available to enable cautious thinkers to evade many traditional types of mistakes. Enough variety is also available to provide bases for generalizations about which kinds of metaphysical hypotheses are both most satisfactory and at the same time most in accord with the facts. Some thinkers, enamored by the elegance of an intellectual scheme, deduce their theories of value, beauty and morality from previously decided upon metaphysical presuppositions. But the importance of axiology, aesthetics and ethics in shaping a philosophy of life is so great that it should not be left to a subordinate position. It is just as reasonable to found a philosophy of life upon the aesthetic and the ethical as upon the metaphysical, if one feels that one has to choose between them. The Organicist view is that neither metaphysical, epistemological or axiological (including aesthetic and ethical) theories are adequate until each has taken full account of the others. The three are interdependent. Neglect of the metaphysical in this volume is an inadequacy, and one that cannot be ignored entirely in exploring religion as the field of final ethics. But our attention here will be focused upon the problem: which conceptions of the universe are preferable, i.e., aesthetically and ethically preferable? This problem involves us in the question: Are there any principles for choosing among alternative metaphysical interpretations? Involved in this is the question: Are there any principles for choosing among religions?
More Principles for Choosing. In attempting to think things through about the nature of the universe and what kind of belief one ought to hold, one may wonder whether there are any principles which will help one to decide which of two or more alternative conceptions one ought to prefer? Of course, one ought to prefer a view which is true, or truest; and we shall discuss the aesthetic and moral reasons for such a preference rather than merely epistemological reasons, as is usually done. First, let us consider as proposals some principles which appear to follow immediately from the problems discussed in the previous chapter.
1. Other things being equal, when faced with the problem of choosing between conceiving a universe in which the goal of life is experienced as aesthetic (i.e., as intuiting life itself as having intrinsic good) and conceiving a universe in which no such goal is experienced, one ought always to choose the former.
2. Other things being equal, when faced with the problem of choosing between conceiving a universe in which the goal of life involves enjoying a greater and one in which it involves enjoying a lesser amount (quantity, quality, intensity), of intrinsic good, one ought always to choose the former.
3. Other things being equal, when faced with the problem of choosing between conceiving a universe in which the goal of life requires less and one in which it requires more ethical endeavor, one ought always to choose the former.
The foregoing principles seem to be intuitively obvious, and, if so, should continue to appear obvious when tested by practice. They seem obvious quite apart from dependence upon any particular type of metaphysical system, except of course one which does not exclude intrinsic value, its enjoyment, the existence of life, its goal, and moral endeavor. Before turning to implications of the foregoing for metaphysical aspects of religion as final ethics, let us examine some implications for epistemological aspects.
Epistemology is concerned with the nature of knowledge, truth and certainty and their opposites, ignorance, falsity, and doubt. Knowledge, truth and certainty are not, by definition, necessarily either intrinsic or instrumental goods. However, when one wants to know, wants to have true knowledge, wants to have certainty, then they do become instrumental goods and the experiences in which one enjoys believing that one has desired knowledge, desired truth, and desired certainty are experienced as intrinsic goods. Focusing attention upon truth, let us recall Aristotle’s statement: “To say of what is that it is not, or of what is not that it is, is false, while to say of what is that it is and of what is not that it is not, is true.” (The Works of Aristotle, Vol. VIII, Metaphysics, tr. by W.D. Ross, Second Edition, p. 1011b. See also, “The Generic Theory of Truth,” The Personalist, Vol. XXXVIII, Autumn, 1947, pp. 370-375, and “The Organicist Theory of Truth,” The Southwestern Journal of Philosophy, Vol. VI, Fall, 1975, pp. 197-201.) Except for pre-reflective and other unreflective experiences, the problem of truth is always present, implicitly if not explicitly, in experience. It is part of the nature of critical or reflective knowing to want to know the truth, or to have true rather than false knowledge. Once the problem of error has arisen, the appearance of error is experienced as evil, either, or both, as intrinsic evil and as instrumental evil. The annoyance felt while the appearance of error is present constitutes an experienced intrinsic evil. Hence, since, ethically, one seeks to avoid what is evil as well as to attain what is good, one owes it to oneself to try to eliminate such apparent error. Thus, in choosing among alternative views of the nature of the universe, part of what one most wants is a view which is true, or, if complete truth is regarded as impossible, then a view which seems truest.
4. Other things being equal, when faced with the problem of choosing between two world views, (i.e., conceptions of the nature of life and the universe) one of which appears to be true and one of which appears to be false, one ought always to choose the former.
5. Other things being equal, when faced with the problem of choosing between two world views, one of which appears to be more true and one of which appears to be less true, one ought always to choose the former.
The two foregoing principles have implications for methods of knowing, for if some ways of knowing are better than others in the sense that they are more likely to yield true, or truer, views, then, ethically, one ought to seek to use those methods.
6. Other things being equal, when faced with the problem of choosing between employing a method which is more likely and a method which is less likely to result in a true view of life and the universe, one ought always to choose the former.
This principle has implications for deciding upon particular methods, such as appeal to authority, tradition, public opinion, revelation, prejudice, wishful thinking, deductive, inductive, pragmatic, and scientific methods. We shall not explore these here. But surely it is clear that, if some ways of learning, knowing, and discovering the truth are better than others, then one ought, ethically, to be concerned about discovering and using the best way.
Interinvolved with the problem of truth is the problem of certainty or, as some prefer to think of it, the problem of eliminating doubt. “Doubt is an uneasy and dissatisfied state from which we struggle to free ourselves and to pass into the state of belief.” (Charles S. Pierce, “The Fixation of Belief,” Popular Science Monthly, Vol. 12, November, 1877, pp. 1-15.) Since the feeling of uncertainty is experienced as an evil, one ought to seek to remove it. That is, one ought to seek certainty as a part of one’s quest for security. One who doubts thereby experiences at least one moral ought, namely, the feeling that one ought to remove one’s doubt if possible. When such a doubt is removed and followed by a feeling of belief, such a feeling is experienced as aesthetic. When one has had doubts about the worthwhileness of one’s life or about the prospects of achieving the goal of life and then arrives at a feeling of assurance that one’s life is worthwhile or that one will achieve the goal, one experiences aesthetic enjoyment of a religious sort. Hence, feelings of assurance, of certainty, are preferable to feelings of doubt.
7. Other things being equal, when faced with the problem of choosing between a conception of life and the universe of which one feels assured and one of which one feels unsure, one ought always to choose the former.
Although the feeling of assurance is itself experienced as an aesthetic good, the presence of evidence of falsity or of dubiety constitutes a part of the “other things” which are not “equal.” Hence, when it is true that the evidence for a belief is lacking or insufficient or that there is evidence against the belief, then one ought to doubt. When one continues to believe what one ought to doubt, one recognizes oneself as dishonest; and again suffers an unaesthetic experience. Hence, the assurance one seeks is not a false assurance but a genuine assurance. One may be able to feel assured to some extent only if one also maintains doubt to a certain extent, in the face of a given set of data.
Another principle has to do with adequacy. In trying to understand life and the universe, one seeks to understand fully, or as fully as possible, not merely some one part of a few parts, but the whole. That is, one can feel one is achieving final satisfaction only if one believes that one has achieved the most adequate view available to one. One’s conception of adequacy itself is likely to include certain dimensions, such as length (of time), breadth (of inclusiveness, in space and complexity), and depth (of penetration). The more metaphysical issues that one becomes acquainted with, the more complicated, and perhaps more difficult to achieve, will one’s notion of adequacy become. The more specialized branches of learning with which one becomes familiar, the more intricate will one’s conception of his task become. For one who is aware of physics and astronomy, chemistry and biology, geology and economics, sociology and psychology, logic and philosophy of language, aesthetics and ethics, etc., will require some conception which incorporates all of them before one regards it as adequate. If this is so, then it seems natural to formulate a principle of adequacy as necessary for the kind of interpretation of experience felt needed by religion, or final ethics.
8. Other things being equal, when faced with the problem of choosing between a more adequate and a less adequate conception of life and the universe, one ought always to choose the former.
Regarding the goal of life, some picture it as beyond life rather than within life, some believe it to be forever unachievable and something only to be sought for, some view it as achievable only once rather than repeatable, and some think of it as temporally finite rather than everlasting. Is it possible to formulate, i.e., discover, principles for deciding between such alternatives? The following principles (9-16) are proposed tentatively for critical examination.
9. Other things being equal, when faced with the problem of choosing between two world views, in one of which the goal of life is viewed as achievable and one in which it is not, one ought always to choose the former. For if the goal is unachievable, then all moral endeavor to achieve such a goal is futile. If one proposes that one ought to be moral, even though the goal of life is unachievable, just so that one can stay alive, is one not implying that such staying alive is somehow inherently worthwhile and, hence, is the goal of life? If the issue of whether the goal of life can be achieved by all or by only some, then ought one not prefer the former? For example, if, when other things are equal, one is comparing a view in which some will achieve the goal of life, e.g., Heaven, and others will not achieve it, but will be condemned to Hell, as in orthodox Christianity, and a view in which all will achieve the goal of life, e.g., the Pure Land, as in Shin Buddhism, is not the latter better in the sense that more people will attain the goal? Although, from the viewpoint of one who knows one will reach the goal (e.g., a Calvinist who knows one is elect), the fate of those who will not may not interest one, if one also identifies oneself with the universe in such a way that one feels that his universe is better if more people achieve the goal than do not, one has an aesthetic reason for wanting all to reach the goal. Hence consider the following:
10. Other things being equal, when faced with the problem of choosing between two world views, one in which all will achieve the goal and one in which only some will achieve the goal, one ought always to prefer the former. This principle is an exemplification of a theory cited earlier, pertaining to the greatest good for the greatest number. Those who hold that one ought to seek the greatest good for the greatest number should, by implication, extend their idea of the greatest number to the greatest number of persons in the universe, if, perchance, they formulated it first relative to some particular group or groups. This raises a further problem relevant to the question of population explosion. If each person is or has intrinsic good and thus in some sense does achieve the goal in life by enjoying whatever intrinsic good one is or has, then, other things being equal, would not a universe with more rather than fewer people be regarded as better? Hence, we propose the following principle:
11. Other things being equal, when faced with the problem of choosing between two world views in which all achieve the goal of life, in one of which there are fewer persons and in one of which there are more persons, one ought always to choose the latter. The reason why fears about population rightly cause some to advocate population restriction methods through birth control, for example, is that they believe that the food supply and other resources are limited and that unless some limitation is placed upon the size of the world’s population, many of those who are born will suffer greatly, i.e., so that their lives will endure more intrinsic evil than enjoy intrinsic good. That is, limitations of resources constitute factors among the “other things” which are not equal.
12. Other things being equal, when faced with the problem of choosing between two world views, in one of which the goal of life is viewed as enjoyed everlastingly and in one of which it is viewed as enjoyed for only a limited period of time, one ought always to choose the former. This principle, if accepted, is not, in itself an argument for belief in everlasting life, for among the “other things” which are not equal there may be facts which imply that the belief is untrue. If so, then the principle previously stated regarding choosing a true rather than an untrue view may take precedence. On the other hand, where the evidence appears to be clearly ambiguous, then, as we shall see below in considering principles regarding obligations relative to wishful thinking, one may appear to be warranted in believing in an everlasting life, partly on the basis of this principle.
13. Other things being equal, when faced with the problem of choosing between two world views in one of which the goal of life can be fully achieved only within life and in the other of which the goal of life can be fully achieved only beyond life, one ought always to choose the former. For, given equality of achievement, and assuming that assurance of achievement is greater when it can be and is achieved within life than when it cannot be achieved within life, the assurance of such achievement as compared with doubt about achievement only in the future has preferable aesthetic qualities, which have already been mentioned as Principle 7, above. If the assurance were, somehow, exactly equal, then there would be no warrant for preference on this basis.
14. Other things being equal, when faced with the problem of choosing between two world views both of which picture achievement of the goals for all persons but only while living on earth in a body, in one of which each person has only one life and in the other of which each person has more than one life, one ought always to choose the latter. For if one life in which the goal of life is actually achieved is good, two such lives are better, other things being equal. Furthermore:
15. Other things being equal, when faced with the problem of choosing between two world views both of which picture achievement of the goal of life for all persons but only while living on earth in a body, in one of which each person has fewer such lives and in one of which each person has more such lives, one ought always to choose the latter.
16. Other things being equal, when faced with the problem of choosing between three world views, in one of which the goal of life is achieved, for all persons, only within life, in one of which the goal of life is achieved, for all persons, only beyond life, and in one of which the goal of life is achieved, for all persons, both within life and beyond life, one ought always to choose the latter.
Turning next to the problem of wishful thinking, we face the issue of whether or not wishful thinking is ever justified relative to views about the nature of life and the universe. On the one hand, since thinking which is recognized as wishful involves an element of doubt which is unaesthetic, it should be avoided if possible. We have already stated, in Principles 4-8, that a true or truer, or more likely true, or more assured, or more adequate view is preferable to its opposite. On the other hand, as long as persons are not omniscient, room for doubt remains, and especially when we know that there is so much that we do not know, large areas of doubt are not only warranted but mandatory. Paradoxically, persons both want to remain “objective,” that is, believe only what is warranted, which means remaining in doubt about what is not warranted, and want to enjoy the aesthetic experience of having all doubts removed, if possible. This latter want is sometimes called “faith.” Now I do not propose here to resolve this paradox, regarding which it may be possible to formulate a principle, but only to explore possible principles relative to how far wishful thinking may be justified. For, although one may seek to be completely realistic in one’s world view, one is likely to find areas in which realism is irrelevant or in which assurance about such realism remains unwarranted. To the extent that knowledge is impossible, the wildest wishing is possible. In this area, wishful thinking may be justified.
Insofar as wishful thinking is justified, one is still morally obligated in choosing regarding world views. That is, one ought always to choose what is best. This means that, where wishful thinking is justified, one ought always to wish for the best. We do not here suggest how one’s conception of what is best will shape itself, or how many different such conceptions a person may have at different times. But, generally speaking, statement of a principle seems appropriate.
17. Other things being equal, when wishful thinking is warranted, one ought always wish for the best. Or, other things being equal, when wishful thinking is justified and one is faced with the problem of choosing between two world views, in one of which what one wishes for is better than what one wishes for in the other, one ought always to choose the former. This principle has implications for theology, for example. Without here considering areas in which theological speculations or conclusions are justified by realistic evidence, and limiting our consideration to those areas where wishful thinking is justified in theology, one ought to wish for a god, or gods, or a condition without gods, which appears to be better or, of course, the best. Now, if one can survey varieties of conceptions of the nature of god and find, relative to areas where wishful thinking is justified, that some conceptions of god are better than others, whether better for persons, or better for such a god, or better for both, then one is thereby obligated to prefer the better, or best, conception. The following statement is a redundant subvariety of the foregoing principle: Other things being equal, when wishful thinking is justified relative to various conceptions of the nature of god, or gods, or conditions without gods, one ought always to choose, i.e., to wish for, the best.
Although, surely, more principles can be stated regarding obligations for choosing among alternatives relative to world views, i.e., to religion and final ethics involving conceptions of the nature of life and the universe, enough have been stated to illustrate, in an introductory way, the kinds of obligations persons may have about the cosmic aspects of their experiences. Further such principles are implicit in the following treatment of levels of identification of self with other aspects of the universe.
Cosmic Levels and Religious Obligations. Although we have deliberately refrained from elaborating a specific metaphysical system here, and have aimed at pointing out its implications of ethics, as we understand it, for any metaphysical scheme, certain minimal presuppositions have been made. We are assuming that selves exist, that some knowledge of self, the universe, including other selves, is possible, that persons and the universe persist at least for some time, and that there appears to be levels of complexity in the organization of what exists. In Chapter II, “Self as Physical,’ we proposed acceptance of the conclusions of contemporary sciences regarding the nature of existence as including subatomic particles, atoms, molecules, the earth, the solar system, galaxies, the Milky Way, and of cells, organs, bodies, persons, and groups as exemplifying different kinds or levels of existence. No final picture of the nature of self or the universe is needed in order to draw some conclusions about interrelations between a self and such levels as it does know. Doubtless the sciences, including metaphysics, will have a long history of development ahead of them, and it would be foolish to state conclusions about ethics which would in any way preclude such development. But it is possible to outline certain principles regarding ethical aspects of conceptions of the relations of each self to such levels as are known and, even, to others yet unknown insofar as they will, when known, be like those now known.
We have seen, in Chapters III and IV, how a person may vary in the extent to which one feels identified with one’s body or parts of it, with one’s mother, with one’s family, with one’s possessions, with one’s community, etc. Part of the problem of evil, with which it is the business of ethics and religion to deal, has to do with fear of whatever is inimical to self. The more narrowly a person conceives oneself, the more there appears to be outside of one to endanger one. The more broadly one conceives oneself, the less there appears to be outside of one to cause one to fear. To the extent that this is so, and to the extent that a person owes oneself the duty of reducing unnecessary fear, one ought to conceive oneself more widely. That is, if, by conceiving oneself more widely, one thereby reduces fear, and thus evil, that is a part of what one ought to do, other things being equal. For example, when a person conceives oneself as a member of a race, or of a nation, rather than of mankind, one may have reason to fear people of all other races of all other nations. But if one considers oneself a member of mankind, then people of all races and all nations are also members of the group with which one feels identified. Not all of the aspects of the problem of evil are thereby solved, but some of them may be, namely those resulting from fear of members of outgroups. To the extent that expansion of conception of self to include other person, groups, living beings or the non-living universe, helps to free oneself from needless fear, one owes it to oneself to do so. To the extent that such an obligation has a bearing upon one’s conception of the nature of self and of the universe, one ought to conceive oneself as widely as one can. If there are several levels of complexity with which one is acquainted, then a person may have a duty to consider, at least, with how many of them it is in one’s interest to feel identified. One will, of course, be conditioned by what one believes to be the truth about the nature of oneself, the universe and levels. And one may need to fluctuate in one’s conceptions, and feeling of identification, at different times. Some mothers, for example, are, of necessity, so completely occupied with family matters that they have little time or inclination to enjoy their membership in the human race. Since this is so, some persons deliberately set certain times for giving attention to their various obligations. Many religious sects establish specific days, such as Sunday for Christians, as desirable time for devoting attention to cosmic interests. Some add other days, or certain times of every day; Moslems, for example, pray five times each day. Meditative prayer includes awareness of identification of self with larger aspects of the universe; with yogins, for example, its aim is to eliminate the “veils of ignorance” which prevent one from awareness of complete identity with ultimate reality. When prayer is conceived in this way, it appears that a person has an obligation to pray, i.e., to become aware of one’s larger goods. Such prayer need not be spoken and does not ask for anything; it is prayer of fuller self-realization. One who fails to achieve the fullest may, of course, express a wish for such achievement as a way of partial recognition of its possible existence and good. Persons who attach the word “prayer” to formalistic rituals, superstitious sacrifices, or petty begging, will want to use some other word. What is at stake is a person’s final satisfaction, the goal of one’s life conceived in terms of expansion to its cosmic fullness, or enjoyment of the whole of life by including in it as much as one can of the whole of his universe.
Although the foregoing discussion has, in effect, urged experimenting with conceiving one’s self more broadly so that one has less to fear, it is also quite possible to experiment in conceiving one’s self more narrowly for the same purpose Whereas Advaita Vedanta illustrates the foregoing experiment carried to a logical extreme, one may also study the Sankhya-Yoga scheme in which the genuine self is conceived as a pure awareness which has become entangled in the world. Yogic practices are then designed to eliminate such entanglement. When successful, a self destroys all self-awareness as well as awareness of anything else in the universe in order to enjoy kaivalya, perfectly isolated bliss. Organicism favors continuing experimentation with many different such views proposed by others until one finds a view which seems most suited to one’s own preferences. But awareness of opportunities for such experimentation is recommended. Some will prefer not to venture far from their inherited views, and other will refuse to cease venturing. Both such types of persons may be seeking and achieving cosmic satisfaction, each in a different way.
The foregoing issue of whether to seek the goal of life through conceiving one’s self, and one’s self-interest, more inclusively or more exclusively may be illustrated relative to three topics; national governments versus world government, racial segregation versus intermarriage, sectarian religions versus world religion. Those who would conceive themselves more inclusively consequently ought to favor the emergence of world government, racial intermarriage, and world religion, assuming that the methods for bringing these about would be peaceful rather than destructive. However, those who, for whatever reason, are so afraid of extra entanglements that they idealize isolation and exclusiveness in attempting to allay their fears will tend toward opposing extremes. The issues become not one of national versus world government but of government versus no government, as with anarchists, not one of intermarriage versus racial segregation but of association versus disassociation, as with Lao Tzu’s “Shun Society,” and not one of organized religions versus a world religion but one of religious organizations versus private opinion and practice, as with solipsists or with A.N. Whitehead when he says: “Religion is what one does in his own solitariness.”
Organicism sees human nature as multi-aspected, wanting both government and freedom from government, both association and self-sufficiency, both religious fellowship and aloofness. However, just as people are partly ambidextrous and partly right-handed or left-handed, so they tend in one of the above directions more than the other, in shaping their personalities and in depicting their life ideals. Those tending toward greater inclusiveness and believing that the ultimate goods of their lives can be achieved in terms of some expansive cosmic scheme will find their primary religious obligation simplified therein. Those disposed to withdrawal and seclusion generate religious ideals which obligate them to retirement, even if not estrangement. But just as a right-handed person wishes one were more ambidextrous, so there are times when those who prefer either a more expansive personality or a more purely private soul may wish to enjoy endoubled richness though pursuing both directions, sometimes successively but also, when possible, both at the same time. That is, one may find privacy in a church, individuality in marriage, and indifference to government even in legislative halls. In megalopolis, one has need of both kinds of ideals, for when one must associate, the need for expanding one’s feeling of identity with many levels and kinds of groups, variably, becomes increasingly something presented to one as a part of the status of things in which one’s goal of life is to be realized. But a person retains integrity also by realizing that there is something more to one than one’s many facets, and that one owes oneself the duty of enjoying that something more which cannot be dissected into multiplicities of parts. Some people feel very lonely even in crowds. Some people feel very much a part of a swarming city, an expansive cosmos, an a developing civilization, while alone. Although people can live happily without being ambidextrous and without having both social and solitary tendencies, persons who do have both seem to live a fuller life, so to speak, than those who do not. Hence, in designing a goal for living, one may wish to adopt “bothism.” If so, then the ideals inherent therein will imply obligations to seek both. Then, one will feel that one’s religion requires one to be both broader and narrower, and often both at the same time in different ways.
Speaking in a theological language, we may say that one will then sometimes feel identified with God, sometimes opposed to God, and sometimes to feel alone as a god. Anyone who holds any of these views exclusively is likely to encounter typical troubles. But one who fails to enjoy all of these is somewhat lacking in religious dexterity. For those whose experiences with theistic religion have been unhappy, a non-theological language may be preferred. A nature-lover may then feel at one with Nature, yet at times feel opposed to Nature, and even regard oneself as a unique epitome of Nature. And, since both theism and atheism are cosmic options, a person whose outlook has remained exclusively either one or the other may also be regarded as less dexterous religiously than one who has understood, or concurrently does understand, how to appreciate the virtues of both.
Religion and Ethics. Religious beliefs about the goal of life, including conceptions about the aesthetic nature of that goal and about the cosmic setting which makes its achievement possible, generate the oughts which constitute final ethics. The two aspectival ingredients of such beliefs, aesthetic completeness and cosmic completeness, supplement each other, for one can feel one’s achievement as aesthetically complete in terms of some conception of the cosmos only if one also feels that such a conception is itself as complete as it can be. To the extent that it cannot be as complete as one might wish, for one does not expect one’s wish for omniscience to be fulfilled, Gotama’s advice needs heeding: Avoid desiring to know more than you can know, not merely about daily affairs but about the nature of self and the universe. To desire more than one can know about the cosmos is to be frustrated, or to suffer unaesthetic experience and to fail to enjoy the goal of life. Hence, final ethics includes also an attitude of willingness to accept not only the universe as it is, but also one’s ignorance for what it is; thereby one may transform aesthetic evil due to feeling that one’s conception is inadequate into aesthetic good by assenting to the knowledge one has as completely all that is in store for one. Final ethics entails religious yea-saying to the goal. When life incudes ineradicable evil, one ought to say yes to it also, not as evil, but as ineradicable The spirit of final ethics may be summed up in a theistic prayer: “God grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change; the courage to change the things I can; and the wisdom to know the difference.”
Summary of More Principles for Choosing. Other things being equal; when choosing between world views:
-720 1. Choose one depicting experiencing the goal of life as aesthetic (i.e., as intuiting life as intrinsic good) in preference to one which does not.
-720 2. Choose one depicting the goal as enjoying more in preference to less intrinsic value.
-720 3. Choose one requiring less moral endeavor to reach the goal in preference to one requiring more.
-720 4. Choose one which appears to be true in preference to one which appears to be false.
-720 5. Choose one which appears to be more true in preference to one which appears to less true.
-720 6. When choosing between methods for ascertaining a world view, choose one which appears more likely to result in a true view in preference to one which appears less likely to so result.
-720 7. Choose one about which one feels assured in preference to one about which one does not.
-720 8. Choose one which appears more adequate in preference to one which appears less adequate.
-720 9. Choose one in which the goal of life appears achievable to one in which it does not.
-720 10. Choose one in which all will achieve the goal in preference to one in which only some will do so.
-720 11. When all will achieve the goal, then choose one in which there are more persons in preference to one in which there are fewer persons.
-720 12. Choose one in which enjoyment of the goal is everlasting to one in which it is not.
-720 13. Choose one in which the goal can be fully achieved only within life in preference to one in which it can be fully achieved only beyond life.
-720 14. When all will achieve the goal only while living in a body on earth, choose one in which each person will have more such lives in preference to one in which each will have only one life.
-720 15. When all will achieve the goal only while living in a body on earth, choose one in which each person will have more such lives in preference to one in which each will have fewer lives.
-720 16. When all will achieve the goal, choose one in which the goal is achieved twice, once within life and once beyond life, in preference to one in which it is achieved only once.
-720 17. When wishful thinking is warranted, choose one in which what one wishes for is better in preference to one in which what one wishes for is not better.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
This final chapter, summing up both Part III and the whole volume, first shows both how various aspects of aesthetic and cosmic satisfaction interdepend in final ethics and how various aspects of individual and social ethics interdepend with final ethics. Then it summarizes even more succinctly by presenting, so far as this volume is concerned, a final definition of ethics.
Satisfaction As Organic. Not only do the aesthetic and cosmic aspects of religious experience supplement each other in a general way, as was pointed out in concluding the previous chapter, but the polarities within each interdepend in great detail. We omit these details but review examples of ways in which they interdepend.
Consider first the aesthetic aspect. In discussing the aesthetic, as intuition of intrinsic value, we noted interdependence of intrinsic and instrumental values, and of the aesthetic as experiencing completeness and of the moral as experiencing incompleteness or a need for something more, and of ethics and religion. Here we should note additionally that such a discussion presupposed interdependence of ways in which a self is or has value (See Chapter VI), and in which a group may be regarded as being or having value (See Chapter XXI) with ways in which the cosmos, including selves and groups, may be or have value (See Chapter XXXIV). Belief that the goal of life to be found and experienced, whether narrowly or expansively, in the universe depends upon there being a self which is or has intrinsic goods which participate in and thus contribute to those intrinsic goods in terms of which the goal of life as a whole is experienced. All such intrinsic values, including those attributed to one’s groups, may so participate. So long as one feels that one has not reached life’s goal, one’s various aesthetic experiences are infected with morality in a way which connotes a lack of fullness which can be achieved only in those experiences we have called “religious,” i.e., in which one’s life as a whole, including its interrelations with the rest of the universe as a whole, is enjoyed aesthetically. Thus each particular experience of intrinsic good in ordinary life tends to retain yearning for something more which only an experience intuiting the intrinsic good of life as a whole can terminate fully or finally.
In contrasting the aesthetic and the moral aspects of experience, we might have reviewed multiplicities of ethical polarities, some of which were discussed in Parts I and II. For example, self-improvement vs. unimprovability (Chapter VII), self as agent or as patient, self as free or unfree, self as controlled by self or by others, self as owner and as owned, self as just or gracious, self as conscientious or without conscience, and self as intelligent or unintelligent. All illustrate moral polarities, as do social improvements, social unimprovability, etc.
Questions about the principle of reciprocity and its workability between individuals (Chapter V) and between groups (Chapter XX) may be extended to relations between a self and his universe. Awareness of polar relationships between self and the universe may take many forms. For example, some seem to believe: “the world owes me a living.” Others feel they should earn their way or even leave the world a better place to live in when they die than it was when they were born. To the extent that one feels one has rights just because one has been born in a universe, one also tends to feel that, to the extent that the principle of reciprocity works, one has duties to the universe also. This tendency begets questions, ideas and often ideals about the universe itself being moral. Some who personify the universe as God interpret religious sacrifice as an act of reciprocating gifts, including the gift of life itself, or if wanting more, then of giving to God so that God will reciprocate beneficially. For such persons, additional questions about the moral nature of the universe, or of God, become significant; and they face the same set of questions, or polarities, all over again in another dimension: Is God improvable or unimprovable (perfect)? Is God agent or patient? Is God free or unfree? Is God sovereign or controlled by others? Is God owned or owner? Is God just or gracious? Is God conscientious or without conscience? Is God intelligent or unintelligent? Those who do not personify the cosmos may still face similar questions about the impersonal universe. All these are examples of moral polarities which were involved, even if not explained, in our assertion that the aesthetic and the moral interdepend.
Consider next cosmic aspects. We explored space-wise levels of expansion and contraction of self-conceptions, e.g., whether life is merely temporal or everlasting, existing in only one body or reincarnated in many. In order to be consistent, we should have explored interests in conceiving self as temporally contracted; some people believe they exist only at the present moment, not over a lifetime, thus withdrawing themselves time-wise even as some withdraw themselves spacewise to being only within their body or in some part of it. There is some aesthetic and religious merit in the view that a self may complete itself in a moment. One who has no care for the morrow, not even caring whether the care-not-for-the-morrow philosophy is true, experiences the goal of life as completely attained in that moment. With Omar Khayyam, one “Takes the cash and lets the credit go.” Time-wise and space-wise conceptions of self have bearing upon the extents to which, and way in which, a self experiences both aspects of the moral-amoral polarity. One may, contractedly, enjoy an amoral moment aesthetically and thereby feel the fullness of life. One may, expansively, identify oneself with the universe, as in Advaita Vedanta and enjoy oneself as identical with cosmic amorality. On the other hand, not only is a purely aesthetic interpretation of life, whether contractedly or expandedly, inadequate because unrealistic, but there is a fundamental sense in which a life, and universe, conceived as both moral and aesthetic, are richer when these are conceived as merely either one or the other alone. The Organicist view is that a life which conceives itself and the universe and the interdependencies between them in terms of multidimensions of polarities is richer than one which does not. Then religious endeavor entails multidimensional moral efforts; but the fullness of life is conceived as including multiplicities, even multidimensions, of goods which organically interdepend in such a way that final satisfaction involves both moral and amoral aspects of the ways in which all other dimensions are experienced both as moral and amoral.
We cannot review here all of the metaphysical polarities that seem to be involved in the nature of existence. (See my Metaphysics: an Introduction, 1974, and my The Philosopher’s World Model, Chapter 4, 1979.) But they too, according to the Organicist view, interdepend in constituting those cosmic aspects of experience which interdepend with the aesthetic aspects of experience to complete experience as religious. Organic enjoyment, religiously experienced, may involve not merely feelings of pleasantness, enthusiasm, satisfaction and contentment intermingled or fused but also enjoyment of experiencing interdependent mingling and fusion of multidimensions of polarities, both morally and amorally, through such feelings. Paradox, which we have not emphasized in this volume, pervades experience in subtle as well as in obvious ways, and to the extent that paradox, or multi-paradox, persists as something that cannot be eradicated from a final view of life in the universe, one’s religious experience will remain too much moral and insufficiently aesthetic if one fails to say “Yes” to such paradox.
Final Definition of Ethics. This volume opened with a “beginning definition” of ethics: “Ethics is concerned with what is good and how to get it” or what one ought to do in order to obtain it. In Chapter I, this definition was elaborated to include conditional and categorical oughts, principles and codes, theory and practice, and individual and social aspects of goodness and oughtness. The nature of ethics was explored further through the remaining thirty-three chapters of the volume, indicating the roles of intention, free will, self-control, ownership, justice, conscience and intelligence, for example, in the ethical nature of a self, of a group, and of the universe. Our conclusion that ethics, in being concerned also with what is good in life as a whole, becomes identical with religions having both aesthetic and cosmic aspects, leaves open many questions about the nature of such whole. Let us mention only two of the kinds of problems involved in framing a final definition, one pertaining to ethical theory and one to ethical practice.
In any proposed final definition of ethical theory, we must not only try to be inclusive in the sense of incorporating individual, social and cosmic ethics, but also in the sense that there has been an historical development of ethical theories, in both Asian and Western civilizations, which has not yet come to its end. Our final definition of ethical theory surely must intend to be saying that there is more to ethical theory, past, present and future, than one does fully understand. So, unless mankind should terminate immediately in some cosmic catastrophe, our final definition of ethical theory should include provision for an open future.
In my proposed final definition of ethical practice, likewise, we must leave the future open for new kinds of ethical problems as well as newer mores and codes of ethical behavior. Ethics, as practice, includes the problems and responses of infants and children, the uncertainties and convictions of youth, of the perplexities of sexual attractions, newly married couples, and parents, and the adjustment problems of maturity, old age, and facing death, as well as those involved in employer-employee, government-citizen, teacher-pupil, and interracial and intercultural situations. Just as the types of ethical problems shift somewhat with stages in the life of each individual, and in the cultural, political and economic development of political groups, so an adequate conception of the nature of ethical practice must include not only these but recognize the probability that new problems and forms of practice will emerge as the average life-span of the population becomes longer and the structure and complexity of world-society becomes larger.
What, then, is ethics? It is every person’s wondering about all the ways of enjoying and of attaining goods and avoiding evils. It consist in all of the ways that people use when they feel they ought to seek good and avoid evil. It consists in the advice one gives oneself and others, and which others give to one, either personally or through established mores and laws, and one’s response in accepting or rejecting such advice. Rebellion and revolution are ethical just as attempts to maintain law and order are ethical. Cultural lag and cultural revision and creation are ethical. Ethics is life-wide and life-long, in the life of each individual and in the life of the human race. The ethical consists, as we have so often said, in what one most wants to do when one really understands one’s own nature and its needs. Our final definition consists in saying that ethics consists in all of what one really most wants to do. The contribution of the present volume has been to aid in achievement of a broad as well as complicated conception of what is good, i.e., individual, social and cosmic, and of an open mind regarding how any variables may have to be taken into consideration before deciding, in any particular situation, what is right.
============================================================