ON THE RELATION BETWEEN SOCIOLOGY AND
ETHICS 1
1. The task of sociology is to study social life in all its manifold forms of manifestation. Ethical ideals and ethical endeavors, there- fore, are objects of sociological research. They are working factors in social development, while they are themselves effects and symp- toms of social conditions, results of social development.
They have their roots in the inner world of individuals ; but this inner world itself is not indifferent for sociology, which traces the interaction of individual and society in all its finest ramifications. The inner world does not develop itself independently of the outer. Social conditions determine directly or indirectly that which the individual conscience adopts as ideal or as true. Very often the character and the direction of ethical life are determined by physio- logical or social heredity. And even the fact that individual initiative is at work sets no definite limit to sociological research, any more than biology gives up the right to investigate the organic variations which are the prerequisites of all natural selection.
From this point of view, sociology is a more comprehensive science than ethics, which is a more special and limited science. Soci- ology stands in a similar relation to ethics as does psychology. Ethical ideals and endeavors are not only sociological, but also psychological phenomena ; they are, therefore, objects for psychology as well as for sociology, and psychology is, in its turn, a more com- prehensive science than ethics.
2. Sociology is not only more comprehensive than ethics, it is also a necessary foundation for ethics. The ethically right must be sociologically possible, must be consistent with the conditions and laws of social development. Ethics is not a system of castles in the air, but a doctrine of the means and ways for developing human life, individual and social, to greater richness and to greater harmony. Ethics ought then to be founded on a study of the nature and the conditions of the actual social development. Only with the help of this study can new values and old values be maintained.
1 Synopsis of a paper read by HARALD HOFFDING, professor of philosophy in the University of Copenhagen, before the Sociological Society, at a meeting in the School of Economics and Political Science (University of London), Novom- l>er ii, 1904; Mr. L. T. Hobhouse in the chair.
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