Page:Philosophical Review Volume 11.djvu/267

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No. 3.]
THE INDIVIDUAL AND SOCIAL VALUES.
251


series. Altruism may be subjectively Steigerungs-fähig, when objectively it is not. This value may, for the present, be looked upon as an imputed value over and above the actual value of the act or the disposition out of which the act springs, a value which is determined by the extent to which the total personality is involved in the action. In the imputation of personal value over and above the actual social and objective value, we take into account the moment of spontaneity in the subject.[1]

The problem then, in its most ultimate aspect, is whether the personal values, imputed, over and above the social values of the individual's actions, are to be looked upon as merely complementary to the social values, or as getting their meaning out of an independent qualitative law of the personal series. The introduction of the concept of complementary values into modern value theories, it is thought, has extended the range of quantitative conceptions to the explanation of purely inner personal values. The attempt has been made to conceive ethical values as complementary values growing out of the harmonious grouping of economic and social goods in the experience of the individual, values which are then imputed to the separate goods, objects, or dispositions. Thus Professor Patten has developed a theory that ethical values are complementary values evolved in the more and more harmonious consumption of economic goods.[2] Through the development of these complementary values, by more harmonious arrangement of the elemental goods, subjective value is conceived as susceptible of indefinite increase, and for these new values new categories are developed which constitute the ethical. In like manner, Ehrenfels[3] has sought to conceive the purely personal values of the individual, which constitute the ultimate personal sanctions of morality, as complementary values growing out of the harmonious relation of social values in the consciousness of the individual. The harmonious grouping of what are intrinsic values in the social order creates new instrumental values for the subject. Ehrenfels recognizes that the expansion in the personality of gen-

  1. Meinong, Werth-Theorie, p. 213.
  2. Economic Causes of Moral Progress.
  3. Ehrenfels, System der Werththeorie, Bd. II, paragraphs 28 to 33.