THE EVOLUTIONARY METHOD AS APPLIED TO MORALITY.
II. Its Significance For Conduct.
IN a preceding paper,[1] I attempted to show that only by the use of evolutionary ideas, that is, the historical method, can morality be brought within the domain of science. That discussion, however, did not develop the implied bearings of the presented theory upon distinctively moral values and validities. If we suppose for the moment that scientific treatment would follow the general lines indicated, what would be the influence of such a treatment upon morality as such? Would it leave moral quality unaffected just where it was? Would it lessen or destroy the moral meaning as such? Or would it intensify and expand ethical significance, giving an added meaning and an added sanction?
Before directly taking up these questions, it is necessary to dispose of a certain ambiguity and confusion. I am convinced that in much recent discussion about validity or objective value, writers have taken up indiscriminately two different standpoints, and passed unwittingly from one problem to another and quite different matter. One question is this: What is the validity of the moral point of view as such? Or, in the form which contemporary thought makes most urgent: How is the validity of the moral point of view, with its insistence upon standards, ideals, responsibilities, to be reconciled with the validity of the scientific point of view and its insistence upon the presented, upon facts, upon the causal? A distinct question is the following: How is the validity of a given moral point of view or judgment determined? This judgment about capital punishment is morally valid; that one is ethically incompetent. This point of view regarding temperance, expansion, the silver question, organized charity, etc., is true—that is, has superior objective value—compared with some other point of view. Or, the judgment "I
- ↑ Philosophical Review, March, 1902.
