ETHICAL OBJECTIVITY IN THE LIGHT OF SOCIAL PSYCHOLOGY.[1]
WHEN, on account of the break-down of traditional morality grounded in custom, the work of the moral philosopher begins, he must in some way establish an objective basis for the ethical principles which he recognizes. The line of attack that has usually first suggested itself is largely psychological, directed to some basic impulse or active faculty supposed to exist in men and to furnish a foundation for an objective ethics, the desire for pleasure and aversion to pain, or more complex faculties, like the reason, spirit, and appetite of Plato, and the longer list of Aristotle, the affections of Shaftesbury, the sympathy of Hume and Adam Smith, and the springs to action of Martineau. Such attempts, however, have hitherto failed because unable to isolate any stable element in the human affective constitution, which would serve as a datum with which an objective ethics might begin. With no stable impulsive factor available, the foundations for a substantial ethical structure had to be sought elsewhere. If they continued to look for a psychological principle, moral philosophers turned either to the reason which they supposed to be capable of valuation on its own initiative, somehow 'measuring' pleasures and pains, finding a 'rational mean,' or 'laws of Nature,' or a categorical imperative, or else they assumed the existence of some hybrid mental faculty, partly cognitive and partly affective, like the 'moral sense' of Shaftesbury and Hutcheson, and the 'moral instinct' of more recent times. If such devices were unconvincing, it was always possible to resort to some type of metaphysical idealism or dogmatic theology. In our own time, when dogmatism either in metaphysics or
- ↑ In addition to the obligations to his written publications herein cited, the writer is indebted to Professor William McDougall, of Oxford University, for reading an earlier draft of this paper, and making numerous suggestions and corrections in personal conversations.
