ordination between two or more conflicting instincts, such as tender emotion and anger in the case of justice.
Many persons instinctively feel tender emotion momentarily whenever any tender and helpless child or animal attracts their attention. A sentiment, i.e., a permanent disposition to feel tender emotions, readily develops, however, only toward one's own children and pets. Continued propinquity and evocation of the acquisitive and self instincts are usually requisite for the formation of a sentiment of tender emotion toward an object. The social desirability that permanent sentiments of kindliness should develop toward one's fellow men in general gives rise to the recognition of such a mental disposition as the virtue of Benevolence. Economy is the virtuous exercise of the acquisitive instinct.[1] This instinct is notoriously weak in a large part of mankind, perhaps from lack of opportunity for its exercise. The ethical problem giving rise to the recognition of a virtue here is therefore two-fold: the desirability that everybody should learn (1) to exercise economy in his own affairs, and (2) to extend the scope of the virtue to property publicly owned (so as to feel personal interest in the conservation and increase of national and municipal wealth, for instance).[2]
It will be the purpose of the remainder of this paper to consider the application of what has been said to the problem of ethical objectivity.
We have seen that the general course of ethical evolution described by the important recent authorities can be interpreted in terms of instincts that are unchangeable so far as their central, emotional nature is concerned, but which have been subjected to control with respect to their afferent and efferent parts, and the sentiments to which they have given rise. The habits thus formed, when recognized as desirable mental traits, have come to be known as virtues.
The cardinal virtues of courage, honor, temperance, justice,
- ↑ Professor Münsterberg has convincingly shown the ethical importance of Economy. The Eternal Values, pp. 304-317.
- ↑ Whether any form of democratic socialism could succeed, would seem to depend, for one thing, upon whether it could develop in each of its citizens a vigorous virtue of economy with reference to publicly owned wealth.
