tory of morality, the genetic study of the moral life (and the moral consciousness), is the sine qua non of an intelligent interpretation of its significance, the indispensable preliminary to its reduction to ethical system. The business of such a preliminary investigation is simply to discover the causation of morality, the uniformities of sequence which characterize moral antecedents and consequents as they characterize all other phenomena. But such an investigation of the moral facts, though it is well entitled to the name of science, is only the handmaid of ethics as a normative science, as the effort to determine the meaning or content of the facts. The results of such a natural science of ethics are the "data of ethics" as a normative science.[1]
The failure to distinguish these two inquiries has led to the greatest confusion in ethical thought. The answer to the question of causal 'origins' has been offered (especially in English, and lately in German ethics) as the answer to the question of ethical content and meaning. This is true of the psychological theory of Hume and Mill, and also of the evolutionary theory which professes, by its substitution of the historical and genetic method for the statical view of the earlier moralists, to have raised ethics to the rank of a science. Take, for example, the solution offered by this school of the problem of egoism and altruism. The problem is: Why ought I to regard the interests of others as well as my own? and especially, Why should I sacrifice my own interests to those of others? The solution offered is an account of the causation of altruistic conduct, the discovery of the psychological fact of sympathy, the internal 'sanction,' as well as of other facts of minor importance—the external 'sanctions,' of altruism, and of the factors in the evolution of
- ↑ Cf. Mr. Balfour's statement (A Defence of Philosophic Doubt, Appendix, 'On the Idea of a Philosophy of Ethics,' p. 336): "An ethical proposition, though, like every other proposition, it states a relation, does not state a relation of space or time. 'I ought to speak the truth,' for instance, does not imply that I have spoken, do speak, or shall speak the truth; it asserts no bond of causation between subject and predicate, nor any coexistence, nor any sequence. It does not announce an event; and if some people would say that it stated a fact, it is not certainly a fact either of the 'external' or of the 'internal' world." Later (p. 348) he says that ethics "is concerned not with the causes, but with the grounds or reasons for action."
