of pleasure, still less that pleasure is the only thing worthy of choice. The moral ideal must appeal to feeling, it must please its devotee; and the various forms of this pleasure have been well described by the psychological and evolutionary moralists. But, after all this descriptive explanation of the motivation of choice, the problem of the content of the moral ideal itself remains unsolved and even untouched.[1]
It is not to be denied that the standard of ethical appreciation has itself evolved. With the gradual evolution of morality there is being gradually evolved a reflective formulation of its content and significance. The evolving moral being is always judging the moral evolution, and there is an evolution of moral judgment as well as of the conduct which is judged. We must distinguish, however, between the subjective or psychological fact of moral judgment, on the one hand, and the objective content of such judgment, on the other. Just as logic distinguishes between the psychological fact and the logical content of intellectual judgment, so must ethics, as a normative science, distinguish between the psychological fact and the objective content of moral judgment. The history of the causation of the psychological fact is one question; the content of its testimony is another question. Ethics has to do with man's ends (in respect of their content), and not with the process or mechanism of their accomplishment.[2] And for ethics as a normative science, the objective validity of moral judgment (whether crude and early, or ripe and late) is a necessary assumption, just as, for logic, the objective validity of intellectual judgment is a necessary assumption. The reality of the Good, and our ability by reflection to discover it (more or less fully), are the postulates of ethics, as the reality of Truth, and
- ↑ Such an exposure of the fallacy of ethical 'Naturalism,' 'Evolutionism,' or 'Empiricism,' is, of course, at the same time an exposure of ethical 'Supernaturalism,' 'Intuitionism,' or A priorism. The question of ethics is a question not of origin, but of content; not of causation, but of meaning. The truth in Intuitionism is, in my opinion, simply its assertion of the ultimateness for ethics of the ethical point of view.
- ↑ Strangely enough, Professor S. Alexander states the distinction between the methods of ethics and of psychology in just these terms, and yet adopts the latter method in his own investigation. Cf. Moral Order and Progress, pp. 62-70.
