The Philosophical Review/Volume 1/Review: Fairbanks - Ethical Worth

by Jacob Gould Schurman

Ethical Worth: A Study as to the Basis of Ethics. By Arthur Fairbanks, Ph.D., Assistant Professor in Dartmouth College. St. Johnsbury, Vt., Caledonian Press, C. M. Stone & Co. — pp. 55.

This is a thesis for the doctor's degree in the University of Freiburg. The author's first result is: "Feeling is the universal basis and form of all judgments of worth. This applies, first, to sense, then to higher intellectual and moral activities. The feeling of our own worth (man's worth) is the basis of all judgments of worth, and this worth is primarily in the will (man's central activity)." It is then shown that the moral judgment is of social origin. The first unconscious standard of judgment is one's own pleasure. Other standards are custom and religious rites, but the moral judgment ultimately implies an internal standard; and this, it is asserted, is not pleasure, but character. This leads to a discussion of utilitarian and evolutionary ethics, in which there is nothing very new or striking. The remainder of the thesis (pp. 38-51) contains an inquiry into the relation of the conception of ethical worth to virtue, duty, and the good, besides some reflections on self-sacrifice and self-assertion and on ethical methods. The work suffers from scrappiness, too many problems having been touched to admit of any one being sounded within the limits prescribed.

J. G. S.