Conscience & Fanaticism: An Essay on Moral ValuesPitt-Rivers, George Henry Lane Fox
Philosophy
Conscience & Fanaticism: An Essay on Moral Values
Pitt-Rivers, George Henry Lane Fox
Conscience; Ethics; Fanaticism
We cannot acquire truth by means of the emotions, which can but be the
means of informing us of our personal relation towards our environment.
They may reveal us to ourselves, or may register the reflection of our
environment within us; but the consequences of emotion cannot be
regarded as ephemeral, for all emotional excitation must have a
permanent residual effect upon the tone of the subjective mind.
(3) JUDGMENT OF ENDS
Without attempting to catalogue or enumerate the various intellectual
and mental processes, consigning them to interminable classes and
subdivisions of volitional, cognitive, affective and cogitative states
or acts, labelled like so many distinct specimens in a collector's
museum, it may yet be possible to detach certain features involved in
the process of moral judgment which are distinguishable from the
essentially instinctive, emotional and suggested elements we have been
considering. The danger involved in reducing psychological processes to
their constituent elements and treating of each element as though it
were static and dissociated, is that it is apt to obscure a true
appreciation of the actual manifestations of personality which result
from complex and interactionary elements in continuous motion, forming
one integral whole in constant process of influencing and being
influenced by its environment. The whole is always more and something
different from the sum of its parts. The factors here specially referred
to which may determine in greater or lesser degree the nature and
direction of moral valuation are deliberative, critical and analytic.
These are essentially the intellectual and _objective_[77] processes
exercised to the best advantage when freed to the greatest possible
extent from instinctive and emotional complications. Judgments formed
under such conditions involve the realization of the ends and effects of
conduct, and an assignment of "desirableness" to those ends. It is clear
that an intellectual judgment of this nature, assigning value to the
ends of conduct, must take into account those inherent characteristics
and instincts which underlie all motives and interests. Thus, we
recognize the fact of the instinct of self-preservation, and are right
in assigning the qualification "good" to life as denoting its
desirableness; similarly the instinct of acquisition is general and
fundamental in the human species,[78] we accordingly assign the
qualification "good" to property and wealth, and to its destruction,
"evil"; the abstract value of the end of this instinct is intensified
and held in greater respect the more it is realized to have been the
means by which the surplus energy of mankind has been utilized to
accumulate the capital essential to the development of civilization. The
desirableness of both life and wealth is also considerably increased or
modified by collateral associations, by the pleasures they enable us to
experience.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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