adult's, and yet we may regard the latter as much more voluntary than
the child's. With the child, the thought is superficial and casual,
because of the restricted stage of organization or growth reached (see
p. 10): his act flows from organic instinct or from accidental
circumstances--whim, caprice, and chance suggestion, or fancy. The
adult's act may flow from habitual tendencies and be accompanied by an
equally small amount of conscious reflection. But the tendencies
themselves are the outcome of prior deliberations and choices which have
finally got funded into more or less automatic habits. The child's act
is to a slight extent the expression of character; the adult's to a
large extent. In short, we mean by character whatever lies behind an act
in the way of deliberation and desire, whether these processes be
near-by or remote.
=Not Everything Voluntary is Morally Judged.=--A voluntary act may then
be defined as one _which manifests character_, the test of its presence
being the presence of desire and deliberation; these sometimes being
present directly and immediately, sometimes indirectly and remotely
through their effects upon the agent's standing habits. But we do not
judge all voluntary activity from the moral standpoint. Some acts we
judge from the standpoint of skill or awkwardness; others as amusing or
boring; others as stupid or highly intelligent, and so on. We do not
bring to bear the conceptions of right and wrong. And on the other hand,
there are many things called good and bad which are not voluntary. Since
what we are in search of must lie somewhere between these two limits, we
may begin with cases of the latter sort.
_(1) Not Everything Judged Good or Right is Moral._--We speak, for
example, of an ill-wind; of a good engine; of a watch being wrong; or of
a screw being set right. We speak of good and bad bread, money, or soil.
That is, from the standpoint of value, we judge things as _means_ to
certain results in themselves desirable or undesirable. A "good" machine
does efficiently the work for which it is designed; "bad" money does not
subserve the ends which money is meant to promote; the watch that is
wrong comes short of telling us time correctly. We have to use the
notion of value and of contribution to value; that is a positive
factor. But this contribution to valuable result is not, in inanimate
objects, something meant or intended by the things themselves. If we
thought the ill-wind had an idea of its own destructive effect and took
pleasure in that idea, we should attribute moral quality to it--just as
men did in early times, and so tried to influence its behavior in order
to make it "good." Among things that promote favorable or unfavorable
results a line is drawn between those which just do so as matter of
fact, and those in which meaning so to do, or intention, plays a part.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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