Problems of Conduct: An Introductory Survey of EthicsDrake, Durant
Philosophy
Problems of Conduct: An Introductory Survey of Ethics
Drake, Durant
Ethics
But for practical purposes, and so far as
our morality is concerned, either the statement in the text or the
suggested equivalent is true. The point is, that the foundation
of morality is in US--whether you call US in the last analysis
consciousnesses or organisms]
It is the existence of felt goodness, intrinsic goodness, and its
opposite, that allows us to attribute to objects another kind of
goodness or badness, according as they are calculated to produce in
us the former kind. This kind of goodness and badness we may call
extrinsic. It is only by thus attributing a sort of goodness and
badness to senseless objects that we can aim for and avoid the good
and bad phases of conscious life. In themselves these conscious moments
are largely unnamable and inexpressible. There are, as it is, dumb
objectless ecstasies that are of transcendent sweetness; but we do
not usually know how to reproduce them, and for the most part we have
to overlook these goods in our ideals and aim only for those that we
can associate with recognized outer stimuli. For practical purposes
we think rather in terms of outer objects than of our states of
experience; nature has had need to make men but very slightly
introspective. And so it is that this derived use of our eulogistic
and disparaging terms plays a larger part than its primary application.
But the essential point to note is that "goodness" and "badness" in
the first instance refer to the fundamental cleavage between the
affective qualities of experience, and only secondarily and by metonymy
apply to objects in the physical world which affect our conscious states.
The next point to note is that our conscious experiences and activities
themselves have not only their intrinsic value, as they pass, but an
extrinsic value, as means toward future intrinsic values. Each phase
of experience has its own worth, while it lasts, and also has its results
in determining future phases with their varying degrees of worth. Our
reveries, our debauches, our sacrifices are good or bad in their
effects as well as in themselves. Thus all experience has a double
rating; acts are not only pleasant, agreeable, intrinsically desirable,
but also wise, prudent, useful, virtuous, i.e., extrinsically desirable.
These extrinsic values usually bulk much larger in the end
than the first transitory intrinsic value; but our natural tendency
is to forget them and guide our action by immediate values. Hence the
need of a continual disparagement of the latter, and the many means
men have adopted of emphasizing the importance of the former. Yet,
after all, our concern for the extrinsic value of acts has to do only
with means to ends; and unless acts tend to produce intrinsic goodness
somewhere they are not extrinsically good. There is no sense in
sacrificing an immediate good unless the alternative act will tend
in its ultimate effects to produce a greater good, or unless the act
sacrificed would have brought, after its present intrinsic good, some
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