Nevertheless the general notions of health, disease, justice, artistic
culture are of great importance: Not, however, because this or that case
may be brought exhaustively under a single head and its specific traits
shut out, but because generalized science provides a man as physician
and artist and citizen, with questions to ask, investigations to make,
and enables him to understand the meaning of what he sees. Just in the
degree in which a physician is an artist in his work he uses his
science, no matter how extensive and accurate, to furnish him with tools
of inquiry into the individual case, and with methods of forecasting a
method of dealing with it. Just in the degree in which, no matter how
great his learning, he subordinates the individual case to some
classification of diseases and some generic rule of treatment, he sinks
to the level of the routine mechanic. His intelligence and his action
become rigid, dogmatic, instead of free and flexible.
_Moral_ goods and ends exist only when something has to be done. The
fact that something has to be done proves that there are deficiencies,
evils in the existent situation. This ill is just the specific ill that
it is. It never is an exact duplicate of anything else. Consequently the
good of the situation has to be discovered, projected and attained on
the basis of the exact defect and trouble to be rectified. It cannot
intelligently be injected into the situation from without. Yet it is the
part of wisdom to compare different cases, to gather together the ills
from which humanity suffers, and to generalize the corresponding goods
into classes. Health, wealth, industry, temperance, amiability,
courtesy, learning, esthetic capacity, initiative, courage, patience,
enterprise, thoroughness and a multitude of other generalized ends are
acknowledged as goods. But the _value_ of this systematization is
intellectual or analytic. Classifications _suggest_ possible traits to
be on the lookout for in studying a particular case; they suggest
methods of action to be tried in removing the inferred causes of ill.
They are tools of insight; their value is in promoting an individualized
response in the individual situation.
Morals is not a catalogue of acts nor a set of rules to be applied like
drugstore prescriptions or cook-book recipes. The need in morals is for
specific methods of inquiry and of contrivance: Methods of inquiry to
locate difficulties and evils; methods of contrivance to form plans to
be used as working hypotheses in dealing with them. And the pragmatic
import of the logic of individualized situations, each having its own
irreplaceable good and principle, is to transfer the attention of theory
from preoccupation with general conceptions to the problem of developing
effective methods of inquiry.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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