Out of such a situation as this, however, genuine ethical deliberation
may arise on condition that standard and "temptation" can lose something
of their abstractness and their hard-and-fast opposition, and develop
into terms of concrete meaning. The agent may come to see that the end
is in some definite way of really vital interest and too important to be
put aside without consideration. He may, of course, in this fall into
gross self-sophistication, like the drunkard in the classical instance
who takes another glass to test his self-control and thereby gain
assurance, or he may act with wisdom and with full sincerity, like
Dorothea Casaubon when she renounced the impossible task imposed by her
departed husband. In the moral life one can ask or hope for complete
exemption from the risk of self-deception with as little reason as in
scientific research. But however this may be, our present interest is in
the method, not in particular results of ethical reflection. Whether
properly so in a particular case or not, the imaged end may come to
seem at least plausibly defensible on grounds of principle which serve
to sanction certain other modes of conduct to which a place is given in
the accepted scheme of life; or the end may simply press for a
relatively independent recognition on the very general ground that its
emergence represents an enlargement and new development of the
personality.[109] The end may thus cease to stand in the character of
blind self-assertive impulse, and press its claim as a positive means of
future moral growth, as bringing freedom from repressive and enfeebling
restraints and as tending to the reinforcement of other already valued
modes of conduct. On the other hand, the standard will cease to stand as
mere resistance and negation, and may discover something of its hidden
meaning as a product of long experience and slow growth, and as perhaps
a vital part of the organization of one's present life, not to be
touched without grave risk.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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