For ordinary judgements of sense-perception the presence in
consciousness of a single unquestioned end is the adequate occasion, as
our analysis (assuming its validity) has shown. For ethical judgment we
have seen that the presence of conflicting ends is necessary; and we
shall now hold that this condition is necessary, though not, without a
certain qualification, adequate, for the economic type as well. If an
imaged end can hold its place in consciousness without a rival, and the
physical means of attaining it have been found and co-ordinated, then
the use or consumption of the means must inevitably follow, without
either ethical or economic judgement; for, to paraphrase the saying of
Professor James, nothing but an end can displace or inhibit effort
toward another end. The economic situation differs, then, from the
ethical in this, that the end or system of ends entering into
competition with the one for the time being of chief and primary
interest has been brought to consciousness through reference to those
"physical" means which already have been determined as necessary to this
latter end. The conflict of ends in the economic situation, that is to
say, is not due to a direct and intrinsic incompatibility between them.
Where there manifestly is such incompatibility, judgment will be of the
ethical type--as when building the house involves the foreclosure of a
mortgage, and so, in working an injury to the holder of the site, may do
violence to one's ideal of friendship or of more special obligation; or
when an impulse to intemperate self-indulgence is met by one's ideal of
social usefulness. In cases such as these one clearly sees, or can on
reflection come to see, in what way an evil result to personal character
will follow upon the imminent misdeed, and in what way suppression of
the momentary impulse will conserve the entire approved and established
way of life. Very often, however, the conflicting ends are related in no
such mutually exclusive way. Each may be in itself permissible and
compatible with the other, and, so far as any possible ethical
discrimination can determine, there is no ground for choice between
them. Thus it is only through the fact that both ends are dependent
upon a limited supply of means that one would, for example, ever bring
together and deliberately oppose in judgment the purpose of making
additions to his library and the necessity of providing a store of fuel
for the winter. Both ends in such a case are in themselves indeed
permissible in a general way, but they may very well not both of them be
economically possible, and hence, for the person in question and in the
presence of the economic conditions which confront him, not, in the last
analysis, both ethically possible. When there is a conflict between two
ends that stand in close organic relation in the sense explained above,
the problem is an ethical one; when the conflict is, in the sense
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