The outcome of such a process, of course, cannot be predicted--and for
the same reasons as make unpredictable the scientist's factual
hypothesis. Just as the scientist's data are incomplete and ill-assorted
and unorganized, for the reason that they have, of necessity, been
collected, and must at the outset be interpreted, in the light of
present concepts, whose inadequacy the very existence of the problem at
issue demonstrates, so the final moral purpose that shall be developed
is not to be deduced from any possible inventory of the situation as it
stands. The process in both cases is one of reconstruction, and the test
of the validity of the reconstruction must in both cases be of the same
essentially practical character. In both cases the process is
constructive of reality, in the functional signification of the term. In
both, the judgment process is constructive also of the self, in the
sense that upon the determination of the agent's future attitude the
cumulative outcome of his past attitudes is methodically brought to
bear.[150]
V
Judgments of value are, then, objective in their import in the same
sense as are the factual judgments in which the conditions of action are
presented. The ideal problematic situation is, in the last resort,
ethical, in the sense of requiring for its solution determination of the
new end that has arisen with reference to existing standards. In
structure and in function the judgment in which the outcome of this
process is presented is knowledge, and objective in the only valid
acceptation of the term.
But, after all, it may be urged, is it not the essential mark of the
objective that it should be accessible to all men, and not in the nature
of the case valid for only a single individual? At best the objectivity
of content which has been made out for the judgment of value is purely
functional, and not such as can be verified by appeal to the consensus
of other persons. The agent's _assurance_ of the reality of the economic
or ethical subject-matter which he is endeavoring to determine, and his
sense of the objectivity of the results which he reaches, need not be
denied. These may well enough be illusions of personal prejudice or
passion, or even normal illusions of the reflective faculty, like that
of interpreting the secondary qualities of bodies as objective in the
same sense as are the "bulk, figure, extension, number, and motion of
their solid parts."[151] Any man can see the physical object to which I
point, and verify with his own eyes the qualities which I ascribe to it,
but no man can either understand or verify my judgment that the purpose
I have formed is in accord with rational ideals of industry and
self-denial, or that this portion of my winter's fuel may be given to a
neighbor who has none.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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