(3) Judgment of Ends
Without attempting to catalogue or enumerate the various intellectual and mental processes, consigning them to interminable classes and subdivisions of volitional, cognitive, affective and cogitative states or acts, labelled like so many distinct specimens in a collector's museum, it may yet be possible to detach certain features involved in the process of moral judgment which are distinguishable from the essentially instinctive, emotional and suggested elements we have been considering. The danger involved in reducing psychological processes to their constituent elements and treating of each element as though it were static and dissociated, is that it is apt to obscure a true appreciation of the actual manifestations of personality which result from complex and interactionary elements in continuous motion, forming one integral whole in constant process of influencing and being influenced by its environment. The whole is always more and something different from the sum of its parts. The factors here specially referred to which may determine in greater or lesser degree the nature and direction of moral valuation are deliberative, critical and analytic. These are essentially the intellectual and objective[77] processes exercised to the best advantage when freed to the greatest possible extent from instinctive and emotional complications. Judgments formed under such conditions involve the realization of the ends and effects of conduct, and an assignment of "desirableness" to those ends. It is clear that an intellectual judgment of this nature, assigning value to the ends of conduct, must take into account those inherent characteristics and instincts which underlie all motives and interests. Thus, we recognize the fact of the instinct of self-preservation, and are right in assigning the qualification "good" to life as denoting its desirableness; similarly the instinct of acquisition is general and fundamental in the human species,[78] we accordingly assign the qualification "good" to property and wealth, and to its destruction, "evil"; the abstract value of the end of this instinct is intensified and held in greater respect the more it is realized to have been the means by which the surplus energy of mankind has been utilized to accumulate the capital essential to the development of civilization. The desirableness of both life and wealth is also considerably increased or modified by collateral associations, by the pleasures they enable us to experience.
There is in all judgment of the morality of an action a perception of the end or consequence of that action. The clearness or dimness of the perception will depend upon the habits of thought and the organization of motives—or lack of it—which result from the native tendencies and development of the subjective mind. The norm of valuation which we apply to moral conduct is conditioned by many conscious and unconscious factors which determine our idea of "desirableness," and the standard will approximate to the conventional and common standard of the community in so far as we are influenced by our environment—or in proportion to our amenability to cosmic suggestion. It is on account of the obvious desire for pleasure and for avoidance of pain that Utilitarians are justified in making use of that general fact as a standard of utility. This in no way implies that the motives of all conduct are efforts to obtain pleasurable sensation or to avoid pain. The mistake of this discredited doctrine of psychological hedonism lay in confusing the motive or impulse to action with the valuation of conduct. It is an unfortunate but undeniable fact that conduct is least often determined by valuation. Realization or anticipation of the end of action is not the necessary stimulus of action, neither does it conform to volition or striving; but realization of consequences frequently inhibits the fulfilment of volition. Both conduct and volition are determined by the relation of subject to object, and by the constitution of the ego, conditioned, as it is, by the innumerable factors of heredity and environment.