The values of reflective morality. Some of these have already been noted. We may briefly summarize the foregoing discussion, and call attention to some additional values of a morality based upon reason, as contrasted with a morality of mere mechanical conformity to custom. It has already been pointed out that intellectual preferences and valuations are rooted in primary impulses; that is, our desires are anterior to reflection. What we intellectually value and prefer has its roots in primary impulses. Reason can discover how man may attain the good; but what is good is determined by the desires with which man is, willy-nilly, endowed. Our preferences are, within limits, fixed for us. As Santayana writes:
Reason was born, as it has since discovered, into a world already wonderfully organized, in which it found its precursor in what is called life, its seat in an animal body of unusual plasticity, and its function in rendering that body's volatile instincts and sensations harmonious with one another and with the outer world on which they depend.[1]
[Footnote 1: Santayana: Life of Reason, vol. I, p. 40.]
Our chief aim in reflective behavior is to discover ways and means by which a harmony may be achieved, a harmony of those very instincts which, left to themselves, would be in perpetual collision, frustrating and checking each other.
Reflection not only seeks to find a way of life in which no natural impulse shall be frustrated, but it is through reflection that desires are broadened, and that new desires arise. Out of reflection upon social relations, which is in the first instance prompted by man's innate gregariousness, arise the conception of ideal friendship and the thirst for and movement toward ideal society. Out of reflection upon the animal passion of sex may rise Dante's beatific vision of Beatrice. Conduct, consciously controlled, finds not only ways by which animal desires may be fulfilled without catastrophe; it transmutes animal desires into ideal values.
Reflection transforms customs into principles. In reflective behavior, as contrasted with that which is controlled by instinct and custom, there are established standards of action to which the individual consciously conforms. That is, instead of merely conforming to custom, an individual comes to act upon principles, consciously avowed and maintained. A man who sets up a standard of action in his professional or business relations is not conforming to an arbitrary code; he is living according to a way of life which he has deliberately and consciously chosen. When a man acts upon principles because he has consciously adopted them in view of the consequences which he believes to be associated with them, he will not make his standard an idol. Reflection establishes standards, but it is not mastered by them. It is persistently critical. Standards are tools, instruments toward the achievement of the good. They are merely general rules, derived from experience and retained so long as they bear desirable fruits in experience. Moral laws are not regarded as arbitrary and eternal, but as good only in so far as they produce good. A virtue is a virtue because it is conducive to human well-being. Standards are not absolute, but relative—relative to their fruits in practice.
Reflective action genuinely moral. Action is most genuinely moral when it is reflective. It is only then that the individual is a conscious and controlling agent. It is only then that he knows what he is doing. When a machine performs actions that happen to have useful results, we do not speak of the action as moral or virtuous. And action in conformity with custom is purely mechanical and arbitrary. An individual who is merely conforming to the customary is no more moral than an automaton. Given a certain situation, he makes a certain response. It makes no difference that the act happens to have fruitful consequences. It is not a matter of individual choice, of conscious volition. Aristotle long ago stated the indispensable conditions of moral actions:
It is necessary that the agent at the time of performing them should satisfy certain conditions, i.e. in the first place that he should know what he is doing, secondly that he should deliberately choose to do it and to do it for its own sake, and thirdly that he should do it as an instance of a fixed and immutable moral state.[1]
[Footnote 1: Aristotle: Ethics, book II, p. 42 (Weldon translation).]
Only when the individual is aware of the consequences of his action, and deliberately chooses those consequences, is there any individuality, any exhibition of choice—in other words, any moral value in the act. When an act is prompted by mere habit and custom, we have an evidence of an individual's environment rather than of his character. Creatures thus moved by capricious and arbitrary impulse are hardly persons, and certainly not personalities. They are played upon by every whimsicality of circumstance; their own character makes no difference at all in the world in which they live. To act reflectively is to be the controlling rather than the controlled element in a situation. Action guided by intelligence is freed from the enslavement of passion, prejudice, and routine. It becomes genuinely free. The individual, emancipated from emotion, sense, and circumstance, from the accidental environment in which he happens to be born, is in command of his conduct. "Though shakes the magnet, steady is the pole." Morally, at least, he is "the master of his fate, the captain of his soul."