[48] Cf. Aristotle's Politics (Jowett's trans.) III. 9. §6 ff. and elsewhere; Nicom. Ethics, I, Chap. III (end).
[49] Cf. Veblen: op. cit.
[50] W. McDougall in his Social Psychology (Ed. 1912, pp. 358 ff.) recognizes "incomplete anticipation of the end of action" as a genuine type of preliminary situation in human behavior, but appears to regard this as in so far a levelling-down of man to the blindness of the "brutes." But "incompleteness" is a highly ambiguous term and seems here to beg the question. "Incompleteness" may be given an emphasis in which it imports conjecture and hypothesis—almost anything, in fact, but blindness. Rather do the brutes get levelled up to man by such facts as those McDougall cites.
[51] I take routine to be the essence and meaning of hedonism. There are two fundamental types of conduct—routine and constructiveness. Reference may be made here to Böhm-Bawerk's pronouncement on hedonism in Kapital und Kapitalzins, 1912 (II-2, pp. 310 ff.): "What people love and hate, strive towards or fight off—whether only pleasure and pain or other 'lovable' and 'hatable' things as well,—is a matter of entire indifference to the economist. The only thing important is that they do love and hate certain things.... The deductions of marginal utility theory lose no whit of their cogency even if certain ends (dependent for their realization upon a supply of goods inadequate to the fulfillment of all ends without limit) are held to have the character not of pleasure but of something else. The marginal utility may be a least pleasure or a competing least utility of some other sort...." (p. 317). This is a not uncommon view. As W. C. Mitchell has suggested, it is too obvious to be wholly convincing. (Journ. Pol. Ec., Vol. XVIII. "The Rationality of Economic Activity.") Veblen has made it perfectly clear that particular matters of theory are affected by the presupposition of hedonism. (Journ. Pol. Ec., Vol. XVII, Quart. Journ. Econ., Vol. XXII, p. 147 ff.) The matter is too complex for a footnote, but I think it of little consequence whether "pleasure" be in any case regarded as substantively the end of desire or not. This is largely a matter of words. What is important is the practical question whether a thing is so habitual with me that when the issue arises I cannot or will not give it up and take an interest in something new the "utility" of which I cannot as yet be cognizant of because it partly rests with me to create it. If this is the fact it will surely look as if pleasure or the avoidance of pain were my end in the case. Hedonism and egoism are in the end convertible terms. There is conduct wearing the outward aspect of altruism that is egotistic in fact—not because it was from the first insincere or self-delusive, but because it has become habitual and may in a crisis be held to for the sake of the satisfaction it affords. Genuine altruism, on the other hand, is a form of constructiveness.
[52] Until after this essay was finished I had not seen John A. Hobson's book entitled Work and Wealth, A Human Valuation (London, 1914). My attention was first definitely called to this work by a friend among the economists who read my finished MS. late in 1915, and referred me in particular to the concluding chapter on "Social Science and Social Art." On now tardily reading this chapter I find that, as any reader will readily perceive, it distinctly anticipates, almost verbatim in parts, what I have tried, with far less success, to say in the foregoing two paragraphs above. Hobson argues, with characteristic clearness and effect, for the qualitative uniqueness and the integral character of personal budgets, holding that the logic of marginality is "an entirely illusory account of the psychical process by which a man lays out his money, or his time, or his energy" (p. 331). "So far as it is true that the last sovereign of my expenditure in bread equals in utility the last sovereign of my expenditure in books, that fact proceeds not from a comparison, conscious, or unconscious, of these separate items at this margin, but from the parts assigned respectively to bread and books in the organic plan of my life. Quantitative analysis, inherently incapable of comprehending qualitative unity or qualitative differences, can only pretend to reduce the latter to quantitative differences. What it actually does is to ignore alike the unity of the whole and the qualitativeness of the parts" (p. 334). Hobson not only uses the analogy of the artist and the picture (p. 330) precisely as I have done, but offers still other illustrations of the principle that seem to me even more apt and telling. Though not indebted to him for what I have put into the above paragraphs, I am glad to be able to cite the authority of so distinguished an economist and sociologist for conclusions to which I found my own way. Other parts as well of Work and Wealth (e.g., Chapter IV, on "The Creative Factor in Production") seem to have a close relation to the main theme of the present discussion.
[53] It may be worth while to glance here for the sake of illustration at an ethical view of preference parallel with the economic logic above contested. "The act which is right in that it promotes one interest, is, by the same principle," writes R. B. Perry, "wrong in that it injures another interest. There is no contradiction in this fact ... simply because it is possible for the same thing to possess several relations, the question of their compatibility or incompatibility being in each case a question of empirical fact. Now ... an act ... may be doubly right in that it conduces to the fulfillment of two interests. Hence arises the conception of comparative goodness. If the fulfillment of one interest is good, the fulfillment of two is better; and the fulfillment of all interests is best.... Morality, then, is such performance as under the circumstances, and in view of all the interests affected, conduces to most goodness. In other words, that act is morally right which is most right." (Present Philosophical Tendencies, p. 334. Cf. also The Moral Economy). It is evident that constructive change in the underlying system (or aggregate?) of the agent's interests gets no recognition here as a matter of moral concern or as a fact of the agent's moral experience. Thus Perry understands the meaning of freedom to lie in the fact that "interests operate," i.e., that interests exist as a certain class of operative factors in the universe along with factors of other sorts. "I can and do, within limits, act as I will. Action, in other words, is governed by desires and intentions." (pp. 342 ff.). The cosmical heroics of Bertrand Russell are thus not quite the last word in Ethics (p. 346). Nevertheless, the "free man," in Perry's view, apparently must get on with the interests that once for all initially defined him as a "moral constant" (p. 343).
[54] In a recent interesting discussion of "Self-interest" (T. N. Carver, Essays in Social Justice, 1915, Chap. III) occurs the following: "We may conclude ... that even after we eliminate from our consideration all other beings than self, there is yet a possible distinction between one's present and one's future self. It is always, of course, the present self which esteems or appreciates all interests whether they be present or future. And the present self estimates or appreciates present interests somewhat more highly than it does future interests. In this respect the present self appreciates the interests of the future self according to a law quite analogous to, if indeed it be not the same law as that according to which it appreciates the interests of others" (p. 71). This bit of "subjective analysis" (p. 60), a procedure rather scornfully condemned as "subjective quibbling" on the following page, must be counted a fortunate lapse. It could be bettered, I think, in only one point. Must the future self "of course" and "always" get license to live by meeting the standards of the present self? Has the present self no modesty, no curiosity, no "sense of humor"? If it is so stupidly hard and fast, how can a self new and qualitatively different ever get upon its feet in a man? In some men no such thing can happen—but must it be in all men impossible and impossible "of course"? And what of the other self? Carver has not applied the "methods of subjective analysis" to change from self to self or from interest in self to interest in others. The present tense of formal logic governs fundamentally throughout the whole account.
If this essay were a volume I should try to consider, from the point of view of constructive intelligence, the explanation of interest as due to the undervaluation of future goods.
[55] Fite, Introductory Study of Ethics, pp. 3-8.
[56] Dewey and Tufts, Ethics, pp. 205-11.