[57] The term "egocentric predicament" (cf. R. B. Perry: Present Philosophical Tendencies, p. 129 ff.) has had, for a philosophic term, a remarkable literary success. But at best it conveys a partial view of the situation it purports to describe. The "egocentricity" of our experience, viewed in its relation to action, seems, rightly considered, less a "predicament" than an opportunity, a responsibility and an immunity. For in relation to action, it means (1) that an objective complex situation has become, in various of its aspects, a matter of my cognizance in terms significant to me. That so many of its aspects have come into relations of conflict or reënforcement significant for me is my opportunity for reconstructive effort if I choose to avail myself of it. Because, again, I am thus "on hand myself" (op. cit., p. 129) and am thus able to "report" upon the situation, I am (2) responsible, in the measure of my advantages, for the adequacy of my performance. And finally (3) I cannot be held to account for failure to reckon with such aspects of the situation as I cannot get hold of in the guise of "ideas, objects of knowledge or experiences" (Ibid.). Our egocentricity is, then, a predicament only so long as one stubbornly insists, to no obvious positive purpose, on thinking of knowledge as a self-sufficing entitative complex, like a vision suddenly appearing full-blown out of the blue, and as inviting judgment in that isolated character on the representative adequacy which it is supposed to claim (cf. A. W. Moore, "Isolated Knowledge," Journ. of Philos., etc., Vol. XI). The way out of the predicament for Perry and his colleagues is to attack the traditional subjective and representative aspects of knowledge. But, this carried out, what remains of knowledge is a "cross-section of neutral entities" which still retains all the original unaccountability, genetically speaking, and the original intrinsic and isolated self-sufficiency traditionally supposed to belong to knowledge. The ostensible gain achieved for knowledge is an alleged proof of its ultimate self-validation or the meaninglessness of any suspicion of its validity (because there is no uncontrolled and distorting intermediation of "consciousness" in the case). But to wage strenuous war on subjectivism and representationism and still to have on hand a problem calling for the invention ad hoc of an entire new theory of mind and knowledge seems a waste of good ammunition on rather unimportant outworks. They might have been circumvented.
But what concerns us here is the ethical parallel. The egocentric predicament in this aspect purports to compel the admission by the "altruist" that since whatever he chooses to do must be his act and is obviously done because he wishes, for good and sufficient reasons of his own, to do it, therefore he is an egoist after all—perhaps in spite of himself and then again perhaps not. The ethical realism of G. E. Moore (Principia Ethica, 1903) breaks out of the predicament by declaring Good independent of all desire, wish or human interest and indefinable, and by supplying a partial list of things thus independently good. What I do, I do because it seems likely to put me in possession of objective Good, not because it accords with some habit or whim of mine (although my own pleasure is undoubtedly one of the good things). It is noteworthy that Perry declines to follow Moore in this (op. cit., p. 331 ff.). Now such an ethical objectivism can give no account of the motivation, or the process, of the individual's efforts to attain, for guidance in any case, a "more adequate" apprehension of what things are good than he may already possess, just as the objectivist theory of consciousness (=knowledge) can supply no clue as to how or whether a more or a less comprehensive or a qualitatively different "cross-section of entities" can or should be got into one's "mind" as warrant or guidance ("stimulus") for a contemplated response that is to meet a present emergency (cf. John Dewey, "The Reflex Arc Concept in Psychology," Psychol. Rev., Vol. IV). Thus neither sort of deliverance out of the alleged predicament of egocentricity abates in the least the only serious inconvenience or danger threatened by subjectivism.
[58] Cf. W. Jethro Brown, The Underlying Principles of Modern Legislation (3d ed., London, 1914), pp. 165-68.
[59] Bosanquet: Principle of Individuality and Value, pp. 13, 15, 20, 24, 27, 30.
[60] The case against the Austrian explanation of market-price in terms of marginal utility has been well summed up and re-enforced by B. M. Anderson in his monograph, Social Value (Boston, 1911). Anderson finds the fatal flaw in the Austrian account to consist in the psychological particularism of the marginal utility theory. The only way, he holds, to provide an adequate foundation for a non-circular theory of price is to understand the marginal estimates people put upon goods as resultants of the entire moral, legal, institutional, scientific, æsthetical, and religious state of society at the time. This total and therefore absolute state of affairs, if I understand the argument, is to be regarded as focussed to a unique point in the estimate each man puts upon a commodity. Thus, presumably, the values which come together, summed up in the total demand and supply schedules for a commodity in the market, are "social values" and the resultant market-price is a "social price." This cross-sectional social totality of conditions is strongly suggestive of an idealistic Absolute. The individual is a mere focussing of impersonal strains and stresses in the Absolute. But the real society is a radically temporal process. The real centers of initiation in it are creatively intelligent individuals whose economic character as such expresses itself not in "absolute" marginal registrations but in price estimates.
On the priority of price to value I venture to claim the support of A. A. Young, "Some Limitations of the Value Concept," Quart. Journ. Econ., Vol. XXV, p. 409 (esp. pp. 417-19). Incidentally, I suspect the attempt to reconstruct ethical theory as a branch of what is called Werttheorie to be a mistake and likely to result only in useless and misleading terminology.
[61] Positive Theory of Capital (Eng. trans.). Bk. IV, Ch. II. The passage is unchanged in the author's latest edition (1912).
[62] It is pointed out (e.g., by Davenport in his Economics of Enterprise, pp. 53-54) that, mathematically, in a market where large numbers of buyers and sellers confront each other with their respective maximum and minimum valuations on the commodity this interval within which price must fall becomes indefinitely small to the point of vanishing. This is doubtless in accord with the law of probability, but it would be an obvious fallacy to see in this any manner of proof or presumption that therefore the assumptions as to the nature of the individual valuations upon which such analysis proceeds are true. In a large market where this interval is supposed to be a vanishing quantity is there more or less higgling and bargaining than in a small market where the interval is admittedly perceptible? And if there is higgling and bargaining (op. cit., pp. 96-97), what is it doing that is of price-fixing importance unless there be supposed to be a critical interval for it to work in? Such a use of probability-theory is a good example of the way in which mathematics may be used to cover the false assumptions which have to be made in order to make a mathematical treatment of certain sorts of subject-matter initially plausible as description of concrete fact.
[63] As I have elsewhere argued ("Subjective and Exchange Value," Journ. Pol. Econ., Vol. IV, pp. 227-30). By the same token, I confess skepticism of the classical English doctrine that cost can affect price only through its effect upon quantity produced. "If all the commodities used by man," wrote Senior (quoted by Davenport, op. cit., p. 58), "were supplied by nature without any interference whatever of human labor, but were supplied in precisely the same amounts that they now are, there is no reason to suppose either that they would cease to be valuable or would exchange at any other than the present proportions." But is this inductive evidence or illustrative rhetoric? One wonders, indeed, whether private property would ever have developed or how long modern society would tolerate it if all wealth were the gift of nature instead of only some of it (that part, of course, which requires no use of produced capital goods for its appropriation).
[64] Certain points in this discussion have been raised in two papers, entitled, "The Present Task of Ethical Theory," Int. Jour. of Ethics, XX, and "Ethical Value," Jour. of Phil., Psy., and Scientific Methods, V, p. 517.