Consider, for example, how his interest in problems of friendship may be used as the point of departure for an extremely important survey over general questions of right relationship. Just because friendship is so vital a concern of adolescent years, he can be led to read what Aristotle, Kant, Emerson, have to say upon this subject and be introduced as well to that larger life of ideal relationships from which these writers regard the dealings of friends. The topic of right attitudes toward a friend broadens out readily into such considerations as treating persons aright for their own sake or regarding them as ends per se, a dead abstraction when approached as it is by Kant, but a living reality when the students get Aristotle's point about magnanimous treatment of friends. They can then proceed by way of contrast to note, for example, how this magnanimity was limited to friends in the upper levels of Athenian society, and went hand in hand with approval of slave labor and other exploitations which a modern conscience forbids. To give sharper edge to the conception of man as deserving right treatment for his own sake, the class might go on to examine other notable violations of personality in past and present; e.g., slavery (read for instance Sparr's History of the African Slave Trade) or the more recent cruelties toward the natives in the rubber regions of the Congo and the Amazon. Reference may also be made (without undue emphasis) to the white-slave traffic of today and the fact be noted that a right sense of chivalry will keep a man from partnership in the degradation which creates both the demand for white slavery and ultimately its supply. We mention this to show how a common practical interest can be employed to introduce the students to so fundamental an ethical conception as the idea of inviolable human worth. It may, no doubt, be highly unconventional for them to begin with a discussion of friendship and after a few periods find themselves absorbed in these other questions; but if care is exercised to sum up and to emphasize the big conceptions underlying the topic, we may be sure that their grasp of the subject will be no less firm than under the older method. Their acquaintance with a study requiring hard, abstract thinking will surely not be hurt, to say the least, by an introduction which is concrete and practical.
Or take another matter of real concern to the student at this period of his life. He is certain to be giving some thought to the matter of his future vocation; and here again is a topic which, properly handled, broadens out into the most far-reaching inquiries. It is to be regretted that as yet the vocational-guidance movement has been occupied in the main with external features—comparing jobs, making objective tests of efficiency, and so on. The central ethical conceptions are usually slighted. That one's vocation is a prime influence in the shaping of personality in oneself, in one's fellow workers, in the public served (or disserved) by one's work, in the world of nations in so far as war and peace are connected with commerce and other interchange of vocational products—all this is matter for the teacher who wishes the ethics course to work over into better living.[[49]] Nor again, as will be noted later in the chapter, need the claims of the subject as a scholarly discipline suffer from such treatment. Questions of the nature of moral standards, of the distinction between expedient and right, etc., can be taken up more profitably when, instead of dealing with the academic questions forming the stock in trade of most textbooks, the course examines a few vocations, let us say, business, teaching, art, law, medicine,—in the light of such standards as these: A history of the calling; e.g., what has it contributed to the elevation of mankind, to the development of the arts and sciences, and to specific kinds of human betterment? What is the best service it can accomplish today? What traits does it require in those who pursue it? What traits is it likely to encourage in them for better and for worse? Report on great leaders in the calling, with special reference to what their work made of them. What are the darker sides of the picture? What efforts are being made today to raise the moral code in this vocation? Sum up the ideal rewards.
We do not mean, of course, that the only problems are those which center around the demands of today for a more just economic and social order. On the contrary, we believe that the movement for social justice is greatly in need of precisely that appreciation of the claims of moral personality which it is the main business of ethical study to promote. But we shall never get our students to profit from their work in social ethics, or in ethical theory, or in any branch of the subject whatever, unless we keep fresh and close the contact with their own experiences and ambitions.
Indeed, we venture to assert that unless this connection is kept unbroken, the subject is not ethics at all but an abstraction which ought to take some other name. Ethics deals with human volitions; but the latter term is meaningless to the student save as he interprets it by his own experiences in the preference of better ways to lower. He knows the difficulties that arise in his own group-associations,—his home or his class or his club, for example,—the conflicts of ambitions, the readiness to shirk one's share of common responsibility, the discordant prides and appetites of one sort and another which lead to overt injustices. All these should be used to throw light upon the living moral problems of group-life in the vocations, in the civic world, in the international order.
Temperamentally, to be sure, the teacher may be inclined to handle his subject in what he prefers to regard as academic detachment. But where the subject is ethics and not dead print, complete aloofness is out of the question. There would be no textbooks in ethics if the men whose convictions are there recorded had not grappled earnestly with problems of vital moment to their day and generation. The crucial questions raised by a changing Athenian democracy were no matters of air-born speculation to Socrates and Plato and Aristotle. Nor is it an accident that the philosopher who so sought to vindicate the worth of man as an end per se should have sent from his apparently isolated study in Königsberg his glad acclaim of the French Revolution. The abounding interest of the English Utilitarians in the economics, the politics, the social reform, of the nineteenth century needs no comment. There are texts for study today because the men who wrote them were keenly concerned about a nobler mode of life for mankind. To invite the student to share their reflections without expecting worthier conduct is to ignore the essential purpose by which those reflections were prompted.
Governing aim in ethics teaching
Hence our first recommendation—that the content of the ethics courses be determined by the principal aim of so interpreting the experiences and interests of the student as to stimulate worthier behavior through a better understanding of the general problem of right human relationships.
Our second recommendation as to aims is suggested by certain extremes in the practice of today. Reference to problems of immediate concern does not mean that ultimate considerations are to be shelved. Indeed, it must rather be stressed that such discussions miss their best object, if they fail to lead to searching reflection upon ultimate standards. The temptation to forego such inquiry today is strong. In their desire to be practical and up-to-date, many teachers are altogether too ready to rest the case for moral obligation upon a kind of easy-going hedonism, the fallacy of provisionalism, as Professor Felix Adler calls it. Tangible "goods" like happiness or "social values" are held up as standards, as if these values were ends in themselves and the problem of an ultimate human worth were irrelevant.
It may very well be a modest attitude to say that we can no longer busy ourselves with the nature of ultimate ends and that we can best employ our energies in trying to define the various goods which contribute now and here to human betterment. Let the effort be made, by all means. But when the last of empirical goods have been examined and appraised (assuming for the moment that we can indeed appraise without possessing ultimate norms) the cardinal question still waits for answer: To what are all these goods instrumental? What kind of life is best? What is it that permits man, with all his faults, his sordid appetites, his meannesses and gross dishonors, to hold his head erect as one yet worthy of the tribute implied in the fact that we have duties toward him?
An answer satisfying to all may never be reached; but to evade these questions is to abdicate the teacher's function. Many young people are led by the biologic teachings of the day to regard man as the utterly helpless product of his environment. Or they are so impressed with the obvious and immediate needs of whole masses for better food, better homes, greater opportunities for culture, that they do not stop to ask whether these goods are worth while in themselves, or if not, what is the deeper purpose to which they should minister. A conception of personality is needed, sufficiently exalted to permit the various immediate utilities to find their due place as tributes to the ideal excellence latent in man; and on the other hand there is need for a view of the spiritual life free from the misuse to which that term is put by the various cults evoked by reaction against modern mechanism. Painstaking inquiry into the grounds upon which the assurance of human dignity can justify itself, has never been more urgently required.[[50]]