The Moral Economy

by Ralph Barton Perry

I shall address myself to an individual protagonist whom I shall designate in the second person; and whom I shall suppose to exhibit that yielding reluctance which is the mark of a mind that for very love of truth will not too readily assent.

As I am to prove morality to you, I accept the burden of proof; but you are not on that account totally without responsibility in the matter. As you must not stop your ears, or close your bodily eyes, so you must not shut the eye of the mind, or harden your heart. Were you to adopt such an attitude I should be compelled to set argument aside, and resort to such practical measures as might shock or entice you into reasonableness. Or, I might abandon you as incorrigible. It is {42} clear that I can as little show reasons to a man who will not think them with me, as I can show the road to one who will not look where I point it out. A very large amount of moral exhortation consists in the attempt to overcome apathy and inattention. Such exhortation cannot in the nature of the case be logical, because the subject's logical organ is not as yet functioning. I doubt if there is any discussion of moral matters in common life in which this form of appeal is not present in a measure sufficient to obscure the merits of the question at issue. I desire for present purposes to eliminate as far as possible all conflict and prejudices, and thus to dispense with zeal and eloquence. I shall assume, therefore, that you propose to be reasonable concerning this moral affair. By this I mean simply that you shall directly observe the facts of life, report candidly on these facts, and fully accept the implications of any judgment to which you may commit yourself. I may phrase your pledge of reasonableness thus: "Show what is right, and that it is right, and I will accept it. I mean my action to be good, and ask only to have the good demonstrated to me, that I may intelligently adopt it."

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II

It is commonly believed that whereas the logic of prudence is unimpeachable, there is a hiatus between this level of morality and those above. To drink one's self to death is a species of folly that the poorest intelligence can understand; but the folly in meanness, injustice, or impiety is a harder matter. Believing as I do that the folly is equally demonstrable in all of these cases, I propose not to accept your ready assent in the simpler case until its grounds have been made as clear and definite as possible. I feel convinced that prudence is not so simple a matter as appears; in fact that it involves the whole ethical dialectic.

I find you, let us say, eating an apple with evident relish; and I ask you why. If you are candid, and free from pedantry, you will doubtless reply that it is because you like to. In this particular connection I can conceive no profounder utterance. But we may obtain a phraseology that will suit our theoretical purposes more conveniently and serve better to fix the matter in our minds. Your eating of the apple is a process that tends within certain limits to continue and restore itself, to supply the actions and objects necessary to its own maintenance. I have proposed that we call such a process an interest. In that it is a part of that very complex physical and {44} moral thing called "you," it is your interest, and it also has, of course, its special subject-matter, in this case the eating of an apple. It involves specific movements of body, and makes a specific requisition on the environment. Now, still confining ourselves strictly to this interest, we shall doubtless agree to call any phase of it in which it is fulfilled, in which its exercise is fostered and unimpeded, good. And we shall doubtless agree to attach the same term, although perhaps in a less direct sense, to that part of the environment which it requires, in this case the apple, and to the subsidiary actions which mediate it, such as the grasping of the apple, or the biting and mastication of it. I mean only that these modes or factors of the interest are in some sense good; qualifications and limitations may be adjudicated later.

In this case, which so far as I can see is the simplest possible case of the sort of value that enters into life, the value is supplied by a specific type of process which we may call an interest, and it is supplied thereby absolutely, fundamentally. It makes both this apple and your eating of it good that you should like to eat it. If you could explain every action as you explain this action, when it is thus isolated, there would be no moral problem.

We may now safely open the door to the objections that have been pressing for admission. {45} The first to appear is an old friend among philosophers; but one whose reputation so far exceeds its merits that it must be submitted to vigilant examination. It is objected (I am sure that you have long wanted to say this) that your repast is good for you, good from your point of view, but not on that account really good. These are the terms with which it is customary to confound any serious judgment of truth; and they acquire a peculiar force here because we seem to have invited their application. We have agreed that your action is good in that it suits your interest, and thus seem to have defined its goodness as relative to you. Now, if we are to avoid a confusion of mind that would terminate our investigation here and now, we must bring to light a latent ambiguity.

We have, it is true, discovered goodness to be a phase of a process called "interest," which is qualified further, through the use of a personal pronoun. The nature of goodness, in other words, is such as to involve certain specific relations, here involving a person or subject. Goodness is not peculiar in this respect; for there are very few things in this world that do not involve specific relations. This is the case, for example, with planets, levers, and brothers. There is no planet without its sun, no lever without its fulcrum, no brother who is not somebody's brother.

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