THE MORAL CONCEPTS
146. GOOD AND BAD; RIGHT AND WRONG.—As
a rule, men reflect little touching the moral terms
which are on their lips every day. It is well
worth while to take some of them up and to turn them
over for examination.
We may use the terms “good” and “bad,”
“right” and “wrong,” in a very
broad sense. A “good” trick may be
a contemptible action; the “right” way
to crack a bank-safe may be the means to the successful
commission of a crime. Evidently, the words,
thus used, are not employed in a moral sense.
When we pass judgments from the moral point of view,
we concern ourselves with men and with their actions,
and measure them by the standard of the social will.
Men and actions are “good,” when they can
meet the test. Actions are “right”
or “wrong,” when they are in accordance
with the dictates of the moral law, or are at variance
with them. That an act may be both right and
wrong, when viewed from different standpoints, even
on moral ground, we have seen in Chapter XXX.
A man may mean to do right, and may, through ignorance
or error, be guilty of an act that we condemn.
To the intelligent, confusions are here unnecessary.
But the history of ethics is full of confusions in
just this field.
147. DUTY AND OBLIGATION.—Verbal usage
sometimes justifies the use of one of these words,
and sometimes that of the other. We say:
I did my duty; we do not say: I did my obligation.
But this is a mere matter of verbal expression, and
we are really concerned with two names for the same
thing.
(1) There has been much dispute as to whether the
sense of duty or moral obligation can or cannot be
analyzed. It has been declared unanalyzable and
unique. Some think this a point of much importance
which imparts a peculiar sacredness to the sense of
duty.
There appears no reason why this position should be
taken. No one has been able to analyze into its
ultimate sensational elements the peculiar feeling
one has when one is tickled. But this does not
make the feeling sacred or awe-inspiring. The
authority of the sense of duty must be looked for
in another direction—and authority it has.
(2) I have spoken of the “sense” of duty.
We all recognize that, when we are faced with a duty,
a feeling is normally present. But the whole
argument of this volume has maintained that man is
not to be treated only as the subject of emotions.
He is a rational being. In some persons feeling
is very prominent; in others it is less so. It
is quite conceivable that, in a given case, a man
capable of reflection should recognize that he is
confronted with a duty, and yet that he should feel
no impulse to perform it. Did no one ever feel
any such impulse, the whole system of duties, the
whole rational order of society itself, would dissolve
and disappear.
Fortunately, the normal man does feel an impulse to
perform duties recognized as such. And in the
case of those exceptional persons who do not, society
strives to supply surrogates, extraordinary impulses
based upon a system of rewards and punishments.
This is a mere supplement, and could never keep alive
a society from which the sense of duty had disappeared.
