The ethical philosopher cannot, hence, confine himself
to developing deductively the implications of some
principle or principles assumed without critical examination.
He must establish the validity even of his principles.
This we should bear in mind when we approach the study
of the different ethical schools.
THE MATERIALS OF ETHICS
17. HOW THE MORALIST SHOULD PROCEED.—The
above reflections on method suggest the materials
of which the moralist should avail himself in rearing
the edifice of his science.
(1) Evidently he should reflect upon the moral judgments
which he finds in himself, the moral being with whom
he is best acquainted. He should endeavor to
render consistent and luminous moral judgments which,
as he finds, have too often been inconsistent and
more or less blind.
(2) He should take cognizance of his own setting—of
the social conscience embodied in the community in
which he lives.
(3) And since, as we have seen, the significance,
either of the individual conscience, or of the social
conscience revealed in custom, law and public opinion,
can hardly become apparent to one who does not bring
within his horizon many consciences individual and
social, he should enlarge his view so as to include
such. The moralists, in our day, show an increasing
tendency to pay serious attention to this mass of
materials. They do not confine their attention
to the moral standard which this man or that has accepted
as authoritative for him, nor to that accepted as
authoritative in a given community. They study
man— man in all stages of his development
and in material and social settings the most diverse.
(4) Nor should the student of ethics overlook the
work which has been done by those moralists who have
gone before him. He who has studied descriptive
anatomy is aware of the immense service which has been
done him by the unwearied observations of his predecessors;
observations which have been put on record, and which
draw his attention to numberless details of structure
that would, without such aid, certainly escape his
attention. Ethics is an ancient discipline.
It has fixed the attention of acute minds for many
centuries. He who approaches the subject naively,
without an acquaintance with the many ethical theories
which have been advanced and the acute criticisms
to which they have been subjected, will almost certainly
say what someone has said before, and said, perhaps,
much better. The valor of ignorance will involve
him in ignominious defeat.
(5) It is evident that the moralist must make use
of materials offered him by workers in many other
fields of science. The biologist may have valuable
suggestions to make touching the impulses and instincts
of man. The psychologist treats of the same,
and exhibits the work of the intellect in ordering
and organizing the impulses. He studies the phenomena
of desire, will, habit, the formation of character.
The anthropologist and the sociologist are concerned
with the codes of communities and with the laws of
social development. The fields of economics,
politics and comparative jurisprudence obviously march
with that cultivated by the student of ethics.
