Page:American Journal of Sociology Volume 10.djvu/330

 318 THE AMERICAN JOURNAL OF SOCIOLOGY

The standard by which we judge a social policy must be a mul- tiple standard, like the compensating pendulum of a reliable clock. The standard here assumed as valid includes the following ideas : (i) Welfare, well-being analyzed into its various unanalyzable elements of health, wealth, knowledge, beauty, sociability, ethical Tightness, and religious faith is the most general conception involved (analysis of A. W. Small). (2) The welfare of all men, not of a limited class, must be the ideal, the regulative principle. Neither the political will of a democratic age nor the authority of an ethical philosophy countenances any standard for social con- duct which is not universal, purely human. Persons cannot ethically be treated as means to ends outside themselves. No policy which is partial to a family, a dynasty, an order, a church, a class, at the expense of others, can be defended. (3) Therefore our standard is set up for the defense of the helpless child, the undeveloped, the tardy, the incapable; not because of what they can now do for society, but because they are human and have potential capacity for future development. (4) The analysis of social ends shows that we include all qualities and kinds of the humanly desirable. As a nature-object every person must have a certain minimum of food and shelter, and, normally, the race-interest asks for provi- sion for propagation, maintenance, and protection of healthy off- spring. Hence the demand of our standard that all capable human beings have a chance to work and produce wealth, material objects of desire. As a psychical person, one who must find his own way in a knowable world, each human being must be taught what he can learn of the knowledge possessed by his community, and his power to learn must be developed. Culture must be many- sided, even in an asylum for idiots or a prison for the criminal. (5) Scientific social ethics transcends merely qualitative analysis of social elements of welfare, and is ambitious to employ mathe- matics as far as possible in the accurate and quantitative measure- ment of its standard. Our age is trying to define at least a mini- mum standard of life for all citizens. This process has already gone farther than many citizens are aware. The standardizing of weights and measures is a recent addition to the functions and offices of our federal government at Washington, and it marks an