Page:American Journal of Sociology Volume 11.djvu/245

 ETHICS AND ITS HISTORY

THE DEPENDENCE OF ETHICS ON NATURAL SCIENCE, AND THE IMPORTANT DIFFERENCE BETWEEN ETHICS AS PERSONAL EXPERIENCE AND ETHICS AS A SOCIAL PROFESSION

PROFESSOR ALFRED H. LLOYD The University of Michigan

It is a very commonplace remark that with each new event, or at least with each new important event, in the unfolding of human life and human experience, history needs to be rewritten. This remark, moreover, however commonplace, applies very forcibly to the history of ethics. Perhaps in the case of ethics the disturbing event is psychology; perhaps it is biology; per- haps it is sociology or anthropology; perhaps it is in practical instead of theoretical life, if the two may ever be divorced ; but, whatever or wherever it be, there can be no doubt that the science of ethics, which studies the phenomena of the moral life, is no longer commonly viewed, or even commonly defined in the books, as it used to be, and that the standards of morality in many quarters have changed in significant ways. A change in the definition would be enough to call for a new history.

And so, as my subject, "Ethics and its History," will now suggest, in this paper it is my purpose to indicate what I con- ceive to be the most timely definition of "ethics," and then, by use of an important distinction between ethics as real personal experience and ethics as a social profession, to show, through an illustration or two, how in the history of ethics the definition has been exemplified. To use history as an illustration in this way will be also to indicate how the history itself should be rewritten.

If, then, after the manner of certain mystics, we should begin our present task by seeking a symbol of this wonderful thing which so glibly we are wont to call " human life," we could find

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