Page:American Journal of Sociology Volume 15.djvu/131

 REVIEWS iiy

authority, that is, that the moral judgment is entirely or partially determined by the will of some particular personality, as the will of God, supposedly revealed in the Bible.

The author thus narrows his problem down as follows: The "foreign pressure theory" or the view that the custom of the group determined the moral judgment of the individual, is bound up with the conception that (i) the judgment is immediate, that is, formed without reference to welfare, and (2) that it is due to the influence of some authoritative personality or institution. He then reviews the evidence collected from his investigation with a view to deter- mine the validity of these two latter points of view.

His results are as follows: He finds that the students of both groups, with few and unimportant exceptions, agree in founding their judgments upon the welfare of the persons concerned, and moreover that those who evinced a belief in the authority of the Bible as a revelation of the will of God as a living reality neverthe- less were not appreciably influenced by its standards. Finding therefore that both immediacy and authority in the moral judgments were lacking, that is, that the judgments were formed with regard to the welfare of the persons concerned and without any external volitional pressure, he concludes that the current conception of the influence of custom on morality is incorrect.

The method employed and the carefulness of the procedure call for recognition. While the questionnaire method is of course open to many objections, where carefully guarded and supplemented as here by personal interviews, it comes nearer bringing one to the heart of many problems than any other method. It seems very doubtful, however, whether the author has found what he thinks he has, that is, whether the evidence proves his main contention. The fault lies not in the method used, but in the author's conception of the relation of the individual to the social consciousness in which he lives. The setting of the standards of the individual over against the standards of the society in which he has been reared, is a fallacy that is rather antiquated. What the author has really shown, and this is extremely important for ethics, is that the judgments of the average individual are based upon a consideration of the actual welfare of the persons affected, and that so-called absolute standards of conduct are really not followed in the judgments of common sense. A number of the students examined (as No. 215, p. 99) showed that a theory of the existence of an absolute standard may