Page:American Journal of Sociology Volume 8.djvu/792

 77 2 THE AMERICAN JOURNAL OF SOCIOLOGY

The relation of ethics to sociology bristles with difficulties. In the first place, ethics aspires not only to explain phenomena, but to appraise them. It differentiates ends. It values actions. It assumes the role of a normative science, whereas sociology does not venture beyond the causes and laws of the phenomena it considers. But there is an ethics that aims to understand, not to appraise, and it is this ethics alone which is on a footing with sociology.

Again, ethics may undertake to explain actions, or it may limit itself to those actions which affect other persons, i.e., conduct. Usually it has ignored what are termed " indifferent actions" and addressed itself to classifying and explaining the feelings, choices, and judgments of men in respect to modes of conduct. It is, of course, only in this sense that ethics can be accounted a social science.

Now, is this " science of conduct " a semi-sovereign member of a federal empire or only a province in a unitary state ? The answer depends upon the relative importance in ethical phe- nomena of special and general factors.

As regards choices, men are brought to take a socially safe line of conduct by all manner of sanctions, suggestions, standards, ideals, and valuations imposed from without. With all this social control there co-operate, however, two specific impulses sym- pathy and the sense of justice. These are other-regarding, it is true, but they do not seem to have their origin in the influence of man on man. The one has its roots in instinct, the other is an off -shoot from early mental growth.

Still more marked is the private factor in the judgments that men in their capacity of disinterested spectators pass upon the conduct of other men. If these judgments were always grounded on social utility, if they invariably encouraged safe actions, and discouraged unsafe actions, they would amount to a self- preserving instinct in society. They would be functional, just as courts and reform schools are functional. Collective judgments as to good and bad would be, in effect, institutions strong, upright pillars of society.

But, in point of fact, people do not praise or blame altogether