Page:Philosophical Review Volume 11.djvu/152

136 and opportunity, not even pleasure is a sufficiently abstract and homogeneous term to admit of an a priori application of distributive justice.

Benevolence, or the principle of increase, becomes then the dominating concept in his system, and justice, or equivalence, is conceived as being worked out by the economic laws of supply and demand. In fact, he seeks to reduce the idea of justice itself to a generalization of the impulses to reward favors and return injuries in kind. "Whenever a man is said to deserve a reward for service to society, the meaning is that it is expedient to reward him in order that he and others may be induced to render similar services by the expectation of similar rewards." Thus is the idea of desert substituted for that of abstract equality, and thus also is justice handed over to the economic system of nature. It is, it will be observed, the same conclusion reached by Guyau, i.e., that distributive justice is really not an ethical principle at all, but merely an economic conception. Le principe: à chacun selon ses œuvres, est un simple principe économique; il résume fort bien l'ideal de la justice commutative et des contrats sociaux, mullement celui d'une justice absolue qui domminent à chacun selon son intention morale. And it is in view of such considerations that Guyau argues for an indifference of ethical values to the working out of values in the external world order. This concept of the indifference of ethical values to nature, when closely examined, resolves itself then into the hypothesis of a relative indifference of two aspects of the fundamental principle of rational sufficiency. The valuing, sanctioning, consciousness, since it springs ultimately out of a striving will, the very principle of whose being is to rise, in the terms of Spinoza to a higher degree of reality, in the terms of the hedonists to higher degrees of pleasure, in the words of the idealists to higher degrees of perfection, can pass judgments ultimately only on the assumption of the possibility of an infinite series of progressive values. On the other hand, the external system of nature, abstracted from the volitional source of valuation, is ultimately conceived in terms of the causal principle of mere equivalence of forces, which is found to have its roots ultimately in a quantitative conception