Page:Philosophical Review Volume 11.djvu/643

627 greatly exceeding anything that a hedonistic theory could justify. "Let us suppose," he says, "some good and wise man to train his family of children. ... Certain virtues must be enforced by painful discipline. ... This enforcement bears heavily upon the susceptibilities for current pains and pleasures of each member of the community. What is the warranty for this disciplinary suppression of the pleasures ... of this small community? It must be found in the interests of their relations to a larger community. But this larger community ... cannot pursue virtuously its own maximum of pleasures ... if the pursuit is conducted without any regard to the next generation [and so on]. ... It seems to me [Professor Ladd concludes] that we are all entitled to a release from the obligation to suffer so much as respects the attainable maximum of our own happiness, if this suffering is a mere form of functioning in the interests of the happiness of others" (pp. 485-6). Now, in the first place, it is of course possible that a hedonist would consider that we do in fact tend (at least in theory) to exalt the merits of discipline and self denial too much, and that this tendency might be moderated with advantage. And I do not observe that Professor Ladd sufficiently reckons with this very obvious reply. But, in the second place, Professor Ladd surely greatly exaggerates the amount of pain we habitually undergo on be- half of posterity. Of course people in general assume, as they naturally must do, that the present order of things and their own part and relationships in it will not suffer any immediate or abrupt termination, and they are bound in reason to take measures accordingly. But perhaps we may doubt whether most people pay any greater regard to the good of posterity than is involved in this not very violent assumption. With the remaining topics of the third division of the work, I will not attempt to deal. I find Professor Ladd's own theory of the Moral Ideal too vague to be capable of any definite criticism; and his discussions of the relations of morality to religion involve too much reference to his general metaphysical views to be satisfactorily dealt with in a review of the present work.