Page:Philosophical Review Volume 11.djvu/81

No. 1.] to find such an identity he despairs of any ultimately synthetic principles. Naturally, if one agrees with Mr. Taylor in viewing the 'self' as "a chaotic and mutually repellant aggregate" of "various cravings for satifactionsatisfaction [sic] of various kinds" (p. 254), the conclusions reached in this study in the "phenomenology of ethics" are unavoidable. But these views, reached from such a point of departure, do not furnish an adequate reply to those who find their starting point in a different concept of personality. Of course, Mr. Taylor could retort that here we are relapsing into metaphysical speculation, and point to his refutation of Green's treatment of the 'self' to expose the futility of trying to escape so easily from the rigorous restrictions of a psychological account. But it would not be difficult to show that his own notion of the 'self' is equally metaphysical, or speculative, or abstract as any other concept of the 'self,' and as such exercises inevitable influence upon his mode of viewing the facts of the moral life. Moreover, whatever may be said for or against Hegel's or Green's concepts of selfhood, it is not clear that an examination of 'experienced' facts forces upon us the notion of the 'self' as an aggregate. For example, Butler certainly accentuated the need of appealing to the actual psychological facts of human nature in order to ascertain the nature of morality, and the result was that human nature had to be viewed as a "constitution," "system," or "hierarchy," and not in any sense as a chaotic aggregate. And it cannot be claimed that the one notion is more speculative than the other, although it certainly and necessarily did result in a very different narrative of the empirical facts.

In accordance with the view that "compromise between diametrically opposed principles is the very essence of any moral ideal which can be regarded as even remotely practical," Mr. Taylor defines "the highest practical moral ideal as that of a system of stable social institutions which secure to each of the individuals living under them the most complete and permanent satisfaction compatible with the enjoyment of similar satisfaction by the rest of the community." If a name is necessary, the author is quite willing to have his doctrine called "Universalistic Ethical Hedonism," if we carefully distinguish between ethical and psychological hedonism. The former "merely maintains that, as a matter of fact, the 'good' and the 'pleasant' so far coincide that the pleasantness of a mode of life may be taken as an indication of its moral rightness." The sixth chapter, on "Pleasure, Duty, and the Good," discusses the connection of the author's view with various forms of hedonism, and attempts to defend in some detail what seems to him "the essence of the hedonist position in ethics