Page:Philosophical Review Volume 13.djvu/659

645 at least unnecessarily crude. False the theory may be, but not so flagrantly and obviously false as he supposes. A more searching and sympathetic examination than he feels called upon to give will easily convince us that an extreme subjectivism is far removed from issuing in an anarchy of sentiment and practice. Moral anarchy springs from an exactly opposite source,—from the fatalism that posits the ethical quality of the act in its uncontrolled event, making the agent wicked or beneficent in his own despite.

Without for the present expressing either agreement or disagreement with the subjectivist view, it may repay us to remove some frequent and not unnatural misunderstandings of its meaning. It does not mean that in view of the consequences of an act committed in the belief of its entire tightness, the agent may not conclude that on a similar occasion it would be well to act differently. It does not mean that, though all took place as he had looked for, a deeper consciousness of the manifold interests involved may not convince him of the folly of his act. It does not mean that he may not keenly and lastingly regret that folly. But it does mean that the act was nevertheless a good act; and that the contrary course, though justified by later reflection and by the fortunate issue of events, would have been wrong, absolutely and eternally wrong.

Again, it does not mean that the good man is to rest self-satisfied, content with his ignorance, trusting to the innocence of his intentions, without troubling himself to make those intentions as enlightened as possible. For it is at least possible that increase of knowledge may be among the ends for which he considers it right to strive. Speaking more generally, it is not to be supposed that according to an ethical subjectivism the object of volition is morally indifferent, and that it is only a mysterious abstract quality of rightness or wrongness, attaching somehow to the volition apart from its objective content, that is of moment. On the contrary, for such a theory, the whole contemplated act, as it presents itself to the agent's judgment, is of moment. Because unforeseen consequences and unweighed considerations are eliminated from the act, it does not therefore