Page:Philosophical Review Volume 13.djvu/668

654 quality of the volition is its proper moral quality, as an expression of the character of its agent; and that which with greater honor is termed the material rightness is simply the desirability of the object as such, or of the volition as its cause, not an ethical determination at all.

This view of the matter, shared by every possible ethical subjectivism, is the point to which the broad-minded eclectic takes particular exception. Why such violence to the facts? he asks. Why thus disrupt the act as it occurs, making so much ethical and so much non-ethical? Why not include the whole act in the judgment,—motive, intention, real and expected consequences, and all? We reply that we do include the whole act through the entire history of its inception and through the whole course of its influence upon later conduct. But distinctions must be drawn. In the first place (to begin at the beginning), the so-called 'real' consequences of the act do not flow from it alone, but from the whole present constitution of the universe, and in their extent include all future history. If, in our desire for objectivity, we will indeed have nothing less than the whole act, we forbid judgment altogether. But this is clearly not the objector's meaning. There is, or may be, a more or less clearly defined series of events which stand in obvious relation to the act as their cause, in such a manner that, other things being equal, its omission would have meant (and would in general mean) their non-occurrence. These are the consequences of the act which he would have us include in our judgment upon the act itself. But his meaning is not yet clear. He may mean simply that these recognized consequences are, or are not, desirable in themselves; but that is not a moral judgment. He is more apt to mean that the consequences are of such a nature as to make the repetition of the act under like circumstances advisable or inadvisable; but this also is not a moral judgment, though it may easily enter into or be combined with a moral judgment. A deliberate change of practice, consequent upon observation of previous results, may easily take place without the slightest adverse reflection upon the moral quality of the former mode of conduct. But the objector's meaning is still more likely to be, that the