Page:Philosophical Review Volume 26.djvu/48

36 so must be learned by observation and experience, nor is it to base ethical judgments on emotion or the moral sense. The mores have regard to utility, and they incorporate likes and antipathies, but they are more complex in composition and sanction than the standards of the older theories. Yet to regard the mores as not merely accounting for past standards but as the only source of future standards is, if possible, more definitely in contradiction with rationalism than were utilitarianism and the moral sense theory.

This position has been most directly challenged by rationalism and by idealism; it is however implicitly antagonized by certain realistic theories. The rationalistic criticism is illustrated by Rashdall's Is Conscience an Emotion. One line of the idealistic criticism is connected with a general method that deserves fuller mention, namely the study of values.

The conception of value has been brought into prominence primarily from metaphysical interests on the one hand and economic studies on the other. In its first source it marks in part the same opposition to naturalism that has been already noted in connection with biological ethics. Nature knows no values. Natural science exhibits only a world of description. But besides this there is a world of appreciation. In part the metaphysical source is not merely anti-naturalistic but anti-intellectualistic. The Ritschlian theology has sought to base itself on judgments of value. In economics wide reaching social claims were based on conflicting theories of value. Is the "true" value of goods to be measured by labor or by competitive demand? The great issue of the justice or injustice of our present economic and social order was joined on this alternative, and the first step was evidently an investigation of value in general. It would be only a novice in human nature that would expect men's decision upon the respective justice of individualism and socialism to be settled by a psychological analysis of the process of valuation. None the less the inquiry thus begun has joined forces with the other interests in the problem of values and a considerable literature has been evoked. Much of this has dealt with ethics only incidentally, but it is instructive to see