Page:Philosophical Review Volume 29.djvu/360

346 progress. If this needed understanding cannot be supplied, we shall have in place of the universal absolutisms of ethical theory a multiple absolutism of anarchistic individuals and groups.

Ethical theory commonly conceives its office as that of supplying the individual a criterion by which his problems as he sees them can be solved. In the typical case a problem is supposed already to have arisen. The immediate alternatives are then to be defined and what they mean to those whom they nearly or remotely concern is to be made as clear as science and common-sense can make it. And then it is that ethical theory first speaks. It reminds the individual, perhaps, of his innate and inescapable desire for happiness—permanent happiness, of course, as nearly unmixed as may be;—or in another key, it reminds him of his essential and abiding character as a man, the fulfillment of which is his duty; or again, it recalls substantive goods to his notice which, in their independent right or in their relation to human nature, compel his acknowledgment of their intrinsic worth. The course of action most clearly and effectively making for his attainment of the acknowledged ideal is then to be chosen. The ideal, that is to say, becomes, in the use of it which ethical theory sanctions, a conception of the goal or end at which the individual ought to aim. The individual, facing his alternatives, is to attain the goal thus pictured by using his picture of it as a criterion for choice. Such is the perspective in which the matter stands in the view of ethical theory.

Actual experience, however, in such a case is less conventionally simple. From an individual's first sense of disappointment, remorse, or alienation from the unity of his group, to the consideration of a moral problem on its merits is a momentous step—for the clear statement of the elements of a problem is all but equivalent to the required solution. At all events such a statement must presuppose a degree of self-confidence and intellectual detachment which is quite foreign to the feelings of isolation, chagrin and self-distrust out of which a moral problem has to take its rise. And clearly whatever part an ideal may play in a