that they are traveling in the right direction. That means life and growth. There is room for the building up of the moral code by additional prohibitions through many, many centuries to come, during which society with a clearer vision of the goal of social justice and a richer moral code will ever be moving toward that goal.

In this ideal of social justice we have a criterion to test right and wrong, new and disputed thou-shalt-nots in the ethical code. Let us now further contrast this view with that of a summum bonum as a criterion. According to the latter view we have some ideal of human well-being which constitutes a supreme end, such as pleasure, energism, self-realization, perfectionism, happiness, loyalty, and so on. Now, so goes the argument, as this is what human beings should seek-what they live for-they should use every means to gain such supreme forms of human satisfaction. Of course, if a group of people co-operates to attain any of these conceived forms of welfare, there is labor to be performed and satisfactions to be enjoyed, and these must be distributed in some way. The question arises, Who is to assume the burdens and who is to enjoy the fruits? Shape then this very process of division in such a way as to promote the creation of this conceived highest good. In some cases withhold satisfactions in order to coerce the recalcitrant or indifferent members to bend their efforts in the cause of the highest good. In other cases hold out great shares of the fruits of the joint work of all as prizes to persuade the indifferent or obstinate members. If they, seeing these proffered shares and wanting still more, persist in withholding their especially needed services, then, to persuade them to put forth their efforts in the interest of the highest good, make the prizes greater, even colossal if need be. Such a scheme of distribution is ethical according to this summum bonum view. . The very criterion of ethical rules of division is whether or not they so direct the process of distribution as to serve to the greatest extent the promotion of the summum bonum. The process of apportioning the burdens and blessings of the social order is subordinated to the process of producing the benefits.

(To be concluded)

SOCIOLOGY AS ETHICS1

EDWARD CARY HAYES
University of Illinois

A philosophy is almost as necessary to civilized society as a language. The philosophy that civilized society must have is an ethics-not this or that particular ethics but some ethics or otherthat is to say, some generally accepted idea or ideas adapted to give direction and momentum to life.

The ethics of yesterday was largely based on legalistic religion, on the thought of divine law enforcible by rewards and punishments here and hereafter. Today the fear of hell and hope of heaven and belief in the intervention of "special providence" in behalf of the good man and in disfavor of the bad man play greatly diminished rôles in the control of life. Moreover, deeply as we may regret it, we cannot fail to observe that the sense of divine companionship which so refined and ennobled some lives and developed such staunch ethical reliability has tended to fade out of the social consciousness as anthropomorphic conceptions of God have been replaced by philosophic pantheism or agnosticism. Religious ethics was for a time reinforced by "moral philosophy"; but moral philosophy like that of Kant was unscientific and is now discredited and for most minds dead.

Look at Germany! Neither the religion of Luther nor the philosophy of Kant' guides her life. Her national policy exhibits a more than barbarous unmorality. And moral disintegration is by no means peculiar to Germany. A large part of our own popular fiction consists in the subtlest advocacy of a pseudo-scientific unmorality. If a critic raises his voice in defense of the "midVictorian" decencies and sanctities he is greeted with a chorus

1 Selections from the two opening chapters of a forthcoming book.

2 Kant taught the absolutism of moral law, and Professor Dewey thinks that his influence has degenerated into a prop for the unmoral absolutism of Prussian govern

ment.

1

of scoffs and jeers. We are assured that nothing is wrong that is "natural," that in nature there is no higher and no lower, that altruism is only a form of selfishness, and that reason has no precedence over the instincts that we share with the beasts. Among "the intellectuals,” “the emancipated," "the enlightened youth," the leaders and makers of our future, great numbers are moving rapidly and with gathering momentum toward an abyss not wholly unlike that into which Germany has fallen. That abyss is no less deep and dark and noisome because with us unmorality takes the form of private rather than national individualism.

Now if this doctrine of "the emancipated" is a true statement of the facts of human existence, and if the moral distinction between right and wrong is an old wives' nursery fable designed to scare a juvenile and timorous humanity, outgrown by the men of a scientific age, or if it is an invention devised and perpetuated in the interest of the many weak in order to bind the strong and is an insult to the right and might of supermen-if moral restraints are only an attempt to curb the "natural" current of full, free, and rich life, then we cannot hide the fact from an adult and scientific world, and we may as well plunge at once into the mêlée of ravening beasts and let nonsurvival take the hindmost.

But does that "doctrine of the emancipated" present a true or a false conception of human life? That is the sole question. Are ravening individualism and ruthless war of groups the method of survival for creatures capable of rational organization? Are the characteristic values of human experience obtainable by the unregulated operation of instincts which we share with animals that have not evolved to the level of gregarious life? Are those values obtainable by the operation of any instincts undirected by reason, or do instincts stimulated and guided by the conclusions of reason yield a richer life than irrational impulses do? If so what are the conclusions of adequately enlightened reason that afford the necessary guidance to instinctive promptings? Does the realization of the biggest net total of human values require the subordination of this or that particular instinct to the harmonious totality of experience? Does it even require the organization of the activities of individuals into a regulated system of co-operation? And is it

required by the nature of the situation that men and women, in order to be capable of the richest individual life and capable of social co-operation on which the greatest net total of individual good depends, must have developed personalities that are products not only of biological but also of social evolution? None of these questions can be finally answered by any kind of dogmatizing or conceptual philosophizing, but only by a genuinely unbiased study of the facts of life as it is lived by men in society.

Will the next generation have an ethics? It will not get its ethics by going backward to mid-Victorian dogmas and speculations. If it has an ethics fit for the demands of social order and progress it will discover it by going forward along the path of science-not along the path of a priori speculation or mystic faith, but along the path of science. And the only science that can equip us with an ethics is the scientific study of human life, that is to say of social life, for man's life becomes human in the significant and distinctive sense only in society and by the methods of causation involved in the cumulative effects of association. In other words sociology, whether called by that name or not, is our only hope for an adequate ethics.

The physicists tell us that the chair in which I am comfortably seated is a stable balance of ionic action, and that if this ionic action were released from the orderly system in which it proceeds it would blow me and my whole environment to less than atoms. Similarly the instinctive action of human individuals is correlated into a comfortable social order, and if the energies of instinctive action were released from orderly and systematic control society would pass into dissolution and decay or chaotic explosion. Primitive men could live together only in little hordes. Beyond the horde was war. The organized co-operation of millions is the supreme product of social evolution, an evolution that has been largely unplanned and uncomprehended. That evolution is not complete. The possibilities of social organization and of individual experience for the masses of mankind are as yet unrealized. In every age men of insight and deep human interest have declared the shortcoming of the society to which they belonged and assured us that we live only along the margin of the fields of realization that we might

enter. Even savages and barbarians have had their messianic hopes and prophecies. Unrealized good is always within view and barely beyond our reach. It is beyond us only because there is nowhere a society that has developed an adequate ethics.

Ethics is always founded on an understanding, a theory, or a faith. Change men's ideas and thereupon their sentiments and conduct change. As a man dozing by the fireside is roused to a fury of action if his wife announces that upstairs the attic is in a blaze, so an ambitionless idler may be converted into a zealot, or a stagnant and decadent society may arise to heights of achievement if sufficiently propulsive ideas are adopted. If the sentiments radiated throughout society rose from apprehension or even a remote approach toward apprehension of the human values at stake and of the way in which commonplace conduct fits into a scheme of things on which the realization or forfeiture of these values depends, men might be aroused to a joy in zestful endeavor and a constancy in sentiment and purpose known only to the most fortunate. We might have an enthusiasm of generous motive in time of peace not inferior to that evoked by war. An individual to be happy and powerful and a society to be progressive and constructive must have ideas that are both propulsive and exalted. If there are no such ideas that are true, then individuals and society are doomed to disappointment, disillusionment, and decay. If there are such ideas, then their discovery and promulgation till they are embodied in the common sense of the masses of mankind are the profoundest of all human needs.

The ideas by which individual and social life has been organized during the nineteenth century are fading out from men's minds. The mind of man will learn all that it can learn. That is inevitable and we must take the consequences. We cannot permanently protect faith by any ignorance that science can dispel. First the teachers and then the taught, gradually and increasingly, will discard all illusions and faiths that cannot survive in the presence of all the knowledge that we possess or can acquire. As yet many have neither received the existing knowledge that will ultimately become common property nor come under the influence of teachers who have received it; but this is only a temporary condition.