Problems of Conduct | Page 4

with their values. Human life is checkered
with the sunshine and shadow of good and evil, joy and pain; it is these
qualitative differences that make it something more than a meaningless
eddy in the cosmic whirl. Natural philosophy (including the physical
and psychological sciences), drawing its impartial map of existence, is
interesting and important; it informs us about our environment and
ourselves, shows us our resources and our powers, what we can do and
how to do it. Moral philosophy asks the deeper and more significant
question, What SHALL we do? For the momentous fact about life is
that it has differences in value, and, more than that, that we can MAKE
differences in value. Caught as we are by the irresistible flux of
existence, we find ourselves able so to steer our lives as to change the
proportion of light and shade, to give greater value to a life that might
have had less. This possibility makes our moral problem. What shall
we choose and from what refrain? To what aims shall we give our
allegiance? What shall we fight for and what against?
For the savage practically all of his activity is determined by his
imperative needs, so that there is little opportunity for choice or
reflection upon the aims of his life. He must find food, and shelter, and
clothing to keep himself warm and dry; he must protect himself from
the enemies that menace him, and rest when he is tired. Nor are most of
us today far removed from that primitive condition; the moments when
we consciously choose and steer our course are few and fleeting. Yet

with the development of civilization the elemental burdens are to some
extent lifted; men come to have superfluous strength, leisure hours,
freedom to do something more than merely earn their living. And
further, with the development of intelligence, new ways of fulfilling the
necessary tasks suggest themselves, moral problems arise where none
were felt before. Men learn that they have not made the most of their
opportunities or lived the best possible lives; they have veered this way
and that according to the moment's impulse, they have been misled by
ingrained habits and paralyzed by inertia, they have wandered at
random for lack of a clear vision of their goal. The task of the moralist
is to attain such a clear vision; to understand, first, the basis of all
preference, and then, in detail, the reasons for preferring this concrete
act to that. Here are a thousand impulses and instincts drawing us, with
infinite further possibilities suggesting themselves to reflection; the
more developed our natures the more frequently do our desires conflict.
Why is any one better than another? How can we decide between them?
Or shall we perhaps disown them all for some other and better way.
Man's effort to solve these problems is revealed outwardly in a
multitude of precepts and laws, in customs and conventions; and
inwardly in the sense of duty and shame, in aspiration, in the instinctive
reactions of praise, blame, contentment, and remorse. The leadings of
these forces are, however, often divergent, sometimes radically so. We
must seek a completer insight. There must be some best way of solving
the problem of life, some happiest, most useful way of living; its
pursuit constitutes the field of ethics. Nothing could be more practical,
more vital, more universally human.
Why should we study ethics?
(1) The most obvious reason for the study of ethics is that we may get
more light for our daily problems. We are constantly having to choose
how we shall act and being perplexed by opposing advantages. Decide
one way or the other we must. On what grounds shall we decide? How
shall we feel assured that we are following a real duty, pursuing an
actual good, and not being led astray by a mere prejudice or convention?
The alternative is, to decide on impulse, at haphazard, after some

superficial and one-sided reflection; or to think the matter through, to
get some definite criteria for judgments, and to face the recurrent
question, what shall we do? In the steady light of those principles.
[Footnote: Cf. Matthew Arnold, Essays in Criticism, vol. i: "Marcus
Aurelius," opening paragraph: "The object of systems of morality is to
take possession of human life, to save it from being abandoned to
passion or allowed to drift at hazard, to give it happiness by
establishing it in the practice of virtue; and this object they seek to
attain by presenting to human life fixed principles of action, fixed rules
of conduct. In its uninspired as well as in its inspired moments, in its
days of languor or gloom as well as in its days of sunshine and energy,
human life has thus always a clue to follow,