Пятница

Morality is loyalty, the willing and practical and thorough-going devotion of a person to a cause.

- Josiah Royce

...the problem of the human good is as old as human reflection and the answers given have been many and various. To formulate an answer ... is to be dogmatically brief, but extended discussion would carry us too far afield. Briefly, then ... men's choices are the expression of their interests. Some of these are fundamental and some are accidental; some are harmonious and some are conflicting; some are constructive and some are destructive, but all express some partial and momentary phase of the self manifesting itself under the special conditions calling for action. As the individual comes to self-consciousness and begins to take control of his life, his problem becomes that of distinguishing the fundamental from the accidental. the harmonious from the conflicting, the constructive from the destructive and, out of the confused chaos of his natural desires, organizing a life that shall express his final and deliberately chosen self. Generated and controlled as we have seen the self to be, there can be no question that in such a plan of life the social self must have a central and dominating place. We are fundamentally members of a society and the actions that separate us from, or antagonize, our fellows are actions that bring us finally into real contradiction with ourselves and frustrate our true natures...an essential characteristic of the moral choice, that it must be a choice of the common good for its own sake and not merely for the sake of some private advantage involved in it. Only as a man is interested in the social order itself and willing to accept any place in it demanded by the social good, do we call him really social. In this devotion to a cause, a man is freed from the pettiness of his individuality, brought into communion with his fellows and given an object alone adequate to the powers of the self. But this is so only as his interests are really expanded to the measure of the cause and it becomes for him the meaning and justification of his life. The human good is thus an ideal good, whose value is not to be estimated in terms of the sense satisfactions of him who wills it, but is chosen as constituting that larger life with which the individual is alone willing finally and deliberately to identify himself. And this identification must be a self-identification, it cannot be a process wrought out for the individual by forces external to himself. His good, to be really his good, must be one he himself recognizes and appropriates for himself, not one merely imposed upon him by authority, be it that of the family, society, or the church. His ideals must be those of his own experience, expressive of the meaning of his own life, and answering to the needs of his individual self. An order of social life conformed to out of habit, deference, or compulsion, remains a thing external and, in so far, incapable of constituting a man's real good...

(from "The Ethical Basis of the State" by Norman Wilde, 1924)

(05/01/2007)