The moral life : a study in genetic ethics / by Arthur Ernest Davies.

  • Davies, Arthur Ernest
Date:
1909
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Licence: In copyright

Credit: The moral life : a study in genetic ethics / by Arthur Ernest Davies. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    individual; it is the principle under which he has been fashioned, and which, through all the growth of moral life, gets wider and more complete exemplification. Therefore we may Icok upon the individual as a joint cause with the moral community in its reali- zation of the moral ideal. The causation of the moral life that is, is never a vis a lergo; it is a conjoint operation of the essential elements of the situation which is awaiting determination. Hence, it is pertinent to remark that to find the explanation of moral behavior in the strongest motive, whatever view one may take of the ‘strong- est,’ does not meet the demands of the problem of freedom. The strongest motive never determines the resulting behavior, because morality implies a complex of motives which sum up all that is pertinent to the issue. But when the individual is reckoned among the causes of moral action, it should not be forgotten that the indi- vidual needs that determination and direction which society affords if what he does is to issue in the freedom of a moral organization. The conclusion, therefore, at which we arrive, is that there is no warrant in a study of the moral facts for predicating freedom as the positive and exclusive attribute of the individual agent. This is true equally of primitive and advanced peoples. The child of Western civilization is, in this regard, on a level with the child of savage origin. Here, then, there is little, except perhaps in the emphasis which is given to the contributing factors, to distinguish the problem of freedom from the problem of motive. Indeed, so intimately connected at bottom are they that Green held that the question of freedom is the question of the origin of motives.* It is perhaps not so much a difference in doctrine, as a difference due to our method of approach to the moral problem, that we prefer to state the relation in converse order. It would then appear that the question of motive is the question of the origin of freedom. We should not say, as would Green, that the individual acts under motives—that is, under the idea of personal good—because he is free; but the empirical fact seems to be that he becomes free as the result of acting under motives. Freedom, consequently, is condi- * Prolegomena to Ethics, p. 100.