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

  • Davies, Arthur Ernest.
Date:
1909
Catalogue details

Licence: In copyright

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

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    The self never is, and never can be, anything but a social con- cept. It is obvious, therefore, that in the case of the moral self we are dealing with that form of reconciliation of the opposing social forces —the personal and the individual—which is made possible by the moral ideal. We may say that the moral ideal is an ideal of a moral self in so far as it secures prospectively the harmony of relations in which the well-being of society consists. From this standpoint we can see that when the moral ideal becomes, in Hume’s phrase, a ‘party’ to our moral concerns, a shifting of the relations between the factors of the moral status takes place. It is doubtless true that the moral ideal can get introduced as a working ideal into our social concernments only as it is thought by the individual. But it is also true that it never is thought within the limits of the individual’s private experience. To think the ideal in a final and complete way is to think beyond all actual experience. The ideal is, as Kant insists, a formulation, in advance of experience, of what it is best that experience shall realize. The ideal is a socius to which we must now become reconciled, and within which we must now seek to realize our highest good. It is a society beyond any existing community, one that includes the principles of control for all individual and personal moral effort. By such a moral ideal the individual is freed from the tryanny of social convention, and society is freed from the misguidance of merely individual impulses. Groups of men, as well as individual men, find the highest life when they live not in the favor of one another, but in that freedom from external restraint which is secured by the moral ideal. The moral ideal is the center and source of moral autonomy. Thus, to maintain under the changing circum- stances of finite existence such relations with the moral ideal as lead to the constant realization of the life which the ideal itself embodies—that it is to be free. To be free is to be, at this time and in this place, a moral self.