With the emergence of those
values, however, everything that affects them becomes significant.
If the complete transformation of our interests would make human life
brighter, fuller of plus values, such a radical alteration, rather
than a harmonization, would be our ideal. As it is, desire points
normally toward the really desirable; the direction of human welfare
lies, in general, along the line of our organic needs, of the avoidance
of clashes, of the mutual subordination and cooperation of natural
impulses. The principle of reason, of intelligence, is necessary in
morality to find this way of cooperation, this ultimate drift of need;
but without the potentiality of happiness chaos would be as good as
order, both within the individual soul and within the social group.
[Footnote: Plato realized this, and in the Philebus points out that
we cannot completely describe morality either in terms of pleasure-pain
or in terms of reason (or wisdom), the organizing principle. Both aspects
of morality are important. Cf, along this line, H. G. Lord, The Abuse
of Abstraction in Ethics, in the James memorial volume.] Do moral acts
always bring happiness somewhere? The ultimate justification of
morality the value of synthesizing our interests, lies in the happiness
men thereby attain. But there is one fundamental doubt that ever and
anon recurs the doubt whether, after all, actions that we agree in
calling virtuous always BRING happiness.
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