Aspects of Value [Reprint 2016 ed.] 9781512802214

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T h e Martin G. Brumbaugh Lectures in Education Third Series

ASPECTS OF VALUE

T h e Martín G. Brumbaugh Lectures in Education

Foundations of Education T h e Emergence of the Modern Mind ASPECTS O F VALUE

Aspects of Value edited by

FREDERICK C. GRUBER Associate Professor of Education University of Pennsylvania

Philadelphia University of Pennsylvania Press

© 1959 by the Trustees of the University of Pennsylvania Published in Great Britain, India, and Pakistan By the Oxford University Press London, Bombay, and Karachi

Library of Congress Catalog Card Number 59-9200

Published in the United States of America

The Martin G. Brumbaugh Lectures in Education T h e Martin G. Brumbaugh Lectures in Education were begun in the summer of 1956 to provide an opportunity for the general public and the educators of the greater Philadelphia area to join the students at the University of Pennsylvania in hearing lectures by distinguished scholars who represent some of the academic disciplines which form the foundation for current American educational theory and practice. Previous Brumbaugh Lecturers have been: 1956

FOUNDATIONS OF EDUCATION

J . Donald Butler, Princeton Theological Seminary August B. Hollingshead, Yale University J . W. Tilton, Yale University Thomas Woody, University of Pennsylvania 1957

T H E E M E R G E N C E OF T H E M O D E R N

MIND

Ethel J . Alpenfels, New York University Abraham Edel, The City College of New York Perry Miller, Harvard University Conway Zirkle, University of Pennsylvania T h e present volume, Aspects of Value, makes the third series of addresses available to the general public. 5

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Thanks is hereby given to authors and publishers for permission to quote from their published works and to all who have contributed to the success of the series, especially to Professor Elizabeth F. Flower for her assistance in selecting the lecturers.

Martin G. Brumbaugh, 1862-1930, was the first professor of pedagogy at the University of Pennsylvania, occupying the chair from 1895 to 1905. Subsequently, he rendered distinguished service as Commissioner of Education in Puerto Rico under President McKinley, as Governor of the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania, and as President of Juniata College.

CONTENTS T h e Martin G. Brumbaugh Lectures in Education T h e 1958 Brumbaugh Lecturers

Page 5 9

Editor's Preface

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Some Present-Day Disagreements in Moral Philosophy by Elizabeth F. Flower

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Values in the History of Ideas by Philip P. Wiener

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Social Interests and Value by Thomas A. Cowan

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Value Conflicts and the Education of Our Young by John L. Childs

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The 1 9 5 8 Brumbaugh Lecturers J O H N L . C H I L D S is Professor Emeritus of Education at Columbia University, where he took his doctorate. He joined the staff of Teachers College in 1928. He served as graduate secretary of the University of Wisconsin YMCA from 1912 to 1916 when he became Foreign Secretary to the International Committee of the YMCA in Peking, China, a post which he occupied till 1927. He was the first chairman of the New York State Liberal party, and is a member of the National Committee on Academic Freedom and the American Civil Liberties Union. His many published works include: Philosophy of Religion, America, Russia and the Communist Party, The Public School and Spiritual Values, and Education and Morals. T H O M A S A. C O W A N is Professor of Law at Rutgers University. After taking degrees in law and philosophy at the University of Pennsylvania, he spent two years as research fellow in the Harvard Law School. He was then called to Washington where he spent two years as special attorney for the United States Department of State. Before coming to his present position, he taught philosophy at the University of Pennsylvania and at the University of Louisiana. Among his numerous publications are: Readings in Ethics, Administrative Law in Action, and Readings in Jurisprudence. E L I Z A B E T H F . F L O W E R is Associate Professor of Philosophy at the University of Pennsylvania and sometime visiting associate professor at Barnard College of Columbia 9

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University. Her major interest is the study of value judgments, particularly in the light of American legal theory. She has written on the status of normative statements and on the relationship of philosophy to the political environment in Latin America, where she has lectured extensively. She is a graduate of Wilson College and the University of Pennsylvania. P H I L I P P . W I E N E R is Professor of Philosophy in T h e City College of New York. After receiving his doctorate from the University of Southern California, he studied at the University of Paris. His numerous publications include Studies in the Philosophy of C. S. Peirce, Leibnitz, and Evolution and Founders of Pragmatism. H e is co-founder, and since 1940, managing editor of the Journal of the History of Ideas.

Editor's Preface In the summer of 1858, Wallace and Darwin issued a joint statement concerning a theory of biological evolution, and scarcely a year later Darwin published his Origin of Species. T h e theory that man is somehow coexistent with nature has been met with opposition, incredulity, skepticism, and acceptance, but it has not and cannot be ignored. T h e hundred years intervening have well been called " T h e Century of Charles Darwin." During this period, Gibbs, Einstein, and others have developed new methods and approaches in mathematics and physics which have further demonstrated that we live in a relative and contingent universe. These events have disturbed the neat universe of Aristotle with its static logic, its fixed categories, and its rigid standards of morals which had been the pattern of Western life for a thousand years, for, as Nietzsche staunchly maintained, these moral values could not be grafted to the evolutionary naturalism of Darwin. Other ideas which stimulated a reassessment of our value systems were the egalitarianism of Locke and the utilitarianism of J . S. Mill with its hedonistic principle of the greatest good for the greatest number. Social evolutionists like Herbert Spencer saw in Darwin's "survival of the fittest" a defense of rugged individualism and of a laissezfaire governmental policy with regard to private enterprise. Like the Greek city states, as Professor Wiener points out, our economy was built upon slavery and cheap immigrant labor. Now that we have come to accept a broader concept of citizenship in our democratic society, and human relationships and natural rights are being 11

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questioned, "the sins of the fathers" are being visited upon the children. T h e last generation has also seen the rise of two regressive, but extremely powerful totalitarian movements: fascism and communism. Both ideologies spring from the historical determinism of Hegel. Believing in the ultimate triumph of the proletariat through the evolutionary force of history, communism almost completely rejects freedom as a natural right of the individual. Freedom is realized only when the individual subjects himself to the collective will of the state as determined by a self-perpetuating, carefully selected party, and engages in a sort of holy war for the extermination of the middle class. Political fascism seeks ultimate peace and human welfare through the domination of a superior race or nation over all others. It rejects completely the idea of equality and believes that the supreme authority of the dominant group must rest eventually in a superior individual chosen by destiny or some other non-human means. Although Germany and Italy were defeated in the Second World War, fascism is by no means dead. Some of its basic principles can be found in almost every phase of our social structure. Communism, fascism, and their variants appeal to the have-nots by promising them something they have never known (fulfillment of the promise is problematic) or by offering a sense of mental, emotional, and spiritual security. Whether the solution of the present dilemma is through surrender to a rigid system of thought and action, or through the application of the best methods man has been able to develop to fight his way through to a broader and more complete view of what it means to be good and to live the good life, is a moot question. We do not have to be a Spengler living in fear of the imminent destruction of Western civilization to realize that we are living in a crisis culture. T o be sure, it is not the only or final

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crisis culture, but the mental and emotional adjustments from a pre-Copernican and a pre-Darwinian world to the atomic age are surely difficult ones. Perhaps Dewey was right when he wrote: "Intellectually speaking the centuries since the fourteenth are the true middle ages." In the last two decades, we have lost much of our confidence in the ability of science to solve all our problems, possibly as Professor Cowan remarks, "because science has not taken account of human feelings in its fact-finding processes." We are beginning to realize the importance of intuition and emotion in art and human relations, but we do not know what this influence is, exactly, or how to use it, or to what purpose. We see these forces operative in what Professor Childs calls the three main problems of American life today: the integration of racial and other minority groups who have been declared equal before the law, the determination of just relations between capital and labor, and the rôle of the United States in international affairs. Can one standard of values be applied to the solution of all these problems, or in a pluralistic society such as ours does each problem press for its own solution; or, again, as Professor Flower suggests, do we have a right to ask such questions at all? It is into this culture that we must initiate our young. Since we ourselves cannot always be sure of the shape and direction of the future, we must prepare our children to meet change positively and courageously. The American public schools are organized and maintained to preserve and to promote our democratic way of life. Therefore, they cannot sidestep our most pressing problems, nor can they be indifferent to the inculcation of moral and spiritual values. In order to explore what these values are, how they have been formed, and how their validity can be determined, four distinguished scholars have been asked to contribute to setting the foundation

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for value judgment in American public education. Professor Flower is concerned with how value judgments can be made. Professor Wiener addresses himself to the persistence of value judgments in the history of ideas, and Professors Cowan and Childs raise some specific questions with regard to what we are doing today in law and education. In the first essay, Professor Flower describes the "stuff or content of ethics" as "questions of what actions are right, what things are to be valued, of how we ought to live." In the last essay, Professor Childs reminds us that "value preference lies at the basis of every organized program of education." But the determination of what is right and the inculcation of what is good cannot be worked out by a time and motion study. "Educators," Childs continues, "have learned . . . that there can be no precise scientific determination of value judgments. Scientific study . . . has not been able to develop an authoritative statement of what educational objectives should be." "Reason," says Flower, "cannot decide the attractiveness of one decision over the other or recommend the beneficial over the pernicious, these are matters of affection," and Cowan adds: "Feelings will not be ruled by thought. Law without feeling is plain tyranny, and education without feeling is intellectual aggression, or worse, still, the brutal morality of gross collective opinion. Education should broaden its concept of excellence to include training in sentiment." He concludes: "Scientific generalization must be changed to include feeling-toned relatedness. Measurements must give way to decision making. Science and morals must be combined in a grand overall theory of decision." " I t is manifestly a difficult thing," comments Childs, "to make unifying policies for the public school when the public which the school serves is divided about the impli-

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cations of our democracy for current life practices." And in response to the question: What do people want? Cowan replies: "We do not really want anything you can mention." But perhaps we do know what we want. Every individual in the free world wants, for himself at least, freedom, welfare, equality, and peace: freedom both for individual self-realization and from oppressive governmental and organizational control; welfare for the pursuit of happiness and the good life; equality and the recognition of human dignity and worth as a material right from the Creator; and peace within the framework of democratic liberty. Unfortunately, many men are not convinced of the "togetherness" about which Cowan writes, especially in " T h e Magic Garden," nor, do we realize fully the impact of John Donne's plea for brotherhood in the lines, "Ask not for whom the bell tolls. It tolls for thee," or the neighborliness of the Good Samaritan. T h e importance of the public schools in realizing these values cannot be over-estimated. Childs says: "It is not an exaggeration to say that the kind of education American children now receive may even determine whether our democratic civilization will survive." And after commenting upon Dewey's common faith in social, economic, and political equality of opportunity and active participation in the common good, Wiener concludes: " T o ignore these values is not only to fail to understand American history, but worse, to betray and deliver it to the enemies of democracy. . . . T h e lesson for education is that we have not really lived democratically in the full sense. We must make greater efforts to achieve, individually and co-operatively, the richer life for all." Philadelphia,

1958 FREDERICK C .

GRUBER

ASPECTS OF VALUE

Some Present-Day Disagreements in Moral Philosophy ELIZABETH F .

FLOWER

In this moment of crisis—when each of us anxiously awaits the next broadcast about the international situation—perhaps to speak of such technical matters as the following requires justification. Once in a discussion less removed from the practical than this is, I heard Felix Cohen, that champion of the underprivileged and those without privilege, protest that he came to philosophers to find what justice guarantees to men dispossessed of political rights only to find us arguing about meaning, verification, and the "naturalistic fallacy." It may be argued that decisions rather than critique are needed today, proposals rather than analyses, the wisdom of a Plato rather than the skepticism of a Socrates. And yet, there is a continuing need for clarification and criticism since each moment has its crisis that would postpone sober review; our only hope of escape from intransigent presents lies in an examination not alone of whether we are doing what is right or good but, more fundamentally, of what it means to make the claim that an action is right or good. i These last two questions, though interrelated, are different in kind. Questions of what actions are right, of what 19

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things are to be valued, of how we ought to live are substantive moral issues. These are the stuff and content of ethics. If we made no such judgments or had no convictions, there would be no ethics at all. T h e y are data for ethics in much the sense that observations and low order generalizations are data for science. But there are analytic or higher order issues which look beyond the judgments actually made toward the theory of moral judgments and which concern, for example, the meaning of the terms "right," "good," "ought," the use of moral language, the grounds for adjudicating competing claims of right and the nature of the justification of value statements generally. These methodological or epistemological problems are to be our concern today. Such issues are implicit in nearly every political and social discussion; they are explicit in the papers of Professors Cowan and Childs a n d Wiener; they are omnipresent in the multitude of daily choices and decisions; and they are central to the history of ethical theory as well as to its current debates. Although the distinction between substantive and analytic is of rather recent vintage in ethical theory, philosophers have been speaking to both kinds of issues since Socrates. T h e distinction probably cannot be sharply maintained, b u t it is a valuable reminder that there masquerade under the single grammatical form of a question various dimensions of appropriate responses. Now a m a j o r (analytic) issue of contemporary ethical debate concerns the nature of appropriate replies to ethical questions, especially those beginning with tuhy. W e can detect a difference, not only in content, between such information-seeking questions as, "Why does acid t u r n litmus paper red or a stick appear to bend w h e n placed in water?" on the one hand, and such questions as, "Why are whales mammals, the angles of a triangle equal to 180°, or the objectives of preferential balloting

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not realizable simultaneously?" We are also familiar with another extreme: questions that demand no information at all. Who of us has not been plagued by the persistent and endless why's of a youngster who is seeking reassurance rather than answers in the ordinary sense. Adults also ask similar questions. From the saccharine, "Tell me why the ivy twines" to the anguish-laden "My God, why hast Thou forsaken me?" may be a far cry, but they are alike in that a minimum of information is appropriate. Can you imagine the amazement that would follow some such questions as, "Why must he have died so young?" if the reply were an account of medical malfunctions. And the question, "Why must I die at all?" is met in Spanish existentialism with a resolve to live so that if I in my individuality, my person, with my history, desires, hopes, and decisions am not immortal, my death will damn the world as unjust as its core. These latter questions speak to the emotions and needs of people, to their loneliness and despair; and fitting responses to them generally encourage, persuade, or inspire rather than inform. Queries about our behavior are susceptible to various kinds of answers illustrated above in the extremes. Consider the following pair, "Why did you drop the teacup?" "Because I was startled by the backfire." Aiid, "Why did you repay the loan?" "Because that was the right thing to do." Now both answers offer reasons for having acted, but the first is (or appears to be) akin to the litmus example and is demonstrably true or false in the manner of any factual statement. The point at issue, however, is the kind of relation that holds in the second: Is it factually or logically evidential or is it essentially like the non-informative replies? More than two thousand years ago, Socrates asked why a man should be just even if he were thereby to gain no reward beyond the consciousness of his rectitude. You

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will remember that the answer was not a brief one and required examination not only of justice and virtue but of ideal government and education. After having studied the Republic at length, some students complain that the answer to the question had eluded them. It seems to me that the kind of solution Socrates was after was precisely one which would unite the kinds of questions distinguished at the outset; that is to say, he sought to give a rational explanation of the first sort that would thereby provide the grounds and the commitment for action. T o be sure, this was not a scientific explanation in today's terms; but in so far as it was a systematic and comprehensive attempt to relate all facets of our knowledge and experience, and by so relating, to explain, it is not at variance with the aims of scientific theory. Similarly, other great systematic philosophies of the ancient and medieval world felt little need to distinguish the truths and proofs of knowledge generally from those of morals, for moral laws were taken to be derivable from the real nature of man by the same methods that physical laws derive from the nature of the world, and both were ultimately thought to rest on the same order. In medieval philosophy, the will and reason of God further bound rational moral explanation to its obligatory quality. Later Kent continued the tradition of the intimate relation between moral experience and other experience by offering a powerful demonstration that the ultimate ground of morality is rationality. It is ironic indeed that Kent's formulation of the problem should have been used in the twentieth century to widen the breach between ethical and scientific matters. But even before Kent, in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries when metaphysical questions about the nature of reality were being recast as epistemological ones about the limits and validity of knowledge, philosophers

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questioned whether moral knowledge was of a piece with mathematical and empirical knowledge, apart from considerations of practice. Locke found no way of handling "inalienable rights" consistent with the rest of his empirical method. And Hume, despite the subtitle of his treatise, . . . an attempt to introduce the experimental method of reasoning into moral subjects, seems to have doubted that ethical statements, those containing an ought or right, could be validated or established by the same methods as factual or is statements. In the twentieth century, when epistemological problems were focussed on issues of meaning and on the criteria of meaningful questions, it was argued that the task of ethics was not to account for the validity of ethical statements, but for their obligatoriness, for their imperative, binding, or persuasive role. Thus, the domain of the Socratic inquiry has been split in two. II

At the close of the last century, Henry Sidgwick set the stage for our present concern. Addressing much the same question that Socrates had posed, he concluded in an edition of the Methods of Ethics that the tendency to promote the happiness of others is among the ordering principles to be found in common-sense maxims. Such an altruistic axiom, he concluded, would be impossible to demonstrate. Should a sincere person insist that there is no reason why he should sacrifice his own happiness for that of another, and does not require others to sacrifice for him, no rational grounds can be offered for persuading him otherwise. The mood of our own century, or at least a part of it, is even more skeptical. Bertrand Russell concludes that it is not so much that ethical questions are difficult to answer but that they cannot be asked legitimately, i.e., fac-

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tually. Science cannot decide questions of value because they cannot be decided intellectually at all, and lie outside the realm of truth and falsehood. With Russell, we come to the heart of this disturbing issue in contemporary ethical discussion. What is the nature and status of ethical judgments—are they cognitive and sufficiently like scientific ones to be embedded in rational theory and explanation or is their role emotive and non-cognitive, related rather to the non-informative quest of the existentialist? Those concerned about this problem tend to be arrayed in two camps, corresponding to the way the issue has just been formulated. On the one hand, there are the skeptics or the non-cognitivists; they are frequently logical empiricists. Theirs is a unified front. O n the other hand, there are the adversaries, agreed mainly just on the conviction that the emotivists are wrong. Let us first consider the non-cognitivists' arguments. First, however, a word of warning: it would be the grossest kind of mistake to underestimate the strength of their position. For they came to suspect the status of value judgments not by a frontal attack on morals or as an apology for a way of living, but as a conclusion from an approach to the problems of scientific method that had already exhibited real achievement. It would be a mistake, too, to overestimate the ease with which their arguments may be met; for, by shifting the burden of proof and demanding rigorous standards of reply, they exposed to their opponents the latter's own weaknesses. If there is a reassuring answer about the rational character of morals, it must not only expose the inadequacies of logical empiricism but show, in analogy with scientific explanation, how moral judgments are confirmed or substantiated, and how corrected. T h i s is a tall order and the task, if it is to be done at all, cannot be done quickly. Indeed, there has been no generally accepted refutation of the emotivists' position; yet this may

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be taken as an indication of the difficulty of the job and its too facile conception rather than an assurance that it cannot be done. Let us introduce the emotivists' view by way of illustration. Imagine that a person is torn between alternate choices of action, and further that, by some happy circumstance, he has access to all mathematical and logical knowledge as well as to all empirical matters, including the happiness and hurt that would follow upon either choice. Has he at hand then a principle for deciding what ought to be done without making any additional assumption? More concretely, suppose we were agreed on the probable effects of nuclear testing, would such information in itself provide a sufficient principle for an ethical decision? Psychologists of course can predict how people will act, economists have extended the domain of marginal utilities and game theory to policy, but can such studies be related to the morality of decision? The kinds of reasons that support factual statements and ought statements are distinct according to the emotivist. Thus the defense of both the following is different: "Nuclear testing is hazardous"; and "Nuclear testing is wrong because it is hazardous." Contrast also the statement made on the radio, "Only time will tell whether our policy in Lebanon was a wise decision" with "Only time will tell whether United States policy was the moral or right choice." The latter could only mean that there is something still to be learned about the grounds of the decision, while the former makes reference to the consequences. Similar considerations apply to ethical disagreement. Let us suppose that Arthur and Beverley in discussing educational aims, socialized medicine, or even more ultimate issues agree exactly on the facts and on which facts are relevant. Arthur holds on these grounds that X is wrong and Beverley concludes, on exactly the same

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grounds, that X is right. Is there then any rational way in which they can reach agreement? T h e i r differences in beliefs about facts, i.e., about empirical matters, would have been open to objective solution; but their disagreements in attitude, i.e., about what is right or wrong are incapable of any proof, and argument here amounts to persuasion. Disagreements in attitude, whether on trivial or serious political, social, and moral issues, are not susceptible to rational resolution. T h e points made by these examples may be summarized: Is and ought statements are distinct; the former are not logically derivable from the latter. Ethical judgments cannot be established by cognitive means. Arguments which support ethical judgments stand in a different relationship than the evidential one of empirical or logical argument. And finally, although differences of belief (that is, factual differences) are resolvable in terms of generally acceptable criteria, disagreements in attitude are not susceptible of such cognitive resolution; and ethical judgments are essentially of this latter kind. T h e force of these arguments is easy to see; and when restated in systematic terms, they had a tremendous impact on contemporary ethical theory. It was probably Hume in the Treatise of Human Nature who first spoke in a modern way about the distinction between is and ought, and he would have answered in the first example that however omniscient the person was he would have gained no moral principle—no principle of choice—from all his knowledge. Reason, Hume held, is limited to the discovery of matters of fact and of relations between ideas; it can indicate the consequences likely to follow on one choice of action or another, but it cannot decide the attractiveness of one over the other or recommend the beneficial over the pernicious; these are matters of affection. "Morality is more properly felt than judged of, for it is

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the nature of virtue to be amiable rather than true, and of vice to be odious rather than false." Ethical matters are not disputable for they are not rational, and there is nothing in which their proof of demonstration could consist. Moreover, every argument in which an ethical statement appears legitimately as a conclusion must have at least one ethical premise, which premise, in turn, could be established only in an argument containing some other ought premise antecedently assured. Morals, thus, cannot be derived from factual grounds alone. In the twentieth century, the logical empiricists sharpened Hume's distinction between relations of ideas and matters of fact (i.e., between analytic and synthetic statements) and developed his conclusion about the status of morals. These empiricists, believing that the history of philosophy had been plagued by issues that were not genuine, sought a criterion for distinguishing significant (true or false) or meaningful sentences and questions from those which are not. Herbert Feigl's article on logical empiricism is the standard elementary statement of the position. The logical analysis of language admits two kinds of cognitively legitimate statements. First, there are analytic or logically true statements which include mathematics and logic and whatever statements may be established by them. Examples are easily come by: "All princesses are female," "A proposition cannot be true and false simultaneously," and "A triangle is a three-angled geometrical figure." Such statements are necessarily true, but their truth is decidable by an inspection (i.e., analysis) of their form and independently of experience. In ordinary discourse, similar sentences often pretend to establish more than they do; thus, "In totalitarian governments power tends to be centralized" and "Everyone knows only one cigarette filters best" are indeed true, but true by virtue of the meaning or use of "totalitarian" and

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" b e s t " and not by an appeal to factual content. T h e truth or validity, then, of these statements certifies nothing about the way the world is, just as uninterpreted geometries do not purport to be descriptive of the real world— in any case, there are various consistent but mutually incompatible ones. T h e principles of logic are not principles of nature but of language. T h e second kind of cognitive or meaningful statement is synthetic of factual. T r u t h , here, depends not only on the structure of language but also on its referential function. T h e terms of a formal system are related to one another by logical rules on a basis of logical primitives, but, in the reconstruction of a natural or experimental language, the ground or base linguistic element must be connected with the empirical. T h i s terminal, ostensive step relating a system of words to experience is an indispensible ingredient, but the nature of this relationship between experience and the report of it is still poorly understood. In any case, a statement is factually meaningful only if it is verifiable (confirmable) or falsifiable by reference to experience and observation. What then is to be said for the status of ethical statements; can they qualify as analytic or synthetic? Now despite the tradition of Spinoza, the Cambridge Platonists, and others who cast ethics in a deductive mold after the model of geometry ethical statements are surely not very similar to mathematical ones. Ethical judgments or debates about good, for example, seem to claim more than the kind of statement which identifies a yard with three feet. Judgments that lying is wrong or that the happiness of others must be a proper concern of each seem to be empirical. T h e importance of the logical critique of moral reason, of course, must not be minimized. Surely, many of the Socratic questions, including the one with which we began this paper, involve the interrelationship of con-

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cepts; but the more critical issue is whether ethical statements can qualify as empirical or synthetic ones and it is about this problem that current controversy has raged. The emotivists say "no." T h e mistake has been, they say, to suppose that ethical statements are about anything, even about personal or social approval. In their distinctively moral sense, ethical statements assert nothing. Since there is no state of affairs that would verify or falsify them, ethical statements are neither true nor false; and if they are said to be meaningful at all, the notion of meaning must be extended beyond the cognitive to include emotive meaning. So far, the non-cognitivists are agreed, but they differ as they go on to develop the precise role that moral language plays. Early writers stressed its expressive or its imperative function, while more recent writers make subtle distinctions between persuasive, guiding, grading, and other uses. Still others rest with sociological, anthropological, and psychological investigations of norms. No one, of course, denies the legitimacy of such studies; at issue are questions of the warranty of norms. HI

You now have something of the emotivists' case before you. It has been given such detail that you might appreciate the force of the theory as well as something of the indignation which its broadcast inspired. It offended nearly everyone, and unfortunately some, who thought that the acceptance of the theory would doom morality, stooped to vindictive tricks to oppose it. Theologian and Marxist alike, intuitionist, phenomenologist, and existentialist all rushed to the attack. T h e controversy raged on the B.B.C. and even spilled over into Time Magazine. Now, of course, their arguments were not without merit, constructively and critically; but all the furor did not

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produce an ethical theory that was generally acceptable or that showed how ethical judgments are establishable and corrigible in anything like the sense required. Furthermore, most of the antagonists could scarcely be said to have refuted the emotivists since generally their ethics rested on assumptions vulnerable to the logical empiricists' criteria of meaning. Practically the only point of view which attempted to engage the emotivists on their own grounds and to reestablish the respectability of value judgments was that of the naturalists. Ethical naturalism, as used here, does not refer to a well-defined school but only to writers who agree to look for whatever there is of value and norms and their validation within the ordinary experiences and aspirations of men. Experience, its organization and direction, is the stuff of our theories—scientific as well as moral. It is, therefore, easy to see why naturalistic arguments should seek to whittle down the sharpness of the distinction mentioned above between matters of fact and logic on the one hand and morals on the other. Sometimes this view leads to an attempt to reconstruct moral theory, satisfying the requirements of scientific method, for example, approaches to a logic of imperatives. More often, as in the case of Margenau and Feigl, it includes a reassessment of fundamental issues of methodology. Thus Margenau thinks that this distinction can be held only because we overestimate how scientific science is—that in its forging, scientific theory and disagreement resemble that of ethics. Even Feigl whose sympathies are positivistic, in Validation and Vindication, holds that "the justifying principles for the establishment of knowledge-claims have been traced to their ultimate foundations in the rules of inference and substitution of deductive logic. We cannot, without vicious circularity, disclose any more ultimate grounds of validation here. Similarly the rule of maximum proba-

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bility in inductive inference forms the ultimate validating basis of all empirical reasoning. Correspondingly the supreme norm of a given ethical system provides the ultimate ground for the validation of moral judgments." However, among the naturalists, the pragmatists most seriously and organizedly challenge a narrowly conceived notion of scientific method and the dichotomy between science and morals. Dewey, for example, held that any sense of "meaningful" is unprofitable which excludes values and norms from meaningful discourse. I should like to remind you that Dewey thought that the twentieth century was applying to social and personal values methods shown to be inadequate in medieval science, for example, deduction of instances from self-evident a priori principles. Had we the stamina we could see that there are no ultimates, that each end is tested in experience and reforged or discarded as it is found inadequate to the intelligent resolution of conflict. Valuations are genuine judgments just as surely as empirical ones are; they are interdependent. The scientific enterprise is value impregnated and policies are not isolatable from facts. Further, the emotivists' distinction between attitude and belief is not tenable, for belief is merely a particular type of attitude, that of being "interested in matters of truth." Disagreements and adjudication in morals do not differ significantly from those in science, and, although emotional and persuasive factors may accompany ethical statements (value statements undoubtedly have a use which determines the relevance of some facts), they do not thereby become an inherent part of the judgment nor of the structure and content of ethical statements. Value statements are about what is valuable or desirable, whereas statements of what is valued or desired are factual. This amounts to a difference between predicting that an eclipse will take place and predicting that it will be

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seen by certain persons if they perform certain acts. Value statements do redirect conduct, they are proposals about what to do in a problematic situation when more habitual actions appear to be unsatisfactory. However, it is only in so far as they are cognitive that they can influence behavior. T h e y express "ideals of conduct which have been created in the course of experience from the observation of the consequences which follow upon the satisfaction of desires." These ideals or standards act as hypotheses and their adequacy is determinable in principle by objective empirical procedures. T h e conceptual pragmatism of C. I. Lewis differs seriously from Dewey's instrumentalism but it also confronts the emotivist's theory in a direct and philosophically interesting way. An Analysis of Knowledge and Valuation offers convincing systematic reasons for regarding value judgments as a species of empirical judgments, like them in structure and verification. He also shows in what sense they may be objective. His more recent Ground and Nature of the Right extends these considerations to ethics. He points out the pervasiveness of right, hence of implicit norms, and its use in contexts ranging from filing an income tax or regulating a diet or other prudential decisions to the drawing of conclusions. In a rather complex argument, Lewis shows how at least one imperative is presumed in science itself: any interpreted deductive system is to be classified as inductive since it has at least one inductive premise, namely that which assigns the reference; but since the probability of every inductive chain may be altered by the addition of even a single relevant premise, no conclusion that has empirical reference is warranted unless all available relevant information has been applied. T h e need then to include all available evidence, never to subordinate the motive of objective truth-seeking to any

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subjective preference, yields an imperative. "Access to all available information is a common need universal to those who have the capacity to determine their own believing and find it imperative to assess critically the manner of their thinking and concluding." This is a basic point as well for such rights as freedom of speech and freedom of investigation and communication. There are further imperatives, for the very idea of critique implies rules. Even such a small sample of counter arguments suffices to show that solutions to these problems of value theory do not come ready-made, but involve the same kind of patient and technical work, of disheartening reverses and occasional insights, that are expected in science. Indeed, it may be fairly asked not only whether there has been any substantive progress in morals since the time of Socrates but also whether there has been any development in the understanding and method of ethics. Whatever the answer to the first query, that to the second is likely to be discouraging; the history of ethics often looks like a set of proposals arranged in time without other direction. If the emotivists have had no other refreshing effect they have at least dampened pronouncements ex cathedra and raised the issue whether theoretical advance is possible. The proposals of Dewey, Lewis, and others are programatic, their service has been largely to indicate the ways we can liberate ourselves jointly from the skepticism of the noncognitivists and from the authoritarianism of a priori ethics. It remains to be seen what can be done constructively. The moral of all of this seems to be that we must cultivate in moral philosophy the same sort of critical and open-minded attitude, the same dispassionate and tentative regard for our hypotheses, and the same willingness to revise and correct as has accompanied the deepening insights into science.

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IV

In conclusion, may I suggest some lines of inquiry that promise insight into value theory. It is interesting that many of these result from a wider view of epistemological problems brought about by the impact of just such normative considerations as the above. In the first place, there is a host of problems centering about the relation between ground experiences and their report. As Feigl said, such base elements are indispensable but the relation is "poorly understood." T h e tendency had been to assume that there must be a single set of reports of sensible experience, or sets reducible to one another, to serve as a basis of true description. Recently, a more tolerant approach seems to be required because, among other things, of the impossibility of separating "bare" experience from its structuring by linguistic or other symbolic presentation. Perhaps, as Nelson Goodman suggests, the world is not one way but many ways, and hence the modes of reporting and describing it are various. By this interpretation, the way is opened, but of course not guaranteed, for legitimate moral, legal, and aesthetic "description." In connection with this issue, it is not clear why Hume, in the frame of his own analysis, did not believe that moral generalizations are developed on the basis of moral experiences analogously to the way empirical generalizations are derived from sensible experiences. Of course, the obstacle is the required bridge between the is and the ought, for reports of what people feel they ought to do or of what is valuable are factual. I shall comment on this in a moment, but in passing let me remark that factual predicates such as "is red" at least share this with "is valuable": that we should want to say that some things are red although they are not seen red, and that other

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things are not red although they are seen red. Similarly, we should wish to regard some things as valuable, although they are not valued, and other things as not valuble, although they are valued. There are also other views of the need to justify induction than that which led Feigl to distinguish between validation and vindication. Thus Goodman, for example, does not think that the need for justification of induction carries us beyond the dynamic and mutual adjustment of rules and accepted inferences. Such a view may have its application to the effort to justify moral ultimates and to the relation of particular moral judgments to moral generalizations. Perhaps more immediately helpful is the growing realization that the task of ethics has been ambiguously construed. If it is taken to be, as in the case of some natural law theories for example, to penetrate to immutable moral principles that exist in some sense independently of men's activities, then the question of a science of morals scarcely arises. But those who do not so regard the objective frequently confuse what moral philosophy is trying to do. Suppose that we hold, as Sidgwick did, that ethics begins with actual judgments of what actions are right or what ought to be done, and then seeks principles that underlie or relate such data. Now if and when such principles are found, they are frequently elevated to the status of moral laws and thereby placed beyond revision and recall; all vestige of their humble origin and their role as explanatory hypotheses is forgotten. Then the question of their justification arises and we are either returned to moral ultimates or "vindication" or else, as with Sidgwick and the non-cognitivists, decide that no rational warrant is available. It is precisely here that a part of Goodman's analysis may be applicable. Of course, the insistence on justification arises partly to

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account for the binding quality of moral principles, particularly when they run counter to inclinations. And this, it is argued, cannot be derived from an anthropology or a psychology even of moral attitudes; these sciences may explain or predict what we believe is right or ought to be done. Here, of course, the familiar problem of a bridge between is and ought statements reappears. But are such problems really far beyond the reach of scientific methods, even as presently pursued? A n anthropologist may collect the data for a study of kinship patterns. He could limit himself to an effort to systematize all reported relationships, but, after he has collected a great deal of data and subjected his theories to frequent tests, he makes an ordering which may force him to regard some informants' responses as lies, slips of the tongue, or errors. While clearly free to discard such deviant responses only tentatively, still, at any given moment, the pattern (also regarded as tentative) provides the rules or norms for correct responses. T o make a slightly different point, psychologists study the conclusions that people will draw from premises; but the work of a logician, though not entirely independent of judgments made, is to determine which are valid and interesting. Considerations such as these suggest that the strength of the non-cognitivists* position derives from insufficient knowledge and an over-simple view of the issues involved. Disagreement in attitude seems to apply to many unresolved arguments. Microbiologists might disagree on whether a line in an ultramagnified photo of a cell is a shadow or a membrane. An extension of the argument might lead to agreement or to locating the origin of the disagreement in incompatible premises. T h i s cannot profitably be called an attitudinal difference without thereby including many disputes of empirical science.

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Reference to verifiability in principle, i.e., resolvability, doesn't improve matters and suggests circularity. Perhaps a more serious and systematic difficulty that highlights the incompleteness of present analyses is the lack of explicit criteria for deciding between competing definitions. Consider the definition of "slum," (or "intelligence," "good education," or "acid"). Of course, there are tremendous practical differences consequent on the choice of physical criteria, the state of the plumbing, paint; over sociological criteria, family integration, delinquency. Yet such consequences aside, investigations have only just begun to delve into when and under what conditions or by what criteria one definition is more acceptable than another. In axiomatized or explicit systems, these conditions may be statable, but then the role of norms needs investigation; otherwise value theory still remains in happy company with most empirical sciences and even with philosophical enterprises.

Values in the History of Ideas PHILIP P .

WIENER

I do not find very enlightening the prevailing intellectual fashion imported from Oxford that philosophy is primarily a matter of linguistic analysis. More important logical contributions were made by fourteenth-century Oxford nominalists (Duns Scotus and William of Occam) and seventeenth-century Oxford scientists (Robert Boyle and the other founders of The Royal Society). Nor am I rendered speechless by the Wittgensteinian cult of the mystique of "the wisdom enshrined in common sense." Common sense is a very ambivalent term for historically acquired practical intelligence and cautious narrowness in ideas. Common sense is neither practically nor theoretically sound when it becomes historically encrusted with smugness, ideophobia, and even arrogance, as in the case of the racially bigoted southerner's common sense. I agree with Santayana that he who ignores history is too often a victim of it. But I find also that Santayana was a victim of certain aristocratic values in the Greek, Roman, and medieval culture on which he was reared, and of the Anglo-Saxon tradition of aloof privacy which he acquired from Boston and England. Yet he was a superb master of the English language, and often sensitive critic of the traditions he had inherited. His lack of political wisdom, evidenced by his admiration for Franco's, Mussolini's, and Stalin's methods, and complete insensitivity to the common-man's hopes in democracy constitute a won39

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derful subject for a student of Santayana's values in the history of his ideas. But my topic calls for consideration of broader problems and principles. T h e y come up when we consider three very broad questions: First, what is the role of values and value-judgments in forming images of the past or beliefs about what has happened to mankind up to the present? T h i s last phrase will do for our definition of history: "beliefs about what has happened to mankind," up to the present non-epochmaking sentence. Second, what are the ways in which such beliefs or ideas about man's past affect his present value-judgments or ideas of value? T h i r d , how shall we envisage the relationship between the diversity of values and value-judgments in man's emotional and active life, on the one hand, and the history of his cultural and intellectual life—including the history of ideas—on the other? T h e history of moral philosophy, if not of all philosophy, has revolved about this very intricate third problem. Anyone may draw freely on that history for illustrations of both illuminating and obscure contributions to its resolution. I shall assume as rough definitions that values are felt desires or needs—good if satisfied, bad if not—and that value-judgments are ideas about values. Such ideas appear in various forms: in explicit metaphysical and theological systems, or in implicitly metaphysical, partly hidden assumptions of historians, social and literary critics, and finally, in hypotheses about human nature. In my opinion, only by starting with the latter view that all value-judgments are hypotheses about what we desire now or in the future can we throw light on our questions.

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I It is a commonplace of critical historical study—the theory of historiography—that every historian is selective in his writing and that the principle of his selection is conditioned by his sense of what is relevant and important. Here, we immediately run into a mass (I almost wrote "mess") of problems: what makes anything relevant for the historian, and relevant to what? to the accuracy of the historian's report, to whatever he finds interesting or favorable to his own or his patron's interests, or perhaps to his or his readers' prejudices, or to a generalization about the pattern of events or about a people or about human nature? Saint Augustine's City of God, Gibbons' Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, Rostovtzeff's Social and Economic History of Rome introduce features of the Roman empire that are relevant to Catholic theology, to social psychology, and political economy respectively. Augustine's eschatology is relevant to the Catholic church's authoritarian interest in seeing to it that temporal power in the city of man must give way to the power of the eternal city. Such aspiration or ambition was hardly considered relevant to Rome's political history on Gibbon's anti-supernatural view. Gibbon's value-judgment, shared by Hume and Kant, was that history had its mainspring and driving force of hope in the enlightened self-interest of a human nature that was the same everywhere and at all times. Carl Becker has shown how the "heavenly city" of the medieval supernatural world came down to earth in the eighteenth-century philosophies. In the Age of Reason, value-judgments thus shifted from an unverifiable base to a verifiable one. The Augustinian idea of history was then understandable as an appeal to certain fairly universal values: the desire for

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revenge, satisfied by burning sinners in hell to light up the places in heaven reserved for the faithful, and the desire for material gain by promising the meek and humble they would inherit the earth. T h e catholicity of the religious values of consolation and escape from fear of disease, poverty, and death was materialized in the Newtonian world-machine, harmoniously and providentially governed by universal laws. As particular masses in local motions show varying forces due to the universal law of attraction, so local conditions would vary the historical manifestations of the fundamental passions governing all men. When Hume declared that "reason is and ought to be the slave of the passions," he was not advocating the abandonment of the eighteenth-century belief in the value of rational enlightenment. On the contrary, he was assuming the universal utility of sober intelligence in ministering faithfully to the common-felt needs of all men. T h e hypothesis about values—common to the historical views of Gibbon, Hume, and Burke—was that there were common feelings all men had for the things they needed and desired. Men's judgments of value were regarded by these eighteenth-century enlighteners as too often intemperate for want of a proper use of the balancing instrument of reason guided by past experience. O n this eighteenth-century idea of secular values and their need of regulation was based the political belief or valuejudgment that the best rulers of the past and of their own time were the enlightened despots. For they were useful in catering to men's needs by patronizing the arts and sciences and keeping the masses in their places of work, while they kept a balance of power among themselves. Rostovtzeff was concerned with what Ortega y Gasset later called the revolt of the masses. T h e great Russian historian, living in exile in England, ended his celebrated Social and Economic History of the Roman Empire with

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a statement of a problem that reveals one of the main underlying fears of the author: Is not the rise to power of the masses a threat to any high cultural attainment today as it was to the glory that was once Greece and Rome? 1 Rostovtzeff was a passionate liberal in love with the orderly elements of our classical heritage and frightened by the excesses of revolutionary struggles for power in the name of the masses. At least, this is my guess or hypothesis as to what values motivated this great Russian scholar to take such great pains in tracing the shifts of power and prestige from patricians to plebeians before the barbarians from outside aided those within to give the finishing blow to the Roman empire. In other words, Rostovtzeff's masterly history not only showed that the growth of internal barbarism was a prelude to the external invasion and collapse of Rome, but expressed a value-judgment about the foundations of all civilization. Spengler, before he broke with the Nazis, hailed the strong ruler who could lead the masses, and produce a new culture having nothing in common with the dead cultures of the past. H e thus gave Toynbee some ideas to support his fears about the imminent death of Western liberal civilization on its inevitable way towards becoming one of a score of extinct cultures. Toynbee combined Spengler's succession of Apollonian and Faustian men with a neo-Augustinian view of a Providence that governed history through the tautology of "challenge and response," and thus providentially generated the twenty or so odd civilizations known to historians. His ten-volumed Study of History is a monumental illustration of the ways in which metaphysical and theological value-judgments, implicitly and often dogmatically assumed by a historian of considerable knowledge and literary talent, influence his and his readers' beliefs. Fears of the future and of the collapse of liberal democracy's hopes are the negative

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values that underlie such historical judgments of despair among the prophets of gloom and the equally symptomatic sense of futility in our angry or beat generation who see no values in history or ideas. Catholic historians are notorious for their dating and attribution of "modern errors"—to use a papal phrase— to the Reformation. Maritain's alleged humanism and its followers or fellow-travelers—T. S. Eliot among t h e m — would have us look to the Middle Ages for a model of humanism. However, G. G. Coulton has shown how spurious the committed Catholic as well as illiberal Protestant historians' views on the Middle Ages and the Reformation are.2 Slavery and the slave trade, the status of women in society and in the church, censorship of the artist and scientist, persecution of the heretic, and the inequalities of wealth and power were left untouched by whatever medieval humanism is to be found in Saint Thomas' metaphysics of a hierarchy of powers and dominations. T h e pagan ancestry of this hierarchical system of values goes back to Plato and Aristotle. In these great Greek philosophers, the dogmatically assumed idea that some men are born to be slaves and others their masters was firmly entrenched. Plato and Aristotle made such value-judgments not only because the means of production, as the Marxist has it, was based on slave labor, but also because their metaphysical ideas about the great golden chain of being kept men fixed in their classes; it led Plato to a cyclical rather than to a progressive theory of historical change and Aristotle to a preformationist theory of heredity. Plato for all his rationalism lacked faith in the power of reason to alter historical change. Such metaphysical ideas and false anthropology reinforced and fitted their valuejudgment that most men—poets as well as slaves—need to be ruled by their intellectual superiors in order for both rulers and their subjects to be happy. Not only did

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medieval Catholic, Arabic, and Hebrew theocrats cling to this chain of hierarchical values but so did Lutheran and Calvinist reformers; our social Darwinists and totalitarian elitists retained the hierarchy of values, with their own at the top, in their philosophies of history. Plato's repugnance to the materialistic values of Sophists, relativists, and Cynics explains why they were so unfairly maligned by him: he deplored Socrates' early training among the Sophists, and never even mentioned the name of his great contemporary, Democritus. Yet neoclassical minds like our own Jefferson and Paine disliked Plato's metaphysical doctrines and preferred the classical humanist's view that man is the measure of all things and that by natural law all men are equal morally. T h e eighteenthcentury Age of Reason exhibited its regard for the value of liberty, which was surely one of the values beside the commercial ones that Charles Beard said were the chief ones for which the American Revolution was fought. T h e victorious struggle of the American Revolution, and the values of Liberté, Egalité, Fraternité of the French Revolution, led to the late nineteenth-century and twentiethcentury liberal democratic conception that history was a constant struggle for freedom from vested interests and for the extension of human rights everywhere. De Tocqueville's and Mill's fears of the tyranny of the majority not only motivated historians like Rostovtzeff, but are still relevant today as arguments for the defense of racial, religious, and political minorities against traditional persecution. Walt Whitman, the poet of grass-roots democracy, along with William James and John Dewey, the religioussecular philosophers of democracy, saw all history as the liberation of the common man and his latent energies. These untapped resources of the common man were apotheosized in John Dewey's common faith in social, economic, and political equality of opportunity and active

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participation in the common good. T o ignore these values is not only to fail to understand American history, but worse, to betray and deliver it to the enemies of democracy. Perhaps, no better example of the effect of values and value-judgments on historical beliefs can be given today than the widespread indoctrinated faith of Marxists in the inevitable triumph of the downtrodden working-class. T h e felt need for doing something to alleviate the miseries of workers was the leading value of Marx's and other Utopian socialist philosophies. T h e ideas that this value could be attained by revolution or gradual reforms, inevitable or merely probable, were predictive value-judgments. Curiously enough, the Marxist theory of history, called dialectical and historical materialism, insists on its scientific character and scientific demonstration of inevitability by use of the dialectical laws of history, and even of nature. Its patently moral and messianic motivations are passed over by its zealous adherents or taken for granted by conciliatory Christians who are sympathizers. Scientific logic has not yet made it clear to the converts to the Marxist theory of historical materialism that there is no strict demonstration of dialectical inevitability or logical necessity in history, human or natural. Hence, the only plausible explanation of the widespread appeal of Marxist belief in historical necessity is that it is a value-charged hypothesis aiming to arouse the hopes of millions of needy peoples who wish to enjoy the values of economic security and the possibilities of freedom more nearly attained to date actually in capitalistic democracies. One practical but Utopian result of my analysis that the Marxian view is a dramatically overcharged hypothesis would be to have our State Department promulgate a rival view based on the fact that all Americans wish to enjoy the security and other values of our ever increasing

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middle class; hence, the greatest hope for a classless society lies in the American historical tradition that the idle rich ought to be taxed and the poor worker helped by governmental welfare legislation to raise his standard of living until all class distinctions are abolished. My hypothesis includes eliminating the special privileges of the bureaucratic class by making it democratically responsible for its conduct to its electorate. Fear of bureaucracy and the lack of a legitimate and needed critique of irresponsible holders of public office have led to the doubtful belief that we can dispense with bureaucratic welfare agencies and social planning altogether. T h e ancient Chinese civil service with its high scholarly and ethical prerequisites shows that bureaucracies need not inevitably produce corruption and deprivation of individual rights. T h e values underlying these fears of bureaucracy and some of the historical evidence are sound, but the historical conclusion is not, since the remedy is clearly a more enlightened citizenry ever critical of its elected representatives and actively on guard against bureaucratic policies that are based on self-aggrandizement rather than on intelligent planning for the common welfare. Yet it is in any case clear that different evaluations of the activities and motivating values of the rulers of history or functionaries of the state will lead to varying accounts of their role in history. "Power tends to corrupt and absolute power corrupts absolutely" is a historical generalization but it was made to the Anglican Bishop Creighton by a liberal Catholic, Lord Acton, to warn against some features of the secular state and the dangers of the state-church. ii In this second part of my discussion, I wish to deal with the so-called "genetic fallacy" and its blown-up form "his-

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toricism" as a pitfall in the theory of individual and social value-judgments. Morris R. Cohen, my revered teacher, and Karl Popper, whose keen critical writings on method in physical and social sciences are admirable, have done much to explode myths about the value of genetic and historical methods in the philosophy of natural sciences and of social history. 3 Both philosophers, as staunch liberals, in their attacks on genetic and historistic method aimed their historical criticisms at social Darwinism and totalitarian political values. T h e social Darwinists (Herbert Spencer, Sumner, Keller, Houston Chamberlain) adopted an evolutionary determinism of "survival of the fittest" to justify a policy of rugged individualism and non-interference by government; racialists used evolutionary biology to support the supremacy of their own people. Hence, it was logically proper and socially important for Cohen and Popper to point out the fallacy of judging the values of ideas, of a man, or of a whole people by their ancestry. A rose smells no less sweet for its having grown in a soil with dung, and many a benefactor of mankind, like Leonardo da Vinci or D'Alembert, has come from illegitimate parentage. O u r American history is marred by the massacre of Indians and anti-democratic lack of protection of the rights of workers, of foreign-born, of religious, and of ethnic groups. But out of these struggles of the past, new values of the democratic aspirations of a free nation and of a free world have emerged. Hence, rather than cond e m n all references to the past in judging values, we are logically led only to avoiding mistaken generalizations about the past and their present and f u t u r e implications. Because we did in fact resort to genocide in taking the virgin land of America from the Indians does not imply that genocide is justified—that would be a genetic fallacy. Rather, in the light of the historical facts, we feel the need

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to re-examine our policy towards Indians today, as well as towards colonial peoples. The fact that we, like the rest of Europe, lived on Negro and immigrant slavery and have been unable to desegregate Negroes in all parts of the United States or adopt non-discriminatory immigration laws does not justify our behavior; on the contrary, the lesson of our historical experience, up to the latest defiances of our Supreme Court's decision on desegregation, and insults to Asiatics in our immigration laws, is that we must change the historical record drastically. This becomes especially urgent if we are to survive the cold war of Soviet propaganda among African and Asiatic peoples, particularly as it exploits our treatment of colored people. In short, we must admit our historical mistakes rather than resort to the logical trick of dismissing them as irrelevant, unless, of course, it is urged that we cannot change our policies because our immoral past determines our present and future policies. That would be a vicious form of historicism. What I am saying is that honest historical inquiry and disclosure of past errors and corruption suffice to avoid the historicism that visits the sins of the fathers upon their sons. This genetic theory is defended only by Lysenko's dubious Lamarckian biology. Only a belief in historical destiny can explain the Soviet leaders' faith in the totalitarian triumph of the new Soviet man over man in capitalist countries. Social Lamarckism also explains Fiske's and Teddy Roosevelt's historical belief in the manifest destiny of American colonialism. Fiske was a good Unitarian and learned historian, but his faith in evolution as the vehicle of Christ and his optimistic belief in inevitable progress were not the products of his historical researches; they were rather the values that led him into history. I mention Fiske here not because he is a great philosopher of history, but because his values and value-judg-

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ments were honestly exhibited in all his writings, and are therefore easy to discern. It is less easy to see the values that p r o m p t o u r allegedly scientific historians and sociologists, w h o overtly profess neutrality or Wertfreiheit or freedom f r o m commitments to any values o r value-judgments in their so-called " o b j e c t i v e " accounts of human history. N o w , truth or the search for truth about values requires value-judgments or hypotheses about what we really need in order to survive and to satisfy our humanitarian feelings. In order to be objective about values, we cannot proceed by denying a felt urgency or need for social improvements its due place in our scientific histories or sociological inquiries into human relations. M y own assumed position is itself a value-judgment that we need hypotheses about better ways of living. T h e public verifiability of these value-judgments or the hypotheses they contain is a c o m p l e x problem unavoidable in historical and social studies. Such studies should throw light on the relations between o u r judgments about the goals or values that should direct h u m a n behavior and the conditions that do observably influence actual behavior. Historical elements enter into both our value-judgments and their objects, the felt needs and aspirations motivating ideas and actions, individual or collective, in the history of civilization. O u r value-judgments are conditioned by our o w n life history or habits and associations with other hum a n beings over a period of time. W e talk of " m a t u r e j u d g m e n t , " i m p l y i n g the ripe fruit of experience and reflection on events. W e find it useful to inquire into a stranger's past and habits before we entrust anything valuable to h i m : w e don't hire kleptomaniacs as banktellers; we don't allow an untrained person to perform a surgical operation; most states require psychiatrists to be licensed physicians; we desire credentials of previous competence or ability in prospective employees; students

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come sadly to know how severe a handicap to their future career cheating of a poor record of school grades can be. These historical considerations do not determine of necessity a person's trustworthiness or competence; if this is the point of the genetic fallacy, it is indisputable. But the logical alternative is not to disdain all references to the past but to use whatever we can learn about past behavior as a guide or aid to forming a reasonably probable judgment about the future trustworthiness and competence of people. Hegel's dictum that history teaches only that we can never learn from history is based on his arrogant rationalistic disdain for merely probable empirical knowledge and on his theodicy of history that made all evils, past and present, historical necessities of the Absolute. In his apologetics for explaining away evil, Hegel resembles the diplomatic Leibniz whom he regarded as his closest spiritual relative; Hegel's "Whatever is, is right" and Leibniz's "This is the best of all possible worlds" mean the same thing. Hegel said he would have been a Spinozist if his own emphasis on Becoming were not so close to Leibniz's dynamic spiritualism; Spinoza's monistic, infinitely infinite substance supplied the highly valued unity which Leibniz's system of infinite monads lacked. But Hegel, whose philosophy appeared during the striving for German unification—had little use for the geometric method of Spinoza or for the algebraic rules of infinite series by which Leibniz strove so desperately to unify his feudal hierarchy of monads or centers of spiritual energy. Mathematical infinity like all the concepts of quantity—the historical development of non-metrical mathematical analysis did not affect Hegel's lofty metaphysical logic— was a "bad infinite," for Quality was a "higher" category than Quantity. The anti-rationalism of Kierkegaard and

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his existentialist followers may be traced in the history of later nineteenth-century thought to the reaction against Hegel's system. But I think it a serious mistake to identify reason with Hegel's dialectical exposition of it. There is such contempt for individual and scientific experience and so little heart in Hegel's omnivorous rationalism that it is no wonder that the existentialists romantically turn back to Pascal's view that "the heart has its reasons which reason does not know." T h e history of metaphysics has wavered between the values of science and those of religious consolation, Russell says in his highly personalized History of Western Philosophy, but it was R. G. Collingwood who pointed to the study of history as a factor in modern philosophy. T h e "realism" of G. E. Moore and the early Russell "erred through neglecting history. . . . You must pay more attention to history. Your positive doctrines about knowledge are incompatible with what happens in historical research." T o say that a philosopher is arguing against "a straw man" or "is flogging a dead horse" is to say that he is ignorant of the history of his adversary's ideas which are too often as unreal or as dead as his own. So Collingwood tells G. E. Moore: "Your critical methods are misused on doctrines which were in historical fact never held. . . ."» Just as Vico criticized the age of Descartes' mechanical rationalism for its lack of appreciation of historical method and values, so Collingwood goes very far in condemning modern science for its neglect of history: " T h e reason why the civilization of 1600-1900, based upon natural science, found bankruptcy staring it in the face was because in its passion for ready-made rules, it had neglected to develop that kind of historical insight which alone could tell it what rules to apply, not in a situation of a specific type, but in the situation in which it actually

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found itself. It was precisely because history offered us something altogether different from rules, namely insight, that it could afford us the help we needed in diagnosing our moral and political problems."8 Here I think Collingwood like Croce has been carried away by his love of history, all the more so when he insists that "all history is the history of thought," 7 which too often becomes only the historian's private thoughts or fancies. HI

Hegel's philosophy, whose secret is buried deep in a technical and evasive terminology "deliberately invented for that purpose" (to quote James's caricatures of abstruse metaphysical systems like Hegel's), was once revealed to me, as an undergraduate, in a too simple formula: Values, Ideas, Facts. You start with God or Absolute Spirit —and Hegel said that it does not matter where you think you start, you and your thoughts being insignificant bits of flotsam in the great Ocean of the Absolute, you must start and end in that immanent Reality of Becoming— the one and only Supreme Value; you learn what you can of the true ideas that The Idea has spawned and let grow up in the objective mind of humanity through the ages. You then rest content with what you think are the facts of life and history. This slaps down the crude empiricists and naive realists whom Hegel found in the British tradition. It consoled spiritualists with the optimistic notion that there are "ultimately" no nasty facts or problems of radical reform. No wonder, rational philosophy to which the ancients looked for wisdom was so severely discredited, not only by Kierkegaard and the romantic existentialists but by scientifically trained positivists from Vienna and linguistically refined analysts from Oxford and Cam-

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bridge. Y e t H e g e l was right in a r g u i n g that we cannot know f a c t s — w h i c h in one clear sense are essentially historical, viz., w h e n they simply mean whatever actually happens to be observed or desired in this w o r l d — w i t h o u t having some idea through which we interpret them. H e was w r o n g in assuming we had to start a priori with an absolutely fixed system of ideas or what Bradley called "a ballot of bloodless categories." Dewey, who started as a Hegelian and became more experimental in the American environment shaped intellectually by British empiricism and academically by German metaphysical rigidity, f o u n d a solution to the question of whether we start with a priori values and ideas or a posteriori facts and generalizations simply by denying both extremes. H e claimed as a matter of historical fact that we start thinking in science, as we do in the rarer occasions of everyday reasoning, with a felt difficulty or problem. H e followed Peirce here, w h o insisted that the m i n d can only begin thinking wherever it happens to be, viz., irritated by d o u b t in a morass of vague ideas i n c l u d i n g concealed assumptions about what we want and about how to get what we want. For instance, there have been in history, and perhaps still are today, more superstitions about the common value of the health of o u r bodies and how to remedy its ailments than about any other body in the universe. T h e relation between value-judgments, with their concomitant hypotheses which function as claims to truth, and historical facts is, if Peirce and D e w e y are as right about this as I think they are, the same as or at least analogous to that between a hypothesis and its verification; of course, we must make due allowance for the differences in complexity between everyday, practical problems and the logically simplified problems of the scientific mode. T h e practical problems of living are more c o m p l e x in nature, because values are replete with biological needs

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and psychological wants requiring that varying physical and social conditions be met. They are narrower in scope than scientific problems but thicker in complexity as all historical situations are. Both the historian and the social scientist have to train themselves to abstract those features of complex human situations that are already familiar to us without distorting them. The range of familiarity will surely grow with our extended scientific knowledge as well as experience. Historical truth or objectivity is not incompatible with selectivity based on what is likely to be of interest or value to each generation. That is why history can be usefully rewritten even without new facts about the past: there are always emerging new interests or values in the present that will determine our perspective and guide our selection of material for interpretation. But the relations of our present value-judgments to the ways and values of the past can be studied objectively once we are critically aware of our principles of selection and of the true differences as well as similarities that relate past and present in the historical continuum. The very fact that our value-judgments are tentative hypotheses, or should be treated as such, on the view I am trying to defend, presupposes a basic historical dimension in both values and value-judgments which would incline us to look for distinctive if not unique features of past cultural phenomena. T o sense and portray such unique or distinctive patterns of thought and feeling in the arts, sciences, religious and social movements of the past requires the artistic skill and philosophic breadth which characterize the great historian as distinct from the chronicler and compiler. By objectivity in history, therefore, I mean not only scientific respect for documentary evidence and coherence of interpretation, but also a large capacity for understanding the transformations of thought and feeling that run

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the whole gamut of mankind's dramatic experiences under the varying conditions of time and place, the stresses and strains of economic and political pressure, the dreams and frustrations of the ordinary man and of the creative artist and thinker, of "civilization and its discontents." It is true that without such objective knowledge, we are sometimes delighted by the unexpected ways in which various strivings of ours or natural processes without our striving come to happy consummation. I should still agree with Morris R. Cohen that if ignorance were bliss, more people should be happier than they have been or are. IV

My conclusions, which I hope have raised many problems, are: Values are felt desires, and value-judgments are ideas or hypotheses about what we need to satisfy or harmonize these desires. Both values and ideas are inescapable in the objective restoration of our continuity with the past. T h e only truth in subjectivism is that some historical selection is made because of desire or need. Yet there is no necessary loss in truth or objectivity if we do not simply substitute our values and value-judgments for those of the past, or vice versa. A growing fund of tested knowledge of the past, including the history of ideas, can be useful in avoiding blind alleys and a myopic view of our present problems in the arts, sciences, and social institutions. Our most deeply felt values of convictions, as to what to live or die for, should be subject to the same sort of modifiability through educated emotions as, in the more limited scientific domain, hypotheses are subject to revision in the light of fresh evidence, self-control taking the place when possible of experimental control.

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The foundations of education are inseparable from the historical crisis of democratic liberalism, itself a recent congeries of ideas and values in the present world situation. It is a crisis which threatens many traditionally accumulated values—artistic, scientific, religious, and philosophical—because it threatens the creative freedom of the human spirit. Classical, Hebrew, and Christian as well as Oriental wisdom regarded this spirit as an undying one, but this is being challenged. Educators should see in this challenge a historical lesson and a value. T h e lesson is that we have not lived democratically in the full sense and, hence, cannot take it smugly for granted that we represent more than the promise of a liberal democracy to enrich the lives of peoples of all classes, nations, and creeds. T h e value of the challenge is that it compels us to make greater efforts, individually and co-operatively, to achieve the richer, creative life for all, which is the historical promise yet to be fulfilled of the idea of a truly liberal democracy.

NOTES 1M. Rostovtzeff, The Social and Economic History of the Roman Empire (2nd ed., revised by P. M. Fraser; Oxford University Press, 1957), 2 vols. The concluding paragraph of the text reads: " T h e evolution of the ancient world has a lesson and a warning for us. Our civilization will not last unless it be a civilization not of one class, but of the masses. T h e Oriental civilizations were more stable and lasting than the GrecoRoman, because, being chiefly based on religion, they were nearer the masses. They have destroyed the upper classes, and this resulted in accelerating the process of barbarization. But the ultimate problem remains like a ghost, ever present and unlaid: Is it possible to extend a higher civilization to the lower classes without debasing its standard and diluting its quality to the vanishing point? Is not every civilization bound to decay as soon as it begins to penetrate the masses?" Cf. J . Burckhardt: "I know too much history to expect anything from the despotism of the masses but a future tyranny, which will be the end of history." (Judgments on History and Historians [Boston, 1958]).

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' G. G. Coulton, "The Historical Background of Maritain's Humanism," Journal of the History of Ideas, V (October 1944), 415-33; cf. also, Coulton's criticisms of Maritain's attempt to justify scholastic views of art and artists in Appendix 22 of Coulton's Art and the Reformation (Cambridge University Press, 1953). « M. R. Cohen, The Meaning of Human History (La Salle, 111., 1949). K. Popper, The Open Society and Its Enemies (Princeton, 1950). * P. P. Wiener, Evolution and the Founders of Pragmatism (Harvard University Press, 1949), Ch. VI, "Social Evolutionism: Fiske's Philosophy of History." 5 R. G. Collingwood, Autobiography (Oxford, 1939) , p. 28. 'Ibid., p. 101. 7 Ibid., p. 110.

Social Interests and Value THOMAS A .

COWAN

Social Interests is a term which law uses to denote the claims society makes on the individual. T h e great bourgeois revolutions were all waged in the interest of the individual: liberty, equality, fraternity; life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. All these were thought of in terms of the individual and this despite the fact that mankind was busily organizing to erect social, economic, and physical constructs on a scale undreamed of by previous generations. We know that this paradox caused uneasiness from the start. It gave rise to a countermovement against the individual. T h e interests of society began to be recognized as inimical to those of "unbridled individualism." Whereas, during the nineteenth century, law was engaged in converting the political ideals of individuality into rules of law, in the twentieth century law undertook the formidable task of creating social interests to balance off the claims that were made in the name of "free individual self-assertion." This work, we know, has been done only too well. Now we are faced with the task of rescuing the over-regulated individual from totalitarianisms of all kinds. T h e problem that social interests now poses for us is how to stop them from smothering the individual. T h e other term of my title, namely Value, is pertinent to this task. Value is a word of many meanings. T o the scientist it connotes primarily truth. His values range along a true-false continuum. The artist's values are dif59

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ferent. In some mysterious manner, they are measured in terms of aesthetic response. Value, for the moralist, is a third kind of thing. Whatever it may be, it is evidently not mainly truth value nor aesthetic value, although it is certainly connected with these two. We are here concerned principally with "value" in the moral sense. And since the legal conception of social interests has presently to do with the plight of the individual, we shall be forced to inquire into the part that morality plays in individual life. My theme is in some sense or other the relation of law to morals. i I shall begin with morality. Why is it that all over the world and in each sphere of activity the human race is calling into question every moral principle it lives by? Not only moralists, whose business it is, but also scientists, artists, soldiers, politicians, businessmen, juveniles, everybody? More than that, the relatively absolute character of evil is being questioned. Sin is being turned into illness, and illness is being perceived as a hidden good. Mankind apparently is entering into a new experimental game. It is experimenting for the first time on a universal scale with morality. T h e old tables of the law are shattered; the new ones, swathed in mists, cannot yet be made out. We have no historical precedent for such thoroughgoing moral scepticism. Ancient Greece provided a few philosophers who, among themselves and for a few members of the aristocracy, raised sceptical doubts of the nature of morality. And under cover of thundering denunciation of immorality, many a moralist through the ages has been able to make cautious inquiries into the nature of morality itself. But today the field is wide open. Our juve-

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niles are delinquent; our leaders are venal. War is an unmitigated scourge instead of a noble profession. Businessmen no longer believe themselves the economic saviors of mankind. Teachers are in despair at the amorality of their charges. Governments must be content with accusing other governments of immorality. They seldom can convince themselves of the righteousness of their own conduct. We are in a state of constant moral crisis. And we do not appear to be enjoying it. Why is this so, especially since the human animal has always had a zest for dangerous innovation? Breakdown and failure have apparently always been part of the human condition. A tribe is healthy and happy if its religion is unimpaired. When the bonds of religion loosen, morality must take over. The age-old ways of valuing things have a certain inertia even after the religious impetus begins to fail. When morality wanes, law inherits its tasks. Conscious reasons must now be given for public actions that were hitherto unquestionably right. When law fails, war becomes universal. Force, the element which law seeks forever to keep in abeyance becomes dominant. The tribe wages war against others for juridical reasons. Lacking these, it seeks to rend itself to pieces in a frenzied effort to pluck out its unrest. Modern society exhibits all these symptoms simultaneously, and more. Not only have religion, morality, and law failed us. War is even a greater failure. No one believes today that war refreshes man and solves his inner distress. On the contrary, it is the paradoxical wish of the military commander that only the enemy may be hurt. His own men must not suffer. Hence, the age-old therapeutic value of war is given up and the task of solving insoluble political problems is assigned to machines. You will notice that in my list law comes fairly near the bottom, behind religion and morality, though ahead

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of war as a means of solving the collective problems of mankind. You will also notice that I did not include science in the list. T h i s is not because I believe with many people that science is nothing but the collection of all the ways of doing anything whatever more efficiently. And that thus it is at the disposal of religion, morality, law, and war indiscriminately. I am well aware that world-wide attempts are being made to foist upon science the task of solving all the problems humanity now confronts. W e know that this debases science and debauches scientists. It beguiles scientists from the pursuit of truth to the production and distribution of material objects. It inflates them with a feeling of power they know they do not possess. It places upon them responsibility for conduct they are utterly powerless to control. Scientists have become worldly, men of affairs. In truth, they are lambs being prepared for the slaughter. If religion, morality, and law are presently in disrepute for failing to bring mankind an enduring sense of satisfaction, science today is on the very edge of catastrophe. A l l thoughtful minds are alarmed at this turn of events. W e have then a condition of universal revolt against all the major collective habits of mankind. How do I propose to account for this vast phenomenon? I do not propose to account for it at all. I shall ask, not why human individuals are in revolt, but rather what are some of the forms this revolt takes and what are some of its effects on collective human behavior? ii

T h e human individual's response to the threat of racial extinction by war is the greatest population increase the world has ever seen. His reaction to the rise of totalitarianism and increased governmental regulation is an un-

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paralleled advance in individual lawlessness. Moral propaganda he couples with schemes for aggrandizement. When he reads expensive advertisements telling him to be good, to take care of himself and others, to go to church, he couples all these admonitions with the unspoken one: "And incidentally do business with our God-fearing corporation." T o carry this analysis a bit farther. T h e individual's answer to the mechanical mode of production made possible by the development of modern science is to trivialize the wonderful objects it produces by childishly demanding more and more of them. He has deprived the beautiful artifacts of the modern machine of every vestige of esthetic worth. T h e leisure which the machine culture affords him he spends primarily in loafing. T h e modern individual is dissatisfied with the world that man created. What in the world does he want? If I may be permitted to speak for him, I shall begin with a confession: I do not know what he and I want. I only know what we do not want: we do not really want anything that you can mention. Having reached this point (something like Descartes' condition of universal doubt) the philosopher in us begins to feel a little more cheerful. At least this discontent of ours is no trifle. W e are not apt to be bought off for a song. If the human individual is in universal revolt against his collectivities and their collective mode of behavior, perhaps the way to begin is to re-examine the collectivities in the light of this universal, individual revolt. By definition, the thing that an individual should prize most highly is himself. And yet the thoughtful, mature individual secretly, or perhaps even openly, despises himself. Why is this so? Can it be that the self which the individual despises is not really his own true self? T h a t it is the self which unreligious religion, immoral morality,

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and unlawful law have made of him? Can it be that this bright, shining, alert, inquisitive, loving, thoughtful, chunk of animated matter really despises itself? Or does it not rather feel that somehow, in a mysterious but unfair manner, it has been done out of its birthright: happiness? I know I was born to be happy and no explanation of why I lost this gift and no substitute, however lofty its virtues, will compensate me for my loss. Only a return to the pristine happy state will do me and the countless other individuals who are my human fellows. Is anything like this remotely possible? Let us seek a hint of an answer in roundabout fashion. There is a function of the human mind whose operation it used to be the business of philosophy to investigate. This task philosophy has strangely neglected in the modern era. T h e function I refer to is feeling or sentiment. By feeling or sentiment, we endow an object or an activity with unique value. We make of it an individual—that whose worth is uniquely appraised. What philosophy had to express concerning this puzzling activity it called wisdom. T h e wise man is he who out of a myriad of conflicting testimonies selects just the one which adequately values the situation. T o him, no two things have the same value. Each thing, and therefore of course each individual human being, have unique worth. At the beginning of the modern era, in response perhaps to the great upsurge of mechanical production and physical science, the philosopher gave over the pursuit of wisdom in favor of knowledge. Not the knowledge of the individuating function of the human mind which I have called feeling or sentiment, but the universalizing knowledge of modern science. Such activity results from the operation of a different function, we are told by the great psychotherapist, Carl Gustav Jung. This activity he calls thought and holds that it is inimical to feeling or senti-

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ment; that it generalizes what feeling seeks to individuate, just as feeling seeks to individuate what thought desires to generalize. Modern science grows at the expense of feeling. And feeling, suppressed and depreciated, knows how to retaliate in emotional outbursts that inundate humanity. I do not purport to lay upon philosophy and science the blame for the undeniable evidence of outraged feelings on the part of the modern individual. I have other broad backs upon which to place most of the burden: morality, law, education. First, morality. m Morality, I say, deals primarily with feeling or sentiment. This comports with our vague intuition that in some mysterious way morality has primarily to do with the individual soul—more accurately, with the feeling life of the individual soul. My meaning is expressed in the little poem called " T h e Magic Garden:" There was once a magic garden Where the herbs and flowers ran wild In a maze of devious patterns Like the movements of a child; Where each root and blossom counted And each blade of grass was taught That its slightest random weaving In a magic web was caught; Where each flower spread its petals With a bright expectant air For it knew the garden's secret And was glad the web was there;

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And there never was a spider When his artful work was done T h a t believed his charm was equal T o the snare that garden spun. Morality then has to do with the individual. A n d this is quite mysterious for the very meaning of morality seems to embed it deeply in the group. Mos means custom; and morality is what it is fitting that all in the group do. How are we to reconcile individual feeling with the compulsive, unconscious, collective character of custom? I am not so foolish as to suppose that I know. I do recognize that morality is in some sense a collective phenomenon. Feeling knows how to individuate, but it also has its own peculiar method of generalization. For want of a better name, I shall call this process "relatedness." While thought discriminates, feeling relates. Feeling binds sentiment together in a web. By individuating everything, the power of feeling ties everything together. T h e method of science will not produce this effect. Feeling will not be ruled by thought. For when morality forsakes feeling and goes over to thought, it generalizes sentiment mechanically and emerges in a code. T h i s is the signal for its demise. It becomes law. Second, law. Law too must answer for outraged human feeling. Will you agree with me if I say that the legal process is an uneasy compromise between thought and feeling, between science and morality, between fact and value? Let me illustrate the dilemma by referring to a notorious case. It is known as Berry v. Chaplin and was decided by the courts of California. T h e child of an unmarried starlet sued Charles Chaplin to establish paternity and if successful to obtain an order decreeing support. T h e defendant denied paternity and offered imposing evidence of eminent serologists that blood tests conclu-

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sively established non-paternity. T h e plaintiff did not contradict this scientific evidence but offered evidence of access to its mother on the part of the defendant at the relevant time. Counsel for the defendant asked the court to dismiss the suit since the testimony of the scientific experts left nothing for the jury to decide. T h e court refused and directed the jury to consider all the evidence, lay and expert, and decide the issue of paternity on this basis. T h e jury obliged, and found as a fact that the defendant was indeed the father of the plaintiff. A support order thereupon issued. T h e legal community finds this a most distressing decision to contemplate. Apparently the judicial process can establish impossibilities as facts. What modern science shows with complete confidence could not exist, the jury with equal confidence proclaims as established. Will you agree with me that this case, unusual as it obviously is, nevertheless does show the triumph of feeling over thought? Will you go further and say that it constitutes a triumph of morality over science? Here, I am afraid that some of you will disagree. You may be led unhesitatingly to say that the decision is not only unscientific, it is also immoral. Many jurists would agree with you. But then again many scientists would not. I have actually had more scientists than lawyers applaud the decision. T h e scientists care nothing for our legal dilemmas. They say, "Someone had to support the child. And Chaplin was rich. Seventy-five dollars a week was not too much to pay for his fun." Be that as it may, and whether you think the decision moral or immoral, you will agree that criteria of science and morality were in conflict. When the instinct for truth-values overcomes the moral instinct for individuated feeling, a legal monstrosity results: a rule of law that is unjust! But how can a rule of

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law b e u n j u s t , if law is the very definition of justice? T h e p a r a d o x can be p u t in familiar terms: a r u l e of law carr i e d to its logical conclusion is always u n j u s t . W h y is injustice logical, a n d logic u n j u s t ? A m a x i m of the R o m a n law p o i n t s the same moral: summum jus, summa injuria. T h e s u m m i t of law is the c u l m i n a t i o n of w r o n g ! Insistence o n t h e scientific v i r t u e of consistency leads inevitably to o u t r a g e d feeling. B u t the converse is also true. Law has its own m e t h o d f o r d e t e r m i n i n g the existence of facts, a n d justice is supposed to be eager to get at the facts. Suppose that you are willing to a d m i t that a certain X, u n k n o w n to you, was u n d e n i a b l y assisted into the n e t h e r world by felonious means. T h a t , in other words, a b r u t a l m u r d e r had been c o m m i t t e d . Suppose f u r t h e r you a d m i t t h a t you were in a peculiarly advantageous position to have f u r t h e r e d this enterprise, and that there existed sufficient reasons why you w o u l d have felt, as you obviously d o n o w feel, that t h e world is well rid of X's presence. Suppose f u r t h e r , w h a t is u n t h i n k a b l e of any of us, that o u r d e f e n d a n t has a l o n g record of assorted robberies, burglaries, mayhem, a n d o n e " u n p r o v e d " felonious homicide to his credit. B u t suppose finally that he knows, as only he can know, t h a t in fact he d i d n o t c o m m i t the m u r d e r . Is it possible t h a t a n y t h i n g could be m o r e i m p o r t a n t , to h i m a n d to h u m a n society, t h a n to d e t e r m i n e the t r u t h or falsity of this q u e s t i o n of fact? I suppose not. A n d yet t r u t h or falsity of questions of fact is the business of science. A n d the instinct that law possesses to get its facts straight is a never-ceasing force. Yet getting facts straight violates ind i v i d u a l sensibilities. It must b e that the law will have to learn to get straight facts w i t h o u t u n d u l y i n j u r i n g h u m a n feelings. At this point, I stop a n d t u r n instead to science w i t h a q u e s t i o n : W h y can't science i n c o r p o r a t e h u m a n f e e l i n g in its fact-finding process? For u n t i l it does, it will

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continue to outrage sentiment, and so will all the disciplines that use science, including law. In order that science should include feeling in the scientific process, a veritable revolution in scientific method must take place. There must be devised a logic of individuality. Scientific generalization must be changed to include feeling-toned "relatedness," scientific individuation must be transmuted to take account of "unique worth," the morality of the scientific way of doing things must be made explicit. The highest ideal of the science of today, namely the ideal of measurement, must give way to an ideal of decision-making, for moralizing is a decisionmaking activity and science and morals must be combined in a grand overall theory of decision. In point of fact, all truth determinations call for decisions; all decisions are unique moral determinations; every moral determination must fit into a "web of relatedness"; truth and falsity are part and parcel of good and evil. This is a vast program for the science of the future. Law already meets this program part way. Decision theory is the very stuff of law's theoretical life. As we know, law's major task at present is to adjust the conflicting social interests of the collectivity and the value demands of the individual, and it does this by juggling moralities and truths. I accuse law of exacerbating the individual's sad plight in the modern world by undervaluing him and overvaluing the collectivities known as society and science. And third, I accuse education of doing the same thing though in a rather different way. Let me recount the following two cases to illustrate my point. Not long ago, a freshman in a certain professional school ended the year with an average of 69.61—70 being passing. Under the rules, his dismissal was automatic but with a right to petition the appropriate faculty committee for readmittance.

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While intellectually this student was not above average, he was an unusually honest man with a strong sense of moral responsibility. T h e committee voted not to readmit him. He had not measured up to the objective standard and hence must be denied admission to the profession. T w o days later, the committee was again in meeting, this time to consider the case of a man who had received two very high grades, two average ones, and two grades low enough to effect his exclusion under the rules. T h e student was evidently quite bright but something had happened to his "motivation," whatever that is. W h e n it appeared likely that the committee would reconsider the case of the intellectual, an older member served notice that in that event he intended to move to reopen the case of the "good child" as well. T h e net effect was that both were readmitted. What have we educators to say of the dilemma of intellectuality versus goodness? What do we do with the good child who is not intellectually nimble? With the people who are capable of extremely fine value judgments, who not only know right from wrong instinctively but consciously and with fine discrimination? I am not in a position to condemn the educator who finds himself confined to mechanical educational scales for weighing educability. I, too, use them and have always done so. Mechanistic civilization, which now seems to be spreading all over the world with a vengeance, simply ignores the work which former ages did in developing the human faculty of feeling and sentiment. Feeling is now equated with emotion and dismissed as irrational. And yet it is the basis of all religion, is it not? Morality without feeling is empty codification or idle semantics. Law without feeling is plain tyranny. War without feeling is butchery. A n d education without feeling is intellectual aggression or, worse still, the brutal morality of gross collective opinion.

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I suggest that philosophy become concerned once more with wisdom; that science study the power of feeling to individuate (adding this to its two historic methods of individuation, namely, minute specification and spacetime coordination); that law recognize that social interests must be balanced by regard for individual worth; that thus law become truly an adjunct to education rather than a system of organized force; and finally that education itself seek its proper aim by broadening its conception of excellence to include training in sentiment, to the end that the vast experiment which the race is now undertaking in the field of morality may result in giving the individual that sense of worth which is the true human heritage.

Value Conflicts in the Education of Our Young JOHN

L.

CHILDS

I

Human living is an active process that involves constant utilization of the resources of the environment. It is within the matrix of these life-sustaining, organism-environment transactions that learning originates. Human creatures are so constituted that what they do and undergo today molds the character of their experiences of tomorrow. These carry-overs from what is experienced today into the life of tomorrow are not restricted to action patterns and skills of manipulation; they also pervade and saturate our modes of perceiving, of thinking, and of valuing. Scientific study of human development shows that man learns as he lives, and that his distinctive intellectual and moral attributes are achieved through this process of experiencing and learning. Hence, we do not have to have schools in order to have learning. For the immature human being, learning is inherent and incessant. It begins long before a child goes to school, it persists after his school years are over, and even during the school period much that a child learns is not due to the work of the school. Schools, therefore, are not maintained to provide opportunity for learning, they are rather organized because their founders desire to promote certain special and approved kinds of learning. In other 73

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words, an expression of value preference lies at the core of every program of organized education. Schools, moreover, are not spontaneously generated; they are deliberately organized social agencies. In this connection, it is also important to note that schools are organized and maintained by adults, not by the children enrolled in them. Important implications for our view of the nature of deliberate education are embedded in these elemental considerations. It is clear that the adults of a community found and support schools because they are concerned to make of their young something other and better than they would become if left to themselves and their surroundings. Indeed, it is faith in this possibility of human improvement through deliberate education which is the ultimate justification of the school as a social institution, entitled to public support. Now the stubborn fact is that there are genuine and conflicting alternatives in human life and thought. In order to nurture dependable and consistent behaviors and attitudes in the young, we are compelled to choose from among these life alternatives. T h u s schools are not morally indifferent institutions. They are brought into existence by adults who desire to preserve and improve cherished modes of life and thought through the systematic nurture of their young. Were Bernard Shaw correct when he declared "that the vilest abortionist is he who attempts to mold the mind of the child" then all who are engaged in organized education would have to be regarded as abortionists. T h e root purpose of the school is to direct, weigh, and influence the experiencing and the growth of the young. Of one thing we may be sure: we cannot form the young and leave them unformed, and we cannot foster certain growth in them unless we are disposed to hinder other possible growths. Indeed, choice among significant life alternatives is written into the very constitution of

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that process of transmitting and directing experience which is organized education. Nor are these manifestations of moral preference which are inherent in the determination of a school program superficial in scope and social consequence. T h e depth of feeling which has been aroused by the 1954 desegregation ruling of the Supreme Court is one example of the crucial nature of these educational selections and emphases. Another example of the reality of these manifestations of educational preference is found in the growing tendency of the prelates of the Roman Catholic church to reject the common public school of our country, even though this rejection places upon them the burden of maintaining their own national parochial school system. Since choices among life alternatives are foundational and inescapable in the work of organized education, it is important that we should be aware of their role in our school activity. It is a mistake to assume that we will do better in education if we are vague and uncertain about the kind of developments we are seeking to bring about in the young, or if we are indefinite and confused about the means required to attain these developments. Ignorance, vagueness, and aimless "busy-work" are no more defensible in education than in other spheres of human activity. T o recognize that in a democratic program of education the so-called "learners" have their due role as "teachers," and that "teachers" should also be alert to learn from their "pupils," cannot reasonably be taken to mean that adults can be freed from their responsibility for guidance, nor that the determination of the ends and means of education can be imposed upon the young who have had the least experience. T o the extent that we have faith in intelligence, we shall believe that the prospect of attaining satisfactory results will be more promising if we are conscious of what we are about when we are about

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the guidance of the learning and the growth of the young. Our whole thought about education will be confused at the root if we do not realize that the making of value judgments is ineradicable in the work of organized education. ii

Educators have also learned, through their own firsthand experiences, that there can be no precise scientific determination of value judgments. For decades, various educational groups have tried to develop procedures by which the program of the school could be scientifically constructed. On the one side, there have been educational psychologists who have sought this stable scientific foundation for education in the systematic and objective study of the native endowment, the infant behaviors, and the process of learning and development of the immature human being. On the other side, there have been educational sociologists who have sought to provide an objective basis for education through the scientific analysis and description of human society. Both of these groups have made important contributions to the work of education, but they have not succeeded in making scientific procedures and findings a substitute for value judgments in the construction of educational programs. They have, rather, disclosed that the scientific description of man and society cannot, in and of itself, provide adequate ground for any affirmation or formulation of what should be. Their studies and findings further demonstrate that factors of value are necessarily involved in every transition from a scientific statement of what is to a moral program concerned with what ought to be. And in the work of education, as we have seen, we are concerned not simply with what is, but most fundamentally with what ought to be. Scientific study has discovered much of value about the

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inherited equipment, the native behaviors, and the general developmental pattern of the child. It has also made indispensable contributions to our understanding of the process by which the immature acquire habits, techniques, appreciations, and attitudes, but it has not been able to develop an authoritative statement of what our educational objectives should be. So far as native endowment and the process of learning are concerned, any language can become the mother tongue of the child. It is the culture of which the child is a member, not scientific generalizations about the process of vocalization, which decides the particular language a child will be taught. What is true of language is also true of many other aspects of the program of the school. As John Dewey perceived many years ago, apart from knowledge of the practical and fine arts of the culture, we cannot define what "the powers" of a child actually are. What holds at the level of the development of habits, skills, and techniques, holds with even greater force when we come to education in matters of history, tradition, sentiments, rights, duties, and loyalties. Interpretations of these cultural affairs are inevitably influenced by that which we have experienced and learned as members of particular human groups. Scientific study of human behavior and learning has deepened our realization that man is by nature a social creature, and that each individual achieves his distinctively human traits by virtue of his participation in some determinate cultural group. Moreover, when we undertake to construct and direct a program of deliberate education, we always pass from the order of the biological to the order of the civilizational. We err greatly if we assume that there is an intrinsic opposition between social nurture and the development of individuality. This confusion is present in the following eloquent appeal by Bertrand Russell in which he

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exhorts the educator to have reverence for the individuality and the felt interests of the child. He says: T h e man who has reverence will not think it his duty to "mold" the young. He feels in all that lives, but especially in human beings, and most of all in children, something sacred, indefinable, unlimited, something individual and strangely precious, the growing principle of life, an embodied fragment of the dumb striving of the world. . . . All this gives him a longing to help the child in its own battle; he would equip and strengthen it, not for some outside and . . . but for the ends which the child's own spirit is obscurely seeking. 1 Experience actually shows, however, that, when educators descend from the lofty plane of abstract principle to make their concrete interpretations of that "which the child's own spirit is obscurely seeking," they invariably read into the "strivings of the child" that which they have learned to value in human culture. Bertrand Russell is no exception. In his emphasis on the primacy of the cultivation of habits of critical, scientific thought in the young, he is reflecting his culture, not the inborn nature of the child. One may be in full accord with his conviction that there is a significant connection between learning to think empirically in terms of conditions, means, and consequences and the attainment of intellectual maturity and independence, and still contend that, if we are to put scientific methods and attitudes at the heart of the curriculum, we should be ready to justify this selection and emphasis on cultural grounds. Obviously, the process of cultural evaluation inherent in all educational construction will be carried on more adequately if we are informed by knowledge of the traditions, the operating institutions, and the life conditions,

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trends, and conflicts of our society. It is need for knowledge of these institutionalized arrangements which makes the sociological approach to education so useful. But educational construction always involves more than accurate statements about existing social conditions and tendencies. It equally involves formulations of that which is deemed significant, feasible, and worthy of preservation and further development. Which is to say, that the development of educational programs involves cultural evaluations, emphases, and choices. Now in societies, such as contemporary America, which are marked by competing interest groups who have divergent conceptions of the public good and of the concrete means by which that good is to be achieved, it is a mistake to assume that there can be an exact scientific determination of either public policies or of the educational purposes and programs which are the correlations of these public policies. hi

During the early thirties, I was co-operating with John Dewey in the writing of the concluding chapter of The Educational Frontier. So I brought this problem of the role of cultural evaluations in the making of educational programs to Dewey's attention. After a number of extended discussions, he defined his own position on this matter as follows: It is the business of a philosophy of education to make clear what is involved in the action which is carried on in the educational field, to transform a preference which is blind, based on custom rather than thought, into an intelligent choice—one made, that is, with consciousness of what is aimed at, the reasons why it is preferred, and the fitness of the means used. Never-

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theless intelligent choice is still choice. It involves preference for one kind of end rather than another which might have been worked for. It involves a conviction that such and such an end is valuable, worthwhile, rather than another. Sincerity demands a maxim u m of impartiality in seeking and stating the reasons for the aims and the values w h i c h are chosen and rejected. B u t the scheme of education itself cannot be impartial in the sense of not i n v o l v i n g a preference for some values over others. T h e obligation to be impartial is the obligation to state as clearly as possible what is chosen and why it is chosen. 2 Naturally, I was gratified that D e w e y formulated his o w n views so clearly on this basic educational question. I w o u l d like to make a brief statement of my own position. I believe that education has already profited much, and will continue to profit, from the scientific study of human behavior in both its social and individual aspects. B u t it is one thing to say that we need more of science in education, and it is another and different thing to hold that we can make a science of education. Scientific understanding is essential to intelligent choice a m o n g life alternatives, b u t choosing from a m o n g these alternatives also involves a manifestation of preference for certain definite values. T h u s choosing is more than knowing, and the process of m a k i n g value judgments is more than a process of inquiry, analysis, and description. It is because A m e r i c a n educators have realized this that they have sought to provide a solid moral foundation for our public school system by making the concept of democracy basic in their interpretation of the m e a n i n g of A m e r i c a n life. A s they have conceived A m e r i c a n democracy, it denotes not only a distinctive form of government, but also a way of life which is g r o u n d e d in respect for each h u m a n being irrespective of

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factors of race, color, creed, sex, nationality background, or family ancestors. Most American educational groups would heartily endorse the following statement from a report of the Educational Policies Commission of the National Education Association. It declares that "the American society which education aids in maintaining and improving is by declaration, profession, and institutional organization a democratic society." It further declares that "in any realistic definition of education for the United States there should appear the whole philosophy and practice of democracy." IV

It is clear from the foregoing that the manifestation of educational preferences includes, as an essential part, the manifestation of social preferences, and that the making of policies for the public school involves the making of social or public policies for our country. Today, our nation has entered upon a period of social transition and transformation, and the American people are not united in their views of the direction in which our country should now move in the sphere of its economy, in its religious and race relations, and in its relation to other parts of the world. It is important that we view the present controversy over the program of the public school in the context of this wider national effort to adjust to altered conditions and demands in both domestic and world affairs. During this period of cultural transition and transformation, the task of making educational choices has become both more difficult and more important. It is more difficult to make these social appraisals and educational choices because many historic norms do not verify them when put to the test of social action, and hence cannot function automatically as criteria of the good and the

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desirable. Moreover, in present-day industrial America, specialized occupational, regional, and interest groups have divergent conceptions of public policy and of the kind of reconstructions which are required to overcome present difficulties. These differences in social, economic, and world outlook which are characteristic of major groups often take the form of contrary demands upon the school. It is manifestly a difficult thing to make unifying policies for the public school when the public which that school serves is divided about the implications of our democracy for current life practices. At the same time, the responsibility for making these socio-educational choices has also become more important, for in this period of social transition and national and international reconstruction our educational determinations are attended by far-reaching consequences. It is not an exaggeration to say that the kind of education American children now receive may even determine whether our democratic civilization will survive. One conclusion is definitely entailed by these considerations. During the present period, when the American people are confused, uncertain, and divided about the direction in which the reconstruction of domestic and world affairs should move, it is a mistake to suppose that the making of educational purposes and programs can be the exclusive responsibility of the educational profession. Cooperation between professional and lay groups—between teachers and parents—is imperative. It is also a fallacy to assume that the organization and the direction of public education in our multi-group, interdependent society can be a non-controversial undertaking. It is time we abandoned the notion that because public education is a community enterprise, designed to serve all the people, it must stay out of the democratic struggle and play no part in those basic processes by which the will of the people is

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formed and the nature of the public good is defined and redefined. Actually, there is little evidence in the history of American education which supports this theory of the role of public education. As a matter of fact, our common school system, "open to all and supported by all," was the outcome of an intense social and political struggle carried on in one locality after another. T h e record also shows that the movement to maintain a public school system, committed to freedom of teaching and inquiry and which can operate as an agency of deliberate social improvement, has likewise been marked by continuing struggle. In one field after another, powerful pressure groups have emerged who have demanded that the beliefs and social arrangements which they consider fundamental should be excluded from the process of free inquiry, discussion, and evaluation by consequences. Public education has constantly struggled to protect itself from the suppressive tendencies of these predatory groups. Horace Mann, and others responsible for the founding of the public school, recognized that the making of educational policies involves the making of public policies, and that the lay public was therefore legitimately involved in this aspect of the educational undertaking. But these pioneers in the development of American education also held that the members of the educational profession have a responsibility to help make clear what is at stake in these socio-educational controversies. T o be sure, educators as educators are not propagandists and they have their distinctive way of sharing in the total process by which public issues are defined and new social meanings, relationships, rights, and standards are developed. During this transitional period, however, there will be no great education unless educators are willing to carry a responsible intellectual and moral role in the remaking of Ameri-

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can life. In our time, the historic conception that public education should seek to enlighten and not enslave requires that educators should lead in the quest for a new consensus. v I shall now briefly identify three major areas in which education should share in the search for a new orientation in American life and thought. All three of these areas are disturbed and controversial. Public education can play a significant part in the resolution of these problems only to the extent that it learns how to act constructively in the zone of the controversial. T h e first of these troubled areas is the sphere of race relations. Long before the momentous decision of the Supreme Court in 1954, we were aware that inherited patterns of discrimination embedded in our segregated public school system were not in harmony with the democratic principle of equality of opportunity for all. As a people we also realize that racial segregation in education is a national as well as a regional problem. Tendencies toward segregation are by no means confined to the South, although it is there that they find their most stubborn expression. As a nation our democratic moral position will be compromised and weakened so long as we maintain these separate educational arrangements which we all realize "are inherently unequal." T h e uncommitted parts of the world find it difficult to trust the democratic purposes of a country which denies equality of treatment to its own colored members. But the experience of the past four years has demonstrated that the movement to establish an integrated public school system in all parts of our country defines a goal

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as difficult as it is urgent. Laws, courts, and military and police forces have their part to play in the resolution of this problem, but in its roots it is a problem of human relationships to be resolved by social and educational action. As Talleyrand once observed, we can do many things with bayonets, but we cannot sit on them. Great credit is due individual educators in a number of communities for the statesmanship, courage, and the success they have had in the process of transforming a segregated school system into an integrated school system. The profession of education, however, as an organized movement has not measured up to its responsibilities. It is to be hoped that our profession will soon get into effectual action, for down to the present church leaders, lawyers, and publicists have done more in this field than have educators as an organized professional body. The second of these tensional areas lies in the sphere of our domestic economy. We have traditionally been reared in a philosophy of individualism, in a mentality of scarcity, and in the notion that the best government is the one that governs least. Today, we live in a dynamic, closely integrated, interdependent industrial order, possessed of unprecedented powers of agricultural and industrial production. We increasingly realize that this interdependent, continental economy requires organs of planning and co-ordination. But, as President Hoover's Commission on Social Trends declared, a system of social and economic planning compatible with the dignity and freedom of individuals and groups "defines a national need, not a developed human capacity." To create a system of democratic planning and control which will enable us to make a sustained use of our productive powers is a central task of our time. This task has its important educational dimensions, as a report of the Educational Policies

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Commission has affirmed. I quote from this report: "A sense of social responsibility has not been absent from education at any stage of its development, but for a long time the maintenance and improvement of American society were taken for granted as the automatic outcomes of individual activities." As a result, many assumed "that the primary function of education was to train individuals so that they could rise into callings deemed higher, if not more lucrative," and they have also assumed that there was "eternal validity to the theory that both individual prosperity and social security and welfare were to be automatically assured by the free application of talents to personal ends." Today, we realize that this historic conception contains an inadequate theory of social welfare, and a misleading view of the nature of personal achievement and success. Much remains to be done, however, before we shall have supplanted it with an alternative economic and social outlook more in harmony with the actual life conditions of today. Education has its important share in the development of this alternative social outlook. T h e third area of tension and transformation is constituted by our changed relations with the rest of the world. Gone beyond recall is the automatic security once provided by the two broad oceans, and with this development has gone the possibility of national self-sufficiency. Events have so shaped themselves that, today, our country with its strategic location, its past history and democratic achievements, together with its demonstrated material resources and technological power, must accept a central role in the organization of the democratic forces of the world. Scientific, technical, political, and cultural competence is required of us as a people if we are to do our part in the organization of a world for security and the pro-

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gressive development of human potentialities. Today, it is widely recognized that American education needs re-orientation if it is to equip our young for these novel world roles and responsibilities. In the past, our education has been predominantly oriented to the historical roots of our civilization in the Western world. This attention to the cultural sources of our major institutions and modes of thought and value is fundamental and must be continued. But it now should be associated with a parallel attention to the cultures of the Near East and the Far East which are the products of traditions other than those of the Hebraic-Christian and the Greco-Roman world. These peoples of the East are being profoundly stirred by the forces of science, technology, and democracy, and they do not intend that their countries shall continue to serve as mere sources of raw materials and markets for the manufacturers of the industrial West. Viewed from the perspective of the cultural and national aspirations of these peoples, it is apparent that the task of developing a world for mutual security and co-operation has its cultural and political, as well as its scientific and technological, aspects. Education must be geared to prepare our young for all the dimensions of this task. Although the domestic and international tasks are organically interrelated, I am in accord with those who believe that a certain primacy should now be given to world needs and responsibilities in the education of American youth. In co-operation with parents, we have as teachers the responsibility and the opportunity to pioneer in the development of this reconstruction in the program of the American public school. In sum, we live today in a troubled and divided world. A central task of public education is to develop the under-

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standings, the outlooks, and the attitudes which will overcome these cleavages. We may hope that the need for a new consensus will lead to one of the most creative periods in American life and education.

NOTES 1 Bertrand Russell, Why Men Fight (New York: T h e Century Company, 1916), pp. 157-58. * W. H. Kilpatrick (ed.), The Educational Frontier (New York: T h e Century Company, 1933), p. 288.