Ethics and the Assumption of Purely Private Pleasures

Abstract

N OCCIDENTAL ethics three sets of conceptions have -been central: reason or knowledge; pleasure, satisfaction, or happiness; justice, goodwill, or duty. The great problem may be said to have been how, from the proper comrbination of the first two elements,, an adequate explanation or sanction of the third may be obtained: how the just life, the life lived with regard to the welfare of others, may be shown to be the reasonable and the happy one. Yet, in spite of rather extreme shifts of emphasis tending to reduce now one, now another, of the three factors, or even two of them, to a mere derivative of the remaining, the conviction has never really been disposed of that all three participate somehow in ultimate value and cannot quite be regarded as mere means to each other or to anything else. Without rationality human life ceases to be human; forsuch abdication of our essential nature there could be no compensation worth considering. Without enjoyment or happiness, again, we could not care to live, nor understand any conception of value, moral or otherwise. Finally, if a reasonable and happy life should involve a possible indifference to the possession of such a life by others, if it were compatible with basic selfishness, then social life would be a shrewd hypocrisy-a la Hobbes-a state of affairs which could no longer exist once it became generally understood; and besides, there is that in man which will not renounce, upon any terms, the ideal of genuine disinterestedness, of sympathetic and responsible sharing in other men's lives and fortunes. Of the three types of conception, perhaps the most ambiguous and elusive is the group to which happiness belongs, rang-