Conscience and Calculation

HE ethical question of what an action or attitude should be depends upon the needs and interests, the values, of the persons involved. Values are vague and incalculable, but the urgency of acting with reference to them makes it a desideratum to state them in definite terms. An illusion of success in this undertaking arises from the fact that a quantitative scheme can be imposed to some extent upon the most elusive qualities. But to inflict numbers on values does not reduce them to figures; nor does the convenience of dealing with quantities avoid the ultimate inconvenience of their being derivative and deceptive. Especially dubious is the effort to be scientific in ethics, in the sense of transforming innumerable inner factors of feeling and desire into uniform integers amenable to computation. It is interesting how superficially successful the attempt can be, how much it is tacitly accepted and trusted, and how hard it is to relinquish. The alternative seems to be admission that morality is subjective, that it cannot be submitted to any objective, external criterion, that each must solve moral problems for himself by his own feeling or conscience, and grant the same privilege to everyone else-or bow to convention, authority, or some other form of arbitrary force. In practice we compromise among three ideas: that morality is a matter of private feeling, that it is acceptance of social pressure, and that it is based on a calculation of consequences to determine the greater good or the lesser evil in every puzzling situation. The advantage of putting ethics into numerical terms is that number is impartial whereas feeling and authority probably are not. The difference between a larger and a smaller number is objective; all can accept it. But this impersonal measuring stick