道德的事實と社會的事實

Abstract

Metaphysics of ethics in modern times eminently comprise social ethics in themselves ; but, since they have not completely done away with the remnants of the Aristotelian concept of substance, freedom as well as moral law have been assumed to lie immanent in individual persons, not, therefore, as something to be socially and historically realized. It was only natural that their normative ethics should not have been based upon such an understanding as would be desirable concerning the ‘sociality' of human beings. In this article the writer aims at a contribution towards establishing such a foundation, answering therewith in his own way the problem of the opposition in modern times between the individual moral and the group moral, raised by Reinhold Niebuhr in his “Moral Man and Immoral Society”. Society consists in the reciprocity among individuals ; and reciprocal actions imply a sort of causality. Actions, however, are here reciprocal neither in its physical nor in its biological sense (i. e. reciprocity between living things and their surroundings), but in the sense of ‘subjective' reciprocity. Subjective reciprocal actions, while they presuppose the ability of freedom on the part of individual subjects, manifest themselves in their genuine essence in enlightening and cultivating this ability of freedom in the subjects concerned in a reciprocal way. Freedom is not so much an idea (Idee) as an ability to be formed through reciprocal actions, and moral law is such a social order as would enable this reciprocal cultivation of freedom ; and this is what the sociality in its ethical and axiological sense should exactly mean. These points the writer has tried to elaborate through a critical survey of Durkheim, Baldwin and Mead ; and especially, attention has been paid to observations of how in the moral life of children the formation of freedom and its socialization are dynamically correlated. Ethics in its own implication is directly social in so far as it has to consider what the social life should properly be like. But this social aspect of ethics does not yet annul by itself the distinction between the individual moral on the one hand, which regulates the relations of individual personalities, and the group moral on the other hand, which is determined by actual forces tending to the negation of personalities ; indeed, the technological rationalism in the capitalistic societies of our day is remarkably endangering our humane relations to be substituted with non-personal, objective relations. It is thus that, in correspondence with the personal and the non-personal relations, a dualism irresistibly suggests itself in which the two types of ethics above said are to be distinguished. The task of ethics in our times, nevertheless, has been considered by the writer to be just in trying to get to a possible synthesis overcoming this opposition.