ABSTRACT
I § These studies in Economics and Politics, with the not infrequent excursions into Psychology which they have involved, have brought us inside the territory claimed for Ethics, or Moral Science par excellence. For, holding as we do, that these social sciences are demarcated, in their subject matter and the questions which they put to it, by the requirements of their corresponding arts, we have been driven to the recognition of standards of values, concepts of human well-being, and motives or incentives to activity, which clearly fall within the domain of Ethics. Now, though the theory, or principles, of Ethics is sometimes claimed as a branch of Philosophy, rather than of Science, the sharp insistence upon this distinction will generally be rejected as an inconvenient pedantry. Philosophy will rightly be recognised as scientia scientiarum, mainly concerned with the nature of knowledge and the presuppositions of the sciences, as well as with the underlying unity required alike to give order to them and to their subject matter, the phenomenal Universe. Whether, therefore, Ethics be formally classed as a branch of Philosophy, or as a science, its devotees claim for it a field of ordered knowledge in the conscious behaviour of man. The distinction sometimes made between Ethics and other ‘Sciences’ viz. that the latter deal exclusively with what is, whereas the former deals also with what ought to be, is wrongly taken to disqualify Ethics as a claimant to the term Science. For an ‘ought’, i.e. some fact weighted with a ‘moral’ value, is none the less an ‘is’. From the standpoint of science, an ideal, as also an illusion or a fallacy of reasoning, has evidently as much right to be taken for a subject of scientific study, as a piece of rock or a plant.
