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Sharp—The Personal Equation in Ethics. 
to me. Therefore the general happiness can not, as the Utili¬ 
tarians claim, be the ultimate goal of moral action. And when 
they maintain it is, they are simply putting a non-moral spring 
of action, namely, sympathy, into the place of the moral motive, 
devotion to an ideal of personal character. 
Now what ethics has to do today is simply to admit that the 
number of motives justly entitled to be classed as moral cannot 
be reduced to a single one. We may not only do what is right, 
but also approve of right-doing, for a variety of reasons. In 
the case of the civilized man of the nineteenth century, we can 
discover at least five such, as follows: The first may be termed 
for want of a better name the teleological. The criterion of 
judgment is here the relation in which the actor places him¬ 
self to the desires or the welfare of other persons besides him 
self. Unselfishness is valued for what it brings to others. The 
second is the aesthetic, determined by the relation of the action 
to an ideal of beauty of character. The former of these two 
lies at the bottom of altruistic Utilitarianism, the latter domi¬ 
nates such widely differing systems as those of Plato, Aristotle 
and Kant. The third principle is logical in its nature and ac¬ 
counts in great part for our approbation of consistency, fair¬ 
ness, etc. The fourth may be termed that of unreasoned senti¬ 
ment. As an example of what is meant I may cite the case of 
the wife of a well-known Arctic explorer, who declared she 
would rather her husbard would die of starvation in the Polar 
night than consent to save his life by eating human flesh. The 
feelings against incest, against over-indulgence in sensual 
pleasure, and against avarice are largely composed of elements de¬ 
rived from this source. The fifth principal is theological. An 
action here meets with approval solely because believed to rep¬ 
resent the will of G-od, as keeping the Sabbath day or attend¬ 
ing the sacraments. Many have expressly denied this last a 
place among independent moral principles, claiming that it is 
only as G-od is implicitly or explicitly thought of as a moral 
being that obedience becomes praise-worthy or disobedience 
the reverse. We cannot make an examination of these contentions 
here. We content ourselves with the remark that it has at 
least a prima facie claim to a place in this list. 
