International Phenomenological Society

Tpes oJ Men and TIeiv BeIalion lo ElIics

AulIov|s) V. J. McOiII
Souvce FIiIosopI and FIenonenoIogicaI BeseavcI, VoI. 3, No. 4 |Jun., 1943), pp. 424-448
FuIIisIed I InlevnalionaI FIenonenoIogicaI Sociel
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TYPES OF MEN AND THEIR RELATION TO ETHICS
I. UNIVERSAL MORAL PRINCIPLES
There seems to be sound reason for the recognition of types of men in
ethics and politics. When types are not recognized, ethical and political
principles must be so formulated as to apply to all men equally, irrespective
of their situation, desires, and capabilities. But rules which specify the
wisest thing for every man to do, cannot furnish much actual guidance to
any man. The gap between abstract universal principles and moral beha-
vior must be bridged by casuistry which, although it has no doubt filled an
important need, has also become synonymous with sophistry and hypoc-
risy,
and probably no moralist would be satisfied if he did not think it
inevitable that ethics, as a science, should take a general formuncompro-
mised by particularity, and hence remain, in great measure aloof, and
inconsequential to actual conduct. The prevailing assumption has been
that if there are general principles or laws of ethics, they must be unhistori-
cal, like those of geometry and mechanics. Most ethics have probably been
written as a kind of geometry or mechanics of the soul, but it may also be
conceived as a historical discipline.
It will be assumed in what follows that it is absurd to say that a man
ought to perform an act when the conditions of its possibility do not exist,
and ineffectual, when these conditions are not known to exist, i.e., when
the opportunity and probable effects of the act in a given period have not
been ascertained, or have not been stated. It follows that when general
principles of ethics are interpreted in the light of conditions and potentiali-
ties existing in a given period, they may possibly specify conduct proper to
this period, but not to other times, unless the same conditions prevail; but
that when such principles are stated without qualification for all men, they
can furnish little actual guidance. What, for example, is
suggested to a
modern man by the admonition to be just in Plato's sense?- The conditions
which gave plausibility to Plato's justice have largely disappeared. The
soul is no longer divided into three more or less independent faculties:
reason, will, and appetite; nor is the supposed dominance of one of these
faculties in certain men admitted. The reasons for keeping a state small,
and not too rich, no longer exist and the niggardly handicraft economy pre-
supposed by the "perfect" state is happily irrecoverable. War is not inevi-
table for all time. It has been disproved that if an artisan is well off, he
will cease to work, and that if he offers advice to the rulers, justice will
suffer, etc., etc. It is clear, in short, that Platonic justice could not direct
practical conduct in present societies or in most societies, primitive or
historical. The practical meaning of courage has also undergone crucial
change. Training and habituation necessary for courage in Plato's time
424
TYPES OF MEN AND THEIR RELATION TO ETHICS 425
would leave a man a coward today when a different course of discipline and
conditioning is required. The same is equally true of temperance, wisdom,
and piety. The aristocratic vice of gluttony, so serious a matter with the
ancients, has all but disappeared. Evidently diversity of entertainment,
eating habits, variety of diet, involving bulky vegetables, have completely
altered the problem of temperance. Authorities in enlightened countries
are concerned to furnish balanced diets to the whole population, not to
inveigh against over-indulgence. "Nothing too much" has been replaced
by "not too much starch, even though it is inexpensive, and more vitamins."
Drunkenness is still a serious problem, but exhortation is not considered a
solution. Its roots are sought in barren experience, frustration, and dietary
deficiency, and the remedy adopted is proportionate to the cause.
The wisdom and piety prized by Plato would be out of place today,
because they presupposed conditions of life which no longer exist, and a
store of knowledge which has been corrected and increased enormously.
The greatness of Plato's language, of course, invests his ideals with a nobil-
ity which produces perennial fascination, especially when his political
motives are ignored, but the stars also have had their magic and men have
been inspired by mythical stories of gods whose conduct offers no practical
analogy or guide to their own. Evidently it is necessary to distinguish
between the esthetic enchantment produced by distant images, elevated
above historical circumstance, and ethics, as a specific guide to a better life.
The ineffectuality of universal precepts and virtues is illustrated in a
different way by Aristotle's account of liberality: "The liberal man," he
says, "will give from a noble motive and in a right spirit; for he will give the
right amount, and will give it to the right persons and at the right time, and
will satisfy all other conditions of right giving."' What the "noble motive"
and "right spirit" are is never explained unless what is meant is merely that
they imply a certain measure of selflessness. Nor is it stated what the
"right time" and who "the right people" are, and what "the right amount,"
unless the latter means merely that the liberal man's charity is proportion-
ate in some sense to his means. The liberal man can only be a person who
is regarded as noble in his expenditures, or rather one whom Aristotle would
so regard, in the Greece of his time, in the Macedonian court, in Athens or
some other scene of his observations. Liberality so described is not com-
pletely lacking in content. It may contradict Gotauma's mendicant ideal or
Jesus' advice to the rich young man, and may be consistent with ideals in
other periods of history, but it clearly has no validity for societies, such as
our own, the economies and amenities of which are widely different from
the Greek model. And what is true of liberality holds largely for the other
1
The Nicomachean Ethics, Weldon edition, London, 1912, p. 100.
426 PHILOSOPHY AND PHENOMENOLOGICAL RESEARCH
moral virtues. They are either descriptions of manners approved in a
particular historical period, or else they are not virtues at all, but merely
logical forms of virtues, for example, means as opposed to extremes. For
without knowledge of life as it was in the various courts and cities of the
4th century B. C., it is not at all clear what specific acts the moral virtues
recommend.
The danger of forgetting that historical conditions which once gave
feasibility to ideals of the past may not have survived in the present is well
illustrated by the virtue of liberality. Although it cost little to keep alive
in Greece, and personal belongings were negligible, the productivity of labor
was so low that, given a stratified society, charity was perhaps a necessity.2
Today even cautious estimates demonstrate that this is no longer the case,'
and it seems to follow that unless dependence upon charity is regarded as
more desirable than self respect and security, the virtue proper to our time
is not liberality, which clings to the notion that the poor will always be with
us, but rather a disposition and program to overcome the need of liberality.
Universal ethical principles, it appears, are either dated, i.e., exclusively
applicable to a particular time, so long as conditions do not change, orelse
they are mere logical forms of virtues. In either case they provide no
universal directives to moral action. The categorical imperative, for ex-
ample, justifies any action undertaken with respect to rational beings which
can be generalized without inconsistency, but even lying, stealing and mur-
der cannot be proved inconsistent in this sense. Kant's imperative does
not specify moral conduct, nor does Bentham's principle of the greatest
pleasure for the greatest number. For moral guidance we must look to the
political writings of these philosophers, to their recommendations for
legislation, but here we shall find proposals appropriate at most to a given
setting, and apparently irrelevant to specific action in other times. To
profit by history it is probably best to realize that it is history. Otherwise,
as Nietzsche once said, the study of history is apt to put an end to it.
But if universal ethical principles fail to specify what is actually right or
wrong, principles relating to types of men are not necessarily open to the
same objection. Being more specific, they may possibly serve as a guide to
proper conduct. The problem, however, is to find types which yield laws
of behavior, and the object will be to show that only historical types can
serve this purpose.
II. CHARACTERS
The immense literature of characters or types of men had its inception
with The Characters of Theophrastus.
2
Max Weber, General Economic History, New York, 1927,
p.
130.
3
See for example: America's Capacity to Produce, Brookings Institution, Wash-
ington, D. C., 1934.
TYPES OF MEN AND THEIR RELATION TO ETHICS 427
"I have wondered," said Theophrastus, "and probably I shall never cease
wondering, why it is when all Greece lies under the same sky and all Greeks
receive a similar education we do not happen to have the same kind of
character."4
He proposes to depict the different types of character to be found among
them, in order that "our sons will become better men." Actually, of course,
not all Greeks were born under the same stars, nor educated alike. The
importance of social circumstance in forming character is neglected not only
by Theophrastus but also by his greatest followers, La Bruyere, Vauvenar-
gues, La Rochefoucauld, and many others, who seem to take it for granted
that their characters are originals, self-caused, ingrained natures, perhaps
incurable, who determine the pattern of their own society, or as it some-
times appears, of society as such. As we shall see, this fallacy of the
character writers has not disappeared in our own time. Although knowl-
edge of conditioning factors and underlying historical changes now available
put us in the way of real scientific explanations of the diversity of human
types, many modern writers prefer to classify types of men, after the man-
ner of descriptive psychology, as the stars were once classified in easily
observed constellations.
The personalities classified in the literature of types, tempers, and char-
acters are usually ill-defined or addicted to a single vice or mannerism, and
they come to life only when they are assigned to their historical period, and
the underlying social causes and motivations are understood. Since no
causal explanation of the characters is offered, no reliable prediction or
control of behavior is possible, and the question arises what value such
classifications can have. Classifications of chemicals or bacteria, are im-
portant to the extent that they facilitate prediction and control, or are
integral parts of a system which does. Otherwise they are described not as
important but as quaint, curious or historically interesting. Thus the
question arises whether classifications of men have a privileged position, or
whether they are not to be judged by the same criteria.
The important characters in Theophrastus or La Bruyere,5 one is tempted
to think, are not the ingrained psychological types they set out to describe,
but rather certain other types which they disclose unwittingly, and which
4
Characters, Introduction.
I
La Bruyere illustrates a different style of character writing. His characters are
often recognizable persons of the day and he appears to be commenting only on the
society of his time, yet it is taken for granted that other societies are much the same,
although less favored in their sovereign. His eulogy of Louis XIV and condemna-
tion of "Mankind" show in profile a timorous, moralizing, better type of courtier.
It is not surprising that like his mentor, Theophrastus, he disregards the social
circumstances which produced his characters, thus absolving the Bourbon order from
all responsibility.
428 PHILOSOPHY AND PHENOMENOLOGICAL RESEARCH
we can discover between the lines. Thus Theophrastus describes the Gross
Man, the Unseasonable Man, the Penurious Man, the Surly Man, and so
on, but says nothing about the Slaveholder, the Slave, the Merchant, and
the Landowner. Yet the latter characters, disclosed incidentally, serve to
explain a number of things about the former. For example, the Gross
Man is said to go personally to do his marketing. In a slave society it is
gross for a free-born man to perform work which is done by slaves. The
Unseasonable Man likewise displays bad taste. "When a slave is whipped
in his presence, he relates how one of his slaves was punished in the same
way and went and hanged himself." The Mean Man, in turn, refuses to
buy his wife a slave although she has brought him a large dowry, and when
he does hire slaves, does not pay their keep, as is customary.
Here manners which are approved and disapproved in an enlightened
slave culture are sharply defined, but the real issues of the day are not
touched upon. It is sufficient to recall that all Greece was divided into
hostile camps. The landed oligarchy was at war with democratic leaders
and with mercantile interests. There were slaves, free artisans, dominating
cities, and more or less enslaved nationalities. There were the rich and the
poor. Speaking of the diversities among the Athenians, Plutarch wrote:
"The Hill quarter favored democracy, the Plain, oligarchy, and those who
lived by the Seaside stood for a mixed sort of government, and so hindered
either of the other parties from prevailing. And the disparity of fortune
between the rich and the poor, at that time, also reached its height; so that
the city seemed to be in a truly dangerous condition, and no other means for
freeing it from disturbances and settling it to be possible but a despotic
power. All the people were indebted to the rich; and either they tilled their
land for their creditors, paying them a sixth part of the increase, and were,
therefore, called Hectemorii and Thetes, or else they engaged their body for
the debt, and might be seized, and either sent into slavery at home, or sold
to strangers; some (for no law forbade it) were forced to sell their children, or
fly their country to avoid the cruelty of their creditors; but the most part and
and the bravest of them began to combine together and encourage one
another to stand to it, to choose a leader, to liberate the condemned debtors,
divide the land and change the government."
Among the great landholders there were doubtless such Theophrastian
characters as the Vain Man, the Offensive Man, and the Unpleasant Man,
but they could doubtless also be found among the democrats. Indeed the
classification of characters before us seems in principle irrelevant to the
great struggle between Spartan oligarchy and Athenian democracy on which
the fate of the ancient world depended, and to be proportionately unim-
portant. Satirical exposes of objectionable characters can, of course, pro-
mote conformity to fixed codes in any society, but it is difficult to see how
6
Plutarch's Lives, New York, 1932, p. 104.
TYPES OF MEN AND THEIR RELATION TO ETHICS 429
any possible character reform, through example and emulation, could have
fundamentally altered the nature or outcome of the struggle. On the
other hand, Solon's attempt to preserve upper class domination by amelio-
ration of the worst abuses of power, was the sort of thing which might have
yielded results. Pericles' democratic reforms and his plan of a federated
union of Greece, it is often claimed, might have turned the tide, had he
lived longer and had fewer enemies. His enemies, however, were not
"characters" but strong parties and combines of interest.
Theophrastus' master, Aristotle, is often well aware, particularly in
Politics and Rhetoric, that the characters that count are those which repre-
sent powerful political and economic interests. In his delineation of the
highminded man in the Nicomachean Ethics, however, the varieties of ideals
honored in different political systems are not mentioned, and one gets the
impression that the highminded man is the ideal for the Athenian, the
Lacedaemonian, and perhaps for all societies.
The inappropriateness of highmindedness in an Eskimo society or in a
genuinely democratic one, will be apparent from Aristotle's description:
"A highminded man is especially concerned with honors and dishonors. He
will be only moderately pleased at great honors conferred upon him by virtu-
ous people, as feeling that he obtains what is naturally his due; for it would
be impossible to devise an honor that should be proportionate to perfect vir-
tue. Nevertheless he will accept honors, as people have nothing greater to
confer upon him. But such honor as is paid by ordinary people and on trivial
grounds, he will utterly despise, as he deserves something better than this.
... He, therefore, who regards honor as insignificant will regard everything
else in the same light.... The highminded man is justified in his contempt
for others, as he forms a true estimate of them, but ordinary people have no
such justification.... His bearing is stately toward persons of dignity and
affluence, it is unassuming towards the middle class; for while it is a difficult
and dignified thing to be superior to the former, it is easy enough to be superior
to the latter. . . . It seems too that the
highminded
man will be slow in his
movements, his voice will be deep and his manner of speaking sedate; for it
is not likely that there will be many things that he cares for....7
[t is apparent that the highminded man is a consummate master, at least
in Greek society, of the art of convincing all classes of his superiority. Since
it is harder to impress the upper class, where his most serious rivals are to
be found, he assumes a stately bearing, but impressing the lower classes is
a responsibility he shares with his class. An aristocratic class sustains its
power, in part, by convincing the people of its superiority and this is no
easy task. War is often welcomed or even fomented, since it knits the
loyalty of the people to the aristocratic leaders, but in time of peace, as
Veblen has shown in his The Theory of the Leisure Class, many devices are
7Nicomachean Ethics, London, 1912, Book IV, ch. VIII.
430 PHILOSOPHY AND PHENOMENOLOGICAL RESEARCH
needed. Garments, insignia, manners, attitudes, habits of speaking, and
reputable- idleness, and wastefulness are deemed necessary in order to
distinguish the ruling class from other classes. The history of such inven-
tions is an important supplement to the literature of polite and praise-
worthy characters. Presented cameo-like, without reference to the social
causes of his peculiar traits, the highminded man appears unmotivated and
preposterous, and the doubt arises whether Aristotle could have been
serious. But once the highminded demeanor is seen as governed by the
necessity of maintaining upper class prestige, of upholding the aristocratic
principle, everything Aristotle says is plausible enough. To make such
isolated characters convincing, one must supply the missing context.
The character of Dion, as described by Plutarch, furnishes a good exam-
ple of highmindedness. Even the faults held responsible for the failure
of his career are distinguishing traits of the highminded man. As Plutarch
says: "There was in his natural character something stately, austere,
reserved, and unsociable in conversation which made his company un-
pleasant and disagreeable" even to his immediate friends who "blamed his
manner, and thought he treated those with whom he had to do less cour-
teously and affably than became a man engaged in civil business."8
But though Plutarch lays undue stress on traits of character, he is far
from regarding them as decisive. Behind his characters are the predomi-
nating historical forces: economic and military dispositions, and conflicting
interests. Although he took sides against democracy and is often biased
in dealing with democratic leaders, he at least took account of the main
causal process. Dion, he says, "designed to suppress the unlimited demo-
cratic government, which indeed is not a government, but, as Plato calls it,
a market-place of governments, and to introduce and establish a mixed
polity, on a Spartan or Cretan model ... wherein an aristocratic body
should preside, and determine all matters of greatest consequence....' '9
This identification of Dion as a partisan in the great conflicts of his age,
seems to reveal his character better than the most extended psychological
analysis. Unfortunately typology and character writing has preferred
psychological and biological description to historical analysis, from Plato's
time right down to the present.
The mission of the type literature is not only entertainment but moral
improvement, and sometimes political reform, although the latter is usually
indirect or disguised. One recurrent plan which stems from Plato's
typology is that of allocating a different social function to different innate
types, thus replacing existent conflict with social harmony. Social har-
mony takes different forms: democratic socialist Utopia, for example, or
8
op. cit., p. 1159.
9
Ibid., p. 1183.
TYPES OF MEN AND THEIR RELATION TO ETHICS 431
rigid authoritarian hierarchy and, by and large, the nature of any social
program based on typology will depend upon the period at which it is put
forward, and upon the political views of its promulgator. The harmonious
society set forth by Francis Fourier, its conflicts composed by proper dis-
position of monogynes, digynes, and polygynes, is the work of an enlight-
ened social reformer; it has little resemblance to the Stdndestaat of Othmar
Spann. Leaning heavily on Plato's theory, the Austrian fascist advocates
an economic hierarchy of estates. At the bottom is common labor, by
nature interested mainly in food, while at the top are the big capitalists,
interested also in culture, as their expense accounts show. Naturally the
spiritual should govern the sensual. This hierarchy, however, was subor-
dinated to a political hierarchy, and in deference to the Nazis, the highest
rung of the ladder was consigned to a Ffthrer estate-for there was no
reason why it could not be done-and the scheme made a considerable im-
pression in Germany. Pretentiously, Spann had announced his theory of
estates as the only bulwark against the rising tide of democracy and social-
ism, and this political motivation is clear throughout. Although this 20th
century program borrows much from Plato's Republic of the 5th century
B. C., it could not turn back history, nor have anything like the same
implications.
Isolation of the supposedly innate characters and types from their his-
torical context is a most persistent tendency in the literature of
Theophrastus and his followers. No attempt is made to account for
them by social formations, so that even if important innate types did
exist, they would never be discovered. Although such human examples
may furnish obvious general warnings or vague recommendations, they
fail altogether to supply the specific directives necessary to moral action.
III. SPRANGER 'S TYPES AND LABOR AS A TYPE
It is noteworthy that while medicine and other sciences dealing with
men have corrected their errors and made great advances in the engineering
of a better life, traditional ethics, elaborating the same inadequacies
through the centuries, has not fulfilled its promise. Thus while no one
would think of relying on the medicine of the 5th century B. C., the ethics
of Plato and other ancient systems of moral guidance are often regarded
as unsurpassed. Even Edward Spranger's Types of Men,'0 the most subtle
and systematic study of the kind in modern times is largely a development
of Plato's ethics and typology.
Spranger's six types of men, the economic, political, social, esthetic,
theoretic and religious are too well known to require extended review.
They are species of men, each of which is determined by the innate domi-
10
English translation of Lebensformen, Halle (Saale), 1928.
432 PHILOSOPHY AND PHENOMENOLOGICAL RESEARCH
nance of one of the six basic value attitudes, or value preferences. Thus
the economic type prefers above all else the personal accumulation of
wealth with the least expenditure of effort; the political man or power type
seeks the maximum freedom for himself and the maximum power over
others; the social type strives for community with others through sym-
pathy and love; the esthetic man craves beauty and artistic activity; the
theoretic man prefers truth and validity; while the religious prizes
a synoptic world view in which all special values find their appropriate
place. It is understood that every man is attracted in some degree to all
six values, that it is high value preference which determines his type. The
same values, as eternal ideal norms, confront every society and apparently
in every historical period incite thought and action to conformity.
Whether a given individual is mainly impelled by the theoretic, or some
other value, depends upon his biological constitution, although there is no
proof offered that biological differences of this sort exist.
Once the six values are defined, Spranger maintains that conflicts and
harmonies can be deduced between value attitudes within a single person,
and between differently constituted persons. For example, the esthetic
man, as defined, will come into conflict with the economic, the social, and
all the other types because he is willing to sacrifice technological efficiency
and profits, sympathy and love, and all the other values for the one he
prizes most highly. The economic man, similarly, will sacrifice beauty and
love for profit, and so on. It is easy to think of situations in which the
theoretic, social and religious types would stand together against the
economic man, or the power type, and of other situations involving still
different combinations. In its systematic character Spranger's typology
is vastly superior to those of Kierkegaard or Jaspers, McDougall or Jaench.
Like them, however, it is completely unhistorical.
The fallacies incurred by ignoring historical change and social condi-
tioning1' are apparent in Spranger's description of the special types. The
esthetic type, for example, is said to live only for beauty
and esthetic
creation, and to be destined to value-conflict with the power type,
the social
man, the religious character, and all the corresponding
valuations within
his own nature. Certainly if there is such a type, Dante, Milton, Shake-
speare, and Balzac, to name only a few great writers, do not belong to it.
In fact, biographical data show that the economic attitude, which is
sup-
posed to conflict with the esthetic,
is often a
great spur
to artistic
work,
and that the "eternal" value-conflicts described by Spranger are,
if
they
emerge at all, historically
and
biographically determined.
Spranger assumes that the same esthetic type goes down through the
11 Spranger (p. 357) admits psychogenic factors and historical conditions as deter-
minants of types. In practice they are reduced to unimportant accidents.
TYPES OF MEN AND THEIR RELATION TO ETHICS 433
centuries essentially unchanged, and he assumes that artists, actors, poets,
and musicians all belong to it, which is especially doubtful. How could
such things be proved? Tests of various kinds, questionnaires, and cor-
relations might be more helpful than Spranger's method of Verstehen,
although so far nothing has been established. Evidently Spranger was
immersed in romantic nineteenth century theories which pictured the
artist as contemplative, disinterested, detached, and alienated from the
politico-economic, life about him. He did not see that the alienation of
the nineteenth century artist coincided with his liberation from patronage
and official loss of social function, and his intuition took what was pe-
culiar to the nineteenth century as eternal traits of all artists, past and
future.
The "theoretic man" is open to the same
objections.
He is pictured as
circumscribed by Aristotelian logic and mechanical conceptions-absent-
minded and ill adjusted to social life. In terms of Bergson's theory of
laughter he is certainly very comic. One thing in particular is foreign to
his nature, and that is the economic. "Utilitarian interests," Spranger
writes, "necessitate such a strong subjective emphasis that they injure all
pure cognition.'2
.... the contrast between the theoretic and economic attitudes has been
most strongly expressed by the Greek thinkers who looked scornfully upon
any form of earning one's living."13
No explanation is given of this attitude on the part of Greek thinkers;
nothing is said, for example, concerning the retardation of science and
technology in classical Greece as a consequence of slavery and master
class attitudes toward work. One is expected to intuit "timeless" relation-
ships which have in fact already changed, and to overlook the historical
conditions which brought them into being. Spranger makes his point
even clearer.
And when today we are offended by the mixing of the commercial attitude
with research, quest for truth and philosophic reflection, this is not only an
after effect of the ancient Greek point of view but is expressive of an eternal
psychology.14
It is perhaps sufficient to point out that the progress of science in the 17th
century,
for example, was closely bound up with technological and com-
mercial needs,'5 and that today in the best laboratories in the world eco-
12 Ibid., p. 112.
13
Ibid., p. 113.
14 Ibid.
lo See, for example, B. Hessen, "The Social and Economic Roots of Newton's
Principia," Science at the Crossroads, London, 1931, and Robert K. Merton,
"Science and Economy of Seventeenth Century England,
"
Science and Society,
vol.
III, 1, pp. 3-27.
434 PHILOSOPHY AND PHENOMENOLOGICAL RESEARCH
nomic and theoretic interest are combined to mutual advantage. In
Soviet Russia particularly the "eternal psychology" has been replaced by
a psychology stressing the unity, interdependence, and mutual respect of
workers of hand and brain.
Once the eternal psychology is adopted, the investigation of persistent
and temporary attitudes in history is greatly hampered. Whenever
new attitudes arise in history, it can be said that people are reacting to
another set of eternal values, and the real causal explanations are neglected.
Spranger's values are much too abstract. Is it possible to think of a man
with a craving for intellectual things itberhaupt, for all inferences, dis-
coveries, inductions, in every field? Great passions of an intellectual
character exist but flow in specific channels, depending on whether persons
are conditioned to chess, point-set theory, colloidal chemistry, or some
other discipline. The social man is also unconvincing even as an ideal
type. Normal men do not even evince a tendency to sympathize with, or
love everyone indiscriminately. To love your family and friends and also
the man who destroys them, is self-contradictory and pathological behavior
which requires the genius of Dostoievsky to portray convincingly. The
same criticism could be made of the religious and other types."6
If the abstractness of Spranger's values is unacceptable, his hierarchy
of values, and of the corresponding value-attitudes and types, must prove
so, a fortiori. While it is possible to define the values so that the economic
is the lowest and the religious, the highest, it is more advisable to include
in the economic sphere efficient service to the public, so that the Nazi
16
The Allport-Vernon Personality Test, based upon Spranger's typology, asks
students exceedingly ingenious questions to determine their type. The effect of
all this clarity and skill is only to illuminate the incredibility of the types. Ques-
tion 12, for example, reads: "Do you believe that contemporary charitable policies
should be curtailed because they tend to undermine individual initiative?" This
is supposed to differentiate the social from the economic type, but whether it does is
doubtful. Ruthless business men, opposing trade unions, social legislation and
government spending, often give vast sums for charity. Such-donations are mostly
tax exempt and worth the money in advertising, and may serve to curb social move-
ments. This business man answers "No." An ardent trade unionist, on the other
hand, might answer "Yes," for he has lived through the degrading period of depres-
sion charity, and sees the main hope for himself and his follows in collective initia-
tive through the union.
These answers would be significant but not in terms of Spranger's types. There
is no reason however to question Allport's claim that the test is reliable, i.e., inter-
nally consistent, or that students of theological seminars show proportionately more
religious types. But does this evidence point to types or conditioning? The answer
appears to be that one is not justified in attributing anything to eternal types which
might be explained by conditioning. It should be added that Allport himself is
aaware of these difficulties and has criticized the abstractness of Spranger's types.
Personality, A Psychological Interpretation, New York, 1937, p. 230.
TYPES OF MIEN AND THEIR RELATION TO ETHICS 435
economy need not be regarded as the highest. Spranger puts the economic
at the bottom because, as he says, it is not an intrinsic value, but merely
instrumental to the "higher" values. Since, on the other hand, the higher
values are not values at all until the lower ones are realized, which requires
ia the usual case, almost the whole waking day, it is hard to see that the
higher values are really higher. For if A is higher than
B,
A is to be
pre-
ferred to B; but if most men preferred the "higher" values most of the day,
neither they nor the values would survive. Oddly enough, Spranger
himself reaches the same conclusion in one place, and thereby implies that
higher values are not always to be preferred, that sometimes the higher
values are not higher. What he fails to say is that this is almost always
the case. "Even though the cognitive value," he concedes, "ranks es-
sentially higher than the economic, to safeguard the foundations of exist-
ence is clearly of a higher significance for a personal value total than to
learn the Pythagorean theorem. "17
It is of no importance that Spranger may be involved here in logical
inconsistency. If the disparagement of economic activity, performed
mostly by the lower classes, which is expressed by every aristocracy, can-
not be presented convincingly, it may be for the reason that one important
premise has been suppressed: the necessity of maintaining leisure class
prestige. A reversal of this attitude toward the activity which most of
the population must carry on most of the time is, of course, a prerequisite
for full democracy.
In his description of the economic man, Spranger betrays the same im-
probabilities we have noted in the other "eternal" types. lie explains
that in order to isolate the pure type it is necessary to disregard all "special
economic forms" which correspond to changing cultural epochs. "We
cannot dwell onesidedly on agriculture or trade and industry,
natural,
money, or credit economy but only on the eternal economic motive...."
"The purely economic type shows only one mental attitude" no matter
what form economy takes.l8 This position seems almost certainly mis-
taken. On analysis, Spranger's eternal forms of economic behavior, appear
to be either trivial or false, ill-suited in either case to determine his eternal
economic type. Thus Spranger describes economic activity as a striving
for self-preservation. In a narrow sense this is false for Jim Fisk, famous
railroad speculator, but true enough for his employees, while in a broad
sense, in which it is true of everyone, it is also true of Jim Fisk. Or again,
the economic type strives for profit. Strictly speaking, Jim Fisk strove
for his own profit, while his employees did not, but in a broad and trivial
sense, every man and every type strives for profit, i.e., advantage or in-
17
Op. cit., p. 285.
'8Ibid., p. 132.
436 PHILOSOPHY AND PHENOMENOLOGICAL RESEARCH
terest. Spranger also describes the economic man as an egoist, although
sometimes enlightened, and this would have to hold for Trobriands,
Dravidians, and Eskimos, for Southern sharecroppers, and New York
financiers. Obviously if there is any truth in this, it is a tautology. But
in Spranger's view even the individual husbandman displays that same
pure economic motive which we find exemplified in the super-broker on the
Exchange. Such universal ascriptions are not uncommon. According
to some economists the plough is the husbandman's capital, which he puts
to
work,
i.e., he ploughs his field. One generalization has it that all men
are capitalists, another, that all are workers. In a loose sense, such gen-
eralizations are true but trivial; in a strict sense, they are false. Sup-
posedly universal economic laws, such as the law of diminishing returns
and the law of diminishing utility may have some physical or psychological
truth, but it is difficult to see, how, as universal principles, they are capable
of explaining the conduct of an economic type.'9
While Spranger depicts an eternal type, Weber and Sombart,20 to whom
he often refers, made voluminous studies of capitalist development, and
of historical types of the bourgeois nature, which they sharply distinguish
from other economic formations. Following L. B. Alberti, Defoe, Ben-
jamin Franklin, and others, Sombart describes the ideals of the early
capitalist era opening up at the turn of the 14th century, and distinguishes
the great diversity of national developments in England, Holland, Italy,
Germany, France, and Spain.2" If the virtues ascribed to the ideal
bourgeois by Franklin-industry, frugality, punctuality, sobriety, etc.-
were soon accompanied by vices, such as are exposed in Gustavus Meyers'
classic book, History of the Great American Fortunes, they are, for all that,
markedly different from the real ideals and practices of the present
bourgeois, which Sombart lists as absolute rationalism, production purely
for exchange and profit, mass production, cheap products, advertising, etc.22
Unfortunately Sombart's characterization of economic types is in-
complete and of uneven merit. We must regard as pure whimsey his
identification of the basic traits of the entrepreneur with those of the child.23
If the entrepreneur takes delight in the senuously large, rapid movement,
novelty, and a sense of power in expanding periods, he loves contraction
19
For a discussion of the restricted significance of economic laws, see Lewis S.
Feuer, " Dialectic and Economic Laws," Science and Society, vol. V, no. 4, pp. 347-355.
20 See Max Weber, Gesammelte Aufsdtze zur
Religionssoziologie,
Tilbingen, 1920;
and Werner Sombart, Der Moderne Kapitalismus, Fifth edition, Munich, 1922.
21
Werner Sombart, Sozialismus und Soziale Bewegung, Eighth edition, 1919.
22
For a much more adequate picture of a contemporary capitalist type one could
turn to Neumann's Behemoth, New York, 1942, or Maxine Sweezy's The Structure of
the Nazi Economy, Cambridge, 1941; and any number of books on the New Deal
policies supply an account of a very different, political economy.
23
Ibid., pp. 221, 222.
TYPES OF MEN AND THEIR RELATION TO ETHICS 437
in periods of dwindling markets or under patent and cartel arrangements.
On the other hand, the following characterization is plausible and conse-
quential. Contrasting the early entrepreneur with the modern, he remarks
that while the former was supposed to succeed by the bourgeois virtues
of diligence and industry, the latter, caught up in the current of economic
entreprise, "no longer exercises virtues but stands in a compulsive rela-
tion. The tempo of the entreprise decides his own tempo. He can no
more be idle than the worker at a machine, which itself determines whether
he is industrious or not."24
Sombart at least recognizes a basic bourgeois type and distinguishes
several historical subtypes of entrepreneur. Spranger admits only the
timeless economic man, long since discarded. The capitalist type or
types, which are so exceedingly important in explaining modern society
are omitted, and the equally important labor type and types are denied
any basis in reality.
Spranger's failure to realize that consequential types are determined
by historical conditions, which is a very common philosophical
failure,
deprives his system of the power of explanation, prediction and control.
Being an "economic man" implies nothing. To make any progress we
must know what period of time and, perhaps, what country we are dealing
with, and whether we have to do with serfs, poor farmers, great
landlords,
financiers, individual artisans, or factory workers in a highly advanced
economy. In mobilizing manpower and predicting its special attitudes
and movements, the government cannot take a step without a classifica-
tion of occupations which Spranger would regard as mere accidents in the
a priori life of the economic type.
It seems clear that Spranger's types must be rejected. In their place,
if we are to speak of types at all, we must make use of historical types such
as the capitalist, the farmer and the laborer as discovered in various strata,
in different sections of the country and at definite periods of politico-
economic development. Of these types, labor is so
frequently denied its
unity, its theory, and goal, that it will be worthwhile to make a few com-
ments on this type and its philosophy.
As we have seen, Spranger rejects labor as a type.
"Much is lacking, he says, to make the fictitious type of theoretic Marxism
and the present day worker coincide, especially since no theory which has
determined the actions of men was ever so unpsychological as this theory
which accepts only the 'artifices' of productive forces."25
Sombhrt in his Sozialismus und Soziale
Bewegung
and A New Social Phi-
losophy takes much the same view, and a host of prominent modern writers,
24
Ibid., p. 237.
25Ibid., p. 362.
438 PHILOSOPHY AND PHENOMENOLOGICAL RESEARCH
following the lead of Sorel, have described the ideals of the proletariat as
useful myths, doomed to failure in all likelihood, but calculated to catapult
the masses into action. Like a powerful stimulant, the myth, which at
first has no basis in reality, makes itself true by the deceptive power of
suggestion; or at least lures the people on to achieve some other alteration
in the status quo. And when history is regarded as unimportant, this
view might have some plausibility. There is certainly a great gap between
the modern worker in most countries and the socialist exemplar, and there
is still much confusion among the workers even as regards the value of
unions. It is not surprising that the very idea of unions was once thought
preposterous, and that every new stage of union tactics projected has
been met with incredulity. Union organizers have been charged with
producing the discontent, or even the conditions, which they seek to
remedy; they have been accused, in substance, of employing a groundless
myth, and of operating on the masses by suggestion. Part of the explana-
tion of this attitude is the prevailing ignorance of the conditions which
necessitate unionization, but there is also the inability or unwillingness to
understand that the historical potentialities of the workers are just as
much a part of their nature as their limited actuality in the present.
The early prophets of capitalism, like the spokesmen for labor, were
once regarded as dangerous and* preposterous. The proof of the over-
whelming importance of both bourgeois types and the proletarian ideal is
seen in the crucial role they play in the modern world. A large and in-
creasing part of the government machinery is charged with adjudicating
the conflict between labor -and
capital,
and the whole nation is
straining
to outproduce and outfight a power which aims to destroy unionism and
to restrict the benefits of free enterprise to a few satraps of the Nazi party.
The most fundamental and important action taken by the Nazi party
to prepare the nation for total war and total conquest-of Germans, and
the rest of the world-was the total destruction on May 2, 1933, of the
German trade union movement, one of the strongest in the world. The
attacks on the trade unions and socialism continue, and have become a
principal means of dividing nations as a preliminary to conquest. It is
noteworthy that the Nazis treat the union and socialist workers of con-
quered countries very much as they do their own. To destroy the pro-
leterian type they robbed and burned trade union quarters and tortured
leaders, but they also took other measures. In an attempt to weaken and
divide German labor, they cut across the employer and employee division
with old types, such as the Jew, already oppressed and calumnized, and
the Aryan, already a groundlessly extolled in Germany. The Nazis in-
sisted that Jew and Aryan were the most fundamental and consequential
types of men, but in point of fact they became consequential only because
TYPES OF MEN AND THEIR RELATION TO ETHICS 439
the Nazis made them so, robbing, incarcerating and transplanting Jews,
and advancing the Aryan in principle at least to preferred positions. It
is in the Nazi use of these types, in short, that we find exemplification of
the Sorelian myth, not in the proletarian ideal, for the latter has conse-
quences that are not merely engineered as a matter of policy but based
upon objective conditions.
Although these objective conditions are denied with amazing frequency,
they appear to be almost as obvious as anything could be. Governmental
medical reports26 are sufficient to indicate the objective needs on which the
ideal is based. Exhaustive investigations carried out by medical men,
social workers, nurses, and specialists in all relevant fields, have shown that
a great part of the American people are suffering from insufficiencies of
diet, housing, medical care, recreation, and cultural opportunity. Many
other studies trace the effects of unemployment and job insecurity, and
the great advances made in these matters as the result of unionization.
Such documentation, which is readily available, establishes the factual ob-
jectivity of the proletarian ideal and gives a basis for the elimination of
that ultimate relativity which vitiates so much of modern ethics. That
higher living standards and greater cultural opportunity are required for
the American people, and for other peoples, admits of no doubt. These
needs are not relative, but historically absolute, i.e., they are to be defined
in terms of the maximum production and leisure possible in a given period,
assuming optimum efficiency but allowing for justifiable wars and other
necessary dislocations. To challenge these absolutes and the correspond-
ing potentialities of the people, as Sombart and other Nazi and near-Nazi
writers have done, requires the adoption of ridiculous psychological and
biological theories, which have no scientific support whatever.27
As history lays down experience and accelerates its pace,, historical
consciousness increases. Our contemporaries within their own lifetime
have seen the momentous growth of trade unions in America, and have
26
See, for example, the Proceedings of the National Health Conference Reports,
1936-1938.
27
In his A New Social Philosophy, Sombart expresses the utmost contempt for
the peoples' desire for security, comfort and material sufficiency and here he follows
the Nazi line. It is unfortunate that writers with no sympathy for fascism some-
times share this view. In the field of applied psychology, for example, nothing is
more common than to read that a questionnaire circulated among employers of this
or that plant has established that what the men want primarily is not higher wages,
i.e., higher standards of living for their families, but company picnics, a kind word
of encouragement from the employer, self-respect awakened by fraternizing with
the management, and the like. It is notable that books in this field rarely mention
unions, even in dealing with management-labor relations. Husband's standard
text, Applied Psychology, does not once refer to unions.
440 PHILOSOPHY AND PHENOMENOLOGICAL RESEARCH
not only experienced vast improvement in their own living standards but
sensed a decisive upswing for the people as a whole. It is not surprising
that type literature reflecting this rapid progress of unionization should
show a recognition of the uncultivated capacities of the people and a practi-
cal readiness to realize them, which is entirely lacking in the type portrayals
of earlier periods. Composite portraits of the union organizer or leader
have become fairly numerous in fiction and expository works. Robert
R. R. Brocks' portait of the union organizer at the beginning of his When
Labor Organizes,28 is a good example. What distinguishes the new por-
trayals of labor types from the character studies of Theophrastus and his
followers, is that in place of psychological expose and moral censure, they
emphasize environmental conditions, such as profits of industry and living
quarters of workers, and bring psychology and ethics into the closest rela-
tion to the basic causal factors.
The-extensive literature depicting the labor type, or types, is sociologi-
cal. It has a pertinence to practical life and an instrumental value never
even approached by the type classifications of individual psychology, such
as those of Jung, Jaspers, Kretschmer, Jaench, Kempf, and Berman. Ap-
parently it is only in the field of psychopathology that individual
psychology is able to develop a typology yielding prediction, verification
and control. There is no question about the importance of the schizo-
phrenic, paranoiac, and other such types, and there is a particular reason
for this. The paranoiac may discourse lengthily and even cogently at
times, on politics, science, or art. We are not interested in what he says
but only in why he says it. In other words, our interest in him is not
social but purely psychological, and this is his only importance for society
or science. Consequently, when human beings are analyzed exclusively
in terms of individual psychology, we have a sense that we are dealing with
patients in a psychopathic ward, which is misleading, to say the least.
For Aristotle was doubtless right about the essential rational and political
character of man, and it is to be hoped that in time psychological methods
will be devised for proving a thesis already largely documented by common
experience and history that, in the long run, it is easier to condition people
to valid arguments than to invalid ones, and to a cooperative society than
to a predatory one.29 This rationalism, in any case, is an essential part
28
New Haven, 1937. For changing labor leader types with the growth of unions,
see also Clinton J. Golden and Harold J. Ruttenberg, The Dynamics of Industriat
Democracy, New York, 1942.
29 While the prevailing tendency of propaganda, prestige, and other social psycho-
logical studies, has been to emphasize emotional factors and unreasoning conformity,
there are also counter-tendencies. For example, it has long been known that mean-
ingful words are easier to remember than nonsense syllables, and rational discourse,
TYPES OF MEN AND THEIR RELATION TO ETHICS 441
of the ideology of labor. Its articulate enemies are forced to emphasize
the limits of reason. This Aristotelian conception of human nature, how-
ever, is not at all inconsistent with irrational policies, such as die-hard anti-
unionism. Psychologists, instead of referring the irrational to emotions
or biological constitution, have the problem of really explaining it by
conditioning.0
IV. ETHICAL IMPLICATIONS
We have argued that if the mission of ethics is to give actual guidance,
to stipulate what actions are right and wrong on specific occasions, uni-
versal ethical principles must be regarded as inadequate. Typological
ethics, less abstract and more relevant to concrete occasions of action,
offered some hope. Unfortunately, characterology and typology have
been dominated by the old dualism of biological organism with its desires
and irrational commotions on the one side, and eternal principles, on the
other. Both are regarded as permanent and changeless. In the triumph
of the biological side with the naturalists and of the eternal principles with
the idealists, and in all the innumerable attempts to compromise the con-
flict, the importance of history has been regularly overlooked and the
essential social nature of man neglected. The characters of Theophrastus
and his followers tend to be only caricatures of vices or stilted models of
good manners as understood by loyal critics or sycophants of a given aristo-
cratic regime, which, however, are often presented as eternal types. Since
the diagnosis of the disorders and discontents of society implied is wide of
the mark, characterology has largely failed to give the moral guidance it
intended even to its own age, not to speak of mankind. For example, the
basic evils of La Bruyere's time were the land problem, heavy taxation of
the peasantry, financial policies, and unnecessary wars, not the existence
of a few stupid, loquacious, or irritating courtiers. La Bruyere saw nothing
of the coming deluge and had no basic moral instruction to offer. The
question suggested is whether modern ethics, in so far as it enshrines the
old types and principles instead of developing historically as the other
sciences have done, is not perpetuating this inconsequentiality.
The historical character of ethics is implied even in the usual definitions
of "ought" and "right." If we say that that act is right which is possible
than disconnected words. Recently, Solomon E. Asch, H. Block, and Hertzman
have shown the importance of rational factors in experiments re. the formation of
judgments, Journal of Psychology, vol. V, pp. 219-251, and George Katona has
stressed the role of understanding in learning, Organizing and Learning, 1940.
30 As an example of a book which attempts this task, we may refer to the first
year book of the Society for the Psychological Study of Social Issues, Industrial
Conflict, New York, 1939.
442 PHILOSOPHY AND PHENOMENOLOGICAL RESEARCH
in relation to the concrete circumstances in which the subject stands, and
which will probably produce more "good" than any other act he might
perform, it is obvious that what is right varies from one period to another,
and even from day to day. But if what is right changes slightly from day
to
day,
it changes basically from period to period, or from one civilization
to another. There seems to be no justification for restricting history to a
chronicle of the unique as with Dilthey, Rickert, and Croce, or for denying
generality in the form of ethical relativity, as with Westermark, for ex-
ample. The arguments against absolute relativity are, first, the tremen-
dous consensus of desire for decent living standards and cultural oppor-
tunities which gets expressed once education is sufficiently generalized and
democratized and, secondly, the necessity of working cooperatively to
achieve these ends, these absolute goods.
The importance of history for ethics is shown not only by the variety of
beliefs and practices which have existed, but also by the transformation of
the ethos of peoples as a result of basic politico-economic changes. By
"basic" we mean what is always meant by the term. We speak of politico-
economic changes as basic relative to other changes, when the latter would
not have occurred had not the former occurred. (But if A is basic relative
to B, B may nevertheless bring about profound changes in A.)' The en-
closure acts in England, or rather, the economic considerations which
inspired them, illustrate the prepotence of basic factors. In a few gener-
ations tenants' rights, which had been protected by law and justice, had
almost disappeared. Absolute ownership of land, unrecognized by the
medieval world, was soon well established. And the new entrepreneur
law and justice which took the place of the old medieval corporatism, ever
suspicious of economic egoism,--could this have resulted from a rectifica-
tion of logical errors, or the occurrence of new ethical insights? The
transformation of the clan system in Scotland in the 16th century, the
reversal of all the ties of kinship, loyalty, and obligation, offers a more
striking example of the power of basic economic factors. With grazing
land at a premium, leaders of clans were known to drive their clansmen
from their farms to the destitution of the cities or a meager living as fisher-
men along the coasts, absolving themselves from immemorial feudal obliga-
tions as well as the close bonds of kinship and loyalty.3' To think of such
changes as inspired principally and in the first instance, by a change in
ethical outlook-a new inference or insight-to which people at once as-
sented, puts an intolerable strain on the imagination. Even if one were
attracted by Max Weber's contention that peculiar religious ideas laid the
basis for the development of capitalism in Western Europe,32 it would have
31
See R. H. Tawney, The Agrarian Problem in the Sixteenth Century, New York,
1912.
32
See Religionssoziologie.
TYPES OF MEN AND THEIR RELATION TO ETHICS 443
to be admitted that the real causal explanations, facilitating prediction
and control of behavior, tend to be rooted in the circumstance of politico-
economic structure and change.
The importance of the economic factor in history has been argued at
great length, and has won many converts, but perhaps not everyone thinks
of the ethical implications. If the basic, factors are politico-economic, it
follows that the primary business of ethics is not to applaud and condemn
individuals but to abet and expedite the development of those among the
most probable politico-economic alternatives which are likely to produce
the greatest amount of absolute good (i.e., the highest living standards
and cultural opportunities feasible in a given period). Naturally, the
support which is to be given to an alternative is part of its initial probability
and one reason for its acceptance. If the basic factors are politico-eco-
nomic, it also follows that the early bourgeois (Franklin), the buccaneering
investor and banker (Jim Fisk, Jay Gould, Commodore Vanderbilt, or
the heroes of Zola's L'argent, and Dreiser's The Financier, etc.), the Nazi
high party bureaucrat-capitalist (Goering), and the New Deal capitalist
are all basic types. The same is true of the proletariat, and various pro-
letariat sub-types: The Southern share cropper, the migratory worker
and the unionized worker in heavy industry. But it also follows that the
theoretic and social type, the introvert and the extrovert, the dominant and
the recessive, the monogyne and the polygyne, the athletic and Pycnik,
the pituitary dominant and the hypothryoid, the eidetic and non-eidetic,
Jew and Aryan, and so on, are relatively superficial types.
They are superficial because in practically any great struggle with far
reaching values at stake, these types, if they exist anywhere, can be found
on both sides, often somewhat equally divided. In the Spanish Civil War
or the Munich issue, for example, there were religious, power, social,
theoretic, and other such types in each camp. There were recessives and
intoverts, no doubt Jews and Aryans, and probably all the customary
psychological and ethical variations were represented. These types are
inconsequential because they were irrelevant to the outcome of momentous
struggles which were to determine not only the broad
political framework,
but also, in great measure, the values of every particular phase of life-
family, profession, trade union, religious and cultural activity. Yet when
nothing is said to the contrary we must assume that these
types are in-
tended as basic. This is certainly Sprangers intention. He seems to
hold that the welfare of the world can only be increased by the perfecting
of his six types, a view which might easily appear cynical.
A man is
told,
in effect,
that he
ought
to realize to his best
ability
the value
pattern
to
which he is by nature peculiarly susceptible. Let us suppose that his
primary susceptibility is to social value (sympathy and love) and that his
next preference is intellectual value, his third, religious, and so on. Due
444 PHILOSOPHY AND PHENOMENOLOGICAL RESEARCH
to a combination of circumstances having very little to do with his value
susceptibility-trade union experience, locality, friends, associations,
books, and education, none of which he freely selected, he finds himself
fighting a life and death battle with the forces of Franco. But if he risks
everything which seems valuable to him in this terrible struggle,, it is not
something he
ought
to do. Rather if, as Spranger holds, "values" should
determine action, the war cannot have had any relation to morality, since
there were on Franco's side no doubt many persons with the same value
susceptibilities as our loyalist, i.e., 1) social, 2) theoretic, 3) religious, and
so on, and it could not have been their duty to fight the loyalist, and his to
fight them.
It is not only Spranger's ethics which displays this irresponsibility or
fatalism, but individualistic ethics in general. One can imagine Stoics
and Kantians and adherents of many individualistic creeds, consciously
killing, and being killed by, men of the same ideals and persuasions. Indi-
vidual honesty and justice, and certainly courage are also to be found on
both sides in any great struggle, such as the Spanish Civil War, and while
we are probably right in thinking that such virtues were much more mani-
fest among the Spanish loyalists than among their fascist adversaries, the
extreme difficulty of proving this warns us to fix our attention upon a moral
cleavage about which there is not the slightest doubt, i.e., the politico-
economic issue. Loyalists and fascists could both acclaim their own justice
and courage across the battle lines. Without an ever-present remembrance
of the deep politico-economic issue which divided loyalist from fascist,
they might sound embarrassingly alike, as they often did to Hemmingway
in For Whom the Bell Tolls. Once the immense difference between the
fascist regime abetted by Hitler and Mussolini, and the democratic republic
is understood, the virtues of the loyalists are seen as socially reasonable
and causally efficient, while those of the fascist armies must appear mere
trumpery, or else blind and pathetic, unconsciously out of accord with the
actual goal in prospect. For while both sides could talk of justice, truth,
courage and other abstract ideals, only one side talked of more hospitals,
schools, and equal opportunity, and only one side had made great strides
toward achieving them. It appears then that if a man is said to be just,
courageous, prudent, well-disciplined, and the like, we must look to the
social context to understand what is meant.
As would be expected, Nazi propaganda methods and morale work are
not in general suitable to America.3 The politico-economic base in Nazi
33Kimball Young's interpretative statement in German Psychological Warfare
(New York City, 1941) recognizes this. But while American advantage in team
work, liberties, etc., is cited, our far-famed economic advantages, so rich inl conise-
quences, are not mentioned.
TYPES OF MEN AND THEIR RELATION TO ETHICS 445
Germany requires inducements to morale, which are wholly unnecessary
here and would be felt as an insult. For example, it would not be ex-
pedient, nor consistent, to stir up racial hatred in this country, to inculcate
contempt for "inferior" peoples and a desire to dominate them, or to sub-
stitute army discipline and the leader myth for trade unions. On the
contrary, the Allied Powers have much to gain in efficiency by upholding
democracy and equality of races, not only at home, but throughout the
world. It may prove difficult to define the Allied democratic type (or
ideal) which now opposes the Nazi type. It is neither capitalist nor
socialist, not of one race nor another, nor of any one nation, though em-
bracing them all; but it is better to try adequately to define the important
types and fail, as might be, than to try to define inconsequential types,
and succeed.
If the general drift of our argument so far is correct, ethics is not some-
thing apart from the sciences, but coextensive with them. It is not inde-
pendent of those sciences, which have human thought and action as their
subject-matter, nor even from those which deal with nature. For ethics
tells what is right and wrong i.e., it specifies what actions should be under-
taken on concrete occasions, which could not, of course, be known without
recourse to the sciences, social and natural. The intimate relation between
ethics and the sciences can be clarified by defining ethics as a system of
statements in which words such as "should," "ought," "right," "better
than," "more reasonable," "wise,"Y "prudent," "proper," and "efficient,"
occur in their natural sense. It will be apparent at once that the sciences
themselves use these terms, and that when they do they are talking ethics,
for there is an ethics of scientific procedure, although it is not usually called
that. And this scientific "ought," of course, has an important bearing
on the "ought" of laboratories, industries, unions, armies, nations, and
social planners. Indeed, the more science develops and the more life
becomes organized and rationalized, the more important it is. Advanced
science is therefore highly "ethical," and advanced ethics, increasingly
scientific.
Although ethical writers usually restrict ethical terms such as "ought,"
"right," and "proper" to human thought and action, common usage ap-
plies them to machines, organizations, institutions, and economies as
well. People say that a machine ought to work or has the wrong engine, or
that an organization is inefficient and should run better than it does. In-
deed, the more science and economies develop and life becomes systema-
tized and civilized, the more people tend to apply ethical terms to machines
and social organizations, rather than to individual agents. For in modern
life machines and social organizations constantly assume the burden of
humdrum and arduous routine, which was formerly left to moral agents.
446 PHILOSOPHY AND PHENOMENOLOGICAL RESEARCH
While the eighteenth century condemned personalities, we of the twentieth
century rail at the criminal inefficiency of systems and institutions. The
responsible moral agents are often not to be found, but we get results none
the less by addressing ourselves to people who disclaim responsibility.
It might be argued that such a statement as "This machine (or social
organization) is inefficient, or does not function as it should," could always
be translated into statements about the inefficiency or immorality of
individuals, but surely such translations would prove difficult and artificial
in many cases. It may be that Durkheim and Levy-Bruehl underestimated
the importance of the individual in primitive societies, and that the "ought"
as applied to individual agents is the primary sense of the term, but it
would not follow that this is the most useful way to employ the term today.
What we wish to emphasize chiefly, however, is the increasing mutual
interdependence of the organizational "ought" and the individual "ought."
When it is said that a machine or organization is not functioning as it
should, moral agents bestir themselves, even though they may not feel
responsible; and when a civilized person is blamed, he is apt to set about
fixing a machine or mending an impersonal system. Machines and in-
stitutions do not respond just as persons do, although the range of their
adaptability increases with civilization, just as the gamut of unique ir-
replaceable personal behavior dwindles. Modern life is obviously more
and more in the hands of vast networks of impersonal techniques and or-
ganizations, serving democratic or fascist purposes.
Another circumstance enforcing the same conclusion is the diminishing
autonomy of sub-systems of ethics, i.e., marital, family, school, profes-
sional, trade union, and national ethics. With increase of education and
communications, the proliferation of institutions and economic organiza-
tions to the remotest regions, and finally, the present war which suddenly
engulfs the world, threatening every individual, family, profession, and
nation, it has become absurd to represent sub-systems of ethics as inde-
pendent and self-reliant. In former periods, with their more localized wars,
no doubt families, professions, and schools could preserve their system
and integrity unless they were in the path of hostile armies,
but all this is
past. Permanent occupation forces now appear over vast areas with police
repression unprecedented in brutality and efficiency. It is now clearly
not a question, as the stock ethical examples have it, whether one should
lie or tell the truth, steal, commit murder or injustice, or refrain from such
actions, but whether one will choose to work in a factory for the enemy
to keep one's family from actual starvation, or wreck the enemy's factories
at the expense of family and friends. In short, the efficiency of Nazi oc-
cupation methods consists largely in pitting sib-ethical principles against
ethical principles, i.e., making it impossible for a man to be ethical,
or
TYPES OF MEN AND THEIR RELATION TO ETHICS 447
nationally ethical, without violating sub-ethical codes. As crisis situations
deepen, sub-ethical systems become less autonomous. Our criticism
of the common run of ethics is that it has not kept pace with this modern
development, and still assumes the autonomy, and rather permanent
tranquility, of family, school, profession, and other such ethical sub-
systems.
Typology and modern ethics have in general failed to recognize the
decisive importance of historical structures and change. We have argued
that both require a historical base, but this will not solve all the problems.
It will still be necessary to proceed from general ethical principles (even
though they are now historical, i.e., concerned with historical conditions
and development), to the ethics of eras, to sub-system principles and also
to unique institutions, situations, and persons. Casuistry has not been
eliminated but completely transformed. Instead of attempting deduction
from abstract principles in an argument which casually neglects most of
the minor premises needed for a conclusion, ethics has at its disposal the
abundance of historical data, and reserves of needed facts which research
has barely scratched. If the ethical expert takes the point of view we have
outlined and denies himself the comforting thought that even the best of
abstract principles do not work out well in this imperfect world, he is in a
state of mind to make direct use of the research procedures and enormous
knowledge accumulated by the various social sciences and has the prospect,
at least, of success, i.e., prediction, verification, and melioristie control of
his subject-matter.
One obstacle to such a reconsideration of traditional ethics is the old
conviction that the model of science is geometry of mechanics, not history;
that science thrives on laws while history cannot achieve them. A good
reply to contentions of this kind has been made by Gordon Allport:
"
'But how,' cry all the traditional scientists, including the older dynamic
psychologists, 'how are we ever to have a science of unique events? Science
must generalize.' Perhaps it must, but what the objectors forget is that
a
general
law may be a law that tells how uniqueness comes about."34
What Allport says in defense of genetic psychological laws dealing with
the development of the unique individual, applies also to the sociological
laws of historical development of institutions, economies, and so on, which,
in our view, ethics could make more use of. That genetic laws of this
sort are scientifically reputable is proved by their important place in so
many sciences-biology, embryology, and geology, to name only a few.
Even in stellar mechanics, which furnished the model of static laws, evolu-
tionary laws are being formulated by Milne, Dirac, and others.
34 Personality, A Psychological Interpretation, New York, 1937, pp. 193-194.
448 PHILOSOPHY AND PHENOMENOLOGICAL RESEARCH
The problem of casuistry remains, for one must still apply the general
principle to the particular case, but it no longer lies beyond the competence
of science. The general principles are now those which pertain to the
most inclusive individual, i.e., world history, and these principles must be
related to the principles of the ethical sub-systems and to the laws of the
development of persons.
V. J. McGILL.
HUNTER COLLEGE.