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Rational Ethics Reason in Science. Volume 5 of The Life of Reason: or, the Phases of Human Progress. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons; London: Constable and Co. Ltd., 1906, 233–61. Volume seven of the critical edition of The Works of George Santayana. In this selection, Chapter IX of Reason in Science, Santayana considered the application of reason to morality. He acknowledged that a rational morality was impossible, because morality is grounded in material conditions and reason could never eliminate material conflicts. However, it is possible that conflicting parties can share common ideal interests in the midst of their material conflicts, the chivalry of war being an example. Common ideals, while not making rational morality possible, may introduce rational ethics. As an example of rational ethics, Santayana looked to Socrates’ conversational method, which “consists in accepting any estimation which any man may sincerely make, and in applying dialectic to it, so as to let the man see what he really esteems. What he really esteems is what ought to guide his conduct” ( ES, 425). After reflecting on the nature of altruism and self-love, Santayana turned next to happiness, which is the culmination of the harmony at which reason aims. He examined some impediments to harmony and concluded that the individual’s purpose is to clarify his or her own intent in the interest of finite and particular harmony. In moral reprobation there is often a fanatical element, I mean that hatred which an animal may sometimes feel for other animals on account of their strange aspect, or because their habits put him to serious inconvenience, or because these habits, if he himself adopted them, might be vicious in him. Such aversion, however, is not a rational sentiment. No fault can be justly found with a creature merely for not resembling another, or for flourishing in a different physical or moral environment . It has been an unfortunate consequence of mythical philosophies that moral emotions have been stretched to objects with which a man has only physical relations, so that the universe has been filled with monsters more or less horrible , according as the forces they represented were more or less formidable to human life. In the same spirit, every experiment in civilisation has passed for a crime among those engaged in some other experiment. The foreigner has seemed an insidious rascal, the heretic a pestilent sinner, and any material obstacle a literal devil; while to possess some unusual passion, however innocent, has brought obloquy on every one unfortunate enough not to be constituted like the average of his neighbours. Ethics, if it is to be a science and not a piece of arbitrary legislation, cannot pronounce it sinful in a serpent to be a serpent; it cannot even accuse a barbarian of loving a wrong life, except in so far as the barbarian is supposed capable of accusing himself of barbarism. If he is a perfect barbarian he will be inwardly, and therefore morally, justified. The notion of a barbarian will then be accepted Moral passions represent private interests. 423 Rational Ethics by him as that of a true man, and will form the basis of whatever rational judgments or policy he attains. It may still seem dreadful to him to be a serpent, as to be a barbarian might seem dreadful to a man imbued with liberal interests. But the degree to which moral science, or the dialectic of will, can condemn any type of life depends on the amount of disruptive contradiction which, at any reflective moment, that life brings under the unity of apperception. The discordant impulse therein confronted will challenge and condemn one another; and the court of reason in which their quarrel is ventilated will have authority to pronounce between them. The physical repulsion, however, which everybody feels to habits and interests which he is incapable of sharing is no part of rational estimation, large as its share may be in the fierce prejudices and superstitions which prerational morality abounds in. The strongest feelings assigned to the conscience are not moral feelings at all; they express merely physical antipathies. Toward alien powers a man’s true weapon is not invective, but skill and strength. An obstacle is an obstacle, not a devil; and even a moral life, when it actually exists in a being with hostile activities, is merely a hostile power. It is not hostile, however, in so far as it is moral, but only in so far as its morality represents a...

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