(3) Moreover, this definition, while an excellent DESCRIPTIONTION of what morality in general is, is not a justification of morality, does not point to its ultimate raison d’etre.  To all this organizing activity we might say, Cui bono, for what good?  Why should we organize our interests; why not deny them like the ascetics?  The mere existence of pushes, in this direction and that, affords no material for moral judgment; a harmonizing of them would make a mathematical resultant, but it would be of no superior worth.  If there were no pleasure and pain in life, it would not matter in the least whether the various life forces were organized or not.  In such a colorless world a unison of human impulses would be as morally indifferent as the convergence of tributary rivers or the formation of an organized solar system.  It is only, as we long ago pointed out, [Footnote:  Cf. ante, p. 74 ] when consciousness differentiates into its plus and minus values, pleasure and pain, that a reason arises why any forces in the cosmos should be thwarted or allowed free play.  With the emergence of those values, however, everything that affects them becomes significant.  If the complete transformation of our interests would make human life brighter, fuller of plus values, such a radical alteration, rather than a harmonization, would be our ideal.  As it is, desire points normally toward the really desirable; the direction of human welfare lies, in general, along the line of our organic needs, of the avoidance of clashes, of the mutual subordination and cooperation of natural impulses.  The principle of reason, of intelligence, is necessary in morality to find this way of cooperation, this ultimate drift of need; but without the potentiality of happiness chaos would be as good as order, both within the individual soul and within the social group. [Footnote:  Plato realized this, and in the Philebus points out that we cannot completely describe morality either in terms of pleasure-pain or in terms of reason (or wisdom), the organizing principle.  Both aspects of morality are important.  Cf, along this line, H. G. Lord, The Abuse of Abstraction in Ethics, in the James memorial volume.] Do moral acts always bring happiness somewhere?  The ultimate justification of morality the value of synthesizing our interests, lies in the happiness men thereby attain.  But there is one fundamental doubt that ever and anon recurs the doubt whether, after all, actions that we agree in calling virtuous always bring happiness.  If not, either our definition of morality, or our universal judgment as to what is moral, would seem to be in error.  Perhaps morality is, after all, off the track, and to be discarded.

(1) We must first lay aside cases of perverted conscience, acts which are “subjectively moral,” or conscientious, but not objectively best.  These cases we have already glanced at; they need be no stumbling block.