What factors are to be considered in estimating the worth of personal moral ideals?

This summary consideration of the obstacles that block the path to happiness through the heedless following of impulse, shows the necessity of moral ideals; that is to say, of directive codes which shall steer the will through the tumultuous seas of haphazard desire into the harbor of its true welfare.  How, then, can we decide between conflicting ideals and estimate their relative value?  It can only be by judging through experience the degree of happiness which they severally effect in the situations to which they are to be applied.  But there are many factors which contribute to or detract from that happiness in its totality; and a proper estimation of ideals must note the degree in which they provide for each possible element of satisfaction.

(1) In the first place, the mere fact of yielding to an impulse, of whatever sort, brings a relief from craving, and a momentary satisfaction.  Just to do what we wish to do is, negatively at least, a good; and in so far every act desired is really desirable.  An ideal which crosses inclination must have this initial price debited against it.  At times the restlessness of pent-up longing is so great that it pays to gratify it even at some cost of pain or loss.  But in general, desire can be modified to fit need; and rational ideals rather than silly wishes must guide us.  It is dangerous to lay much stress on the urgency of desire, and almost always possible with a little firmness to hush the blind yearning and replace it with more ultimately satisfying desires.

(2) Normally, however, our desires represent real goods, which must bulk much larger in our calculation than the mere relief of yielding to the impulse.  Not only is it ipso facto good to have what we want, but what we want is usually something that can directly or indirectly give us pleasure.  The pleasure, then, to be attained through following this or that impulse is to be estimated, both in its intensity and its duration.  The certainty or uncertainty of its attainment may also legitimately be considered.  And this pleasure, though it is but one phase of the total situation, must be taken seriously into account in our appraisal of ideals which permit or forbid it.

(3) A further question is as to the purity of this pleasure, i.e, its freedom from mixture with pain.  Most selfish and sensual pleasures, however keen, are so interwoven with restlessness, shame, or dissatisfaction, or so inevitably accompanied by a revulsion of feeling, disgust or loathing, that they must be sharply discounted in our calculus.  Whereas intellectual, aesthetic, religious pleasures are generally free from such intermixture of pain, and so, though milder, on the whole preferable even in their immediacy and apart from ultimate consequences.