The International Journal of Ethics 

About: The International Journal of Ethics is an academic journal. The journal publishes majorly in the area(s): Politics & Bioethics. Over the lifetime, 990 publications have been published receiving 6502 citations.

The Genesis of the Self and Social Control

Abstract: It is my desire to present an account of the appearance of the self in social behavior, and then to advert to some implications of such an account in their bearings upon social control. The term "behavior" indicates the standpoint of what follows, that of a behavioristic psychology. There is an aspect of this psychology that calls for an emphasis which I think has not been sufficiently given it. It is not simply the objectivity of this psychology which has commended it. All recent psychology, in so far as it lays claim to a scientific approach, considers itself objective. But behavioristic psychology, coming in by the door of the study of animals lower than man, has perforce shifted its interest from psychical states to external conduct. Even when this conduct is followed into the central nervous system, it is not to find the correlate of the neurosis in a psychosis, but to complete the act, however distant this may be in space and time. This doctrine finds itself in sympathetic accord with recent realism and pragmatism, which places the so-called sensa and the significances of things in the object. While psychology has been turning to the act as a process, philosophic thought has been transferring contents that had been the subject-matter of earlier psychology from the field of states of consciousness to the objective world. Prebehavioristic psychology had a foot in two worlds. Its material was found in consciousness and in the world of physiology and physics. As long, however, as psychology was occupied with states of consciousness which constituted objects, there was an inevitable duplication. The whole physiological and physical apparatus could be stated in terms of states of consciousness, and solipsism hovered in the background. A psychology that is called upon to analyze the object into the

Belief and Will

Abstract: absolutely right or wrong? because no moral legislation has its basis in pure ethics. But the pertinent questions are: Will prohibitory legislation, if enacted, do harm or good ? Will it educate the nation into a healthy temperance sentiment ? or will it be so openly and flagrantly violated as to lower the tone of public morality and lessen respect for law and order? Will it promote self-control or breed hypocrisy? Will it bring a national blessing or a national calamity? If it will have both good and evil effects, will its advantages or disadvantages be greater ? What will be its residuum of influence in moulding our national character ? These questions it does not lie within my province now to answer. My task is completed, if I have made it clear that they are legitimate questions, and that the asking of them is the only way by which we can find our duty as citizens. A satisfactory answer to them cannot be given in any off-hand manner, but must involve careful study of our social conditions and of the actual results of prohibitory legislation in similar conditions elsewhere. D. J. FRASER. ST. JOHN, NEW BRUNSWICK.

The Ethics of Competition

Abstract: w-T HIS volume of essays' was prepared for publication by a group of Professor Knight's students at the University of Chicago. As they are careful to say, he had no hand in it. Indeed, I could well imagine that he did not altogether approve of the project. He is not the man to cherish all his past utterances for precious transmission to posterity. Certainly he has never allowed himself to be shackled by his earlier opinions. I am by no means sure that he would now give full agreement to everything this book contains or even that its contents and its emphasis would be the same if he had done the selecting and editing himself. Nevertheless this book is the most complete and faithful expression of the whole of Professor Knight's intellectual personality that we have or are likely to have for some time to come. Risk, Uncertainty and Profit deals with a special problem in an appropriately technical fashion, and so, I presume, will his anticipated work on capital. Professor Knight is only fifty, and we may therefore hope that he will some day give us a complete and mature statement of his social philosophy. But until he does so we shall find his postulates and guiding principles, his assumptions and conclusions, his outlook upon our times, and his hopes and fears for the future of industrial society more fully assembled in this collection than anywhere else. In these circumstances what is under review is not so much a book as a man. The temptation to study the man behind the essays is irresistible. One could scarcely read this book, I think, without realizing that its author is not only deeply versed in the literature of philosophy but is himself of distinctly philosophic temperament. Knight has often referred to himself in print as an economist of "the armchair persuasion," but the physical immobility which the phrase suggests does scant justice to the restlessness and adventurousness of a mind inveterately given to projecting every problem into the infinite and viewing it in terms of its elemental