An Introduction to Social Philosophy

Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: RELATION TO SOCIAL ECONOMY. exclusively with the fact that human well-being involves a certain mastery over material conditions, and that in the effort to obtain this mastery men are led to associate themselves together in quasi-mechanical combinations, and to act in conformity with quasi-mechanical laws; the ethical philosopher, on the other hand, is concerned almost exclusively with the fact that human well-being involves the subjection of the individual will to universal principles of conduct, which are independent, or almost independent, of such material conditions. And thus it happens that neither the economist nor the moralist, as such, concerns himself directly with the problems which arise from the fact that human well-being depends on textit{loth these conditions. The absence of any adequate treatment of such problems has, for many reasons, become especially conspicuous at the present time. Now, whether such a limitation of the provinces of Economics and Ethics implies a false abstraction in our modes of thought, is a question which we cannot now consider: but when we have said that it is at least a part of the business of Social Philosophy to deal with the debatable territory which is thus omitted, we have said enough to show that Social Philosophy is a subject which at present will repay a careful study. A science, however, which is to deal with the general conditions of social well-being, in such a way as to connect Economics with Ethics, must, even if this were its only function, be not only a great but a large subject; one, moreover, to which the saying ardua quae pulchra is clearly applicable. In such an essay as this we cannot hope to do more than indicate broadly the nature of the problem, the general method on which it ought to be dealt with, and a fe...