unity more free or even to make the rewards of effort more
equitable and secure. But it has been one of the purposes of this
discussion to suggest that just this growth in outlook and intelligence
may in the long run be counted on--not indeed as a direct and simple
consequence of increasing material abundance but as an expression of an
inherent creativeness in man that responds to discipline and education
and will not fail to recognize the opportunity it seeks.

Real economic progress is ethical in aim and outcome. We cannot think of
the economic interest as restricted in its exercise to a certain sphere
or level of effort--such as "the ordinary business of life" or the
gaining of a "livelihood" or the satisfaction of our so-called
"material" wants, or the pursuit of an enlightened, or an unenlightened,
self-regard. Economics has no special relation to "material" or even to
commonplace ends. Its materialism lies not in its aim and tendency but
in its problem and method. It has no bias toward a lower order of
mundane values. It only takes note of the ways and degrees of dependence
upon mundane resources and conditions that values of every order must
acknowledge. It reminds us that morality and culture, if they are
genuine, must know not only what they intend but what they cost. They
must understand not only the direct but the indirect and accidental
bearing of their purposes upon all of our interests, private and social,
that they are likely to affect. The detachment of the economic interest
from any particular level or class of values is only the obverse aspect
of the special kind of concern it has with values of every sort. The
very generality of the economic interest, and the abstractness of the
ideas by which it maintains routine or safeguards change in our
experience, are what make it unmistakably ethical. Without specific ends
of its own, it affords no ground for dogmatism or apologetics. And this
indicates as the appropriate task of economic theory not the arrest and
thwarting but the steadying and shaping of social change.

THE MORAL LIFE AND THE CONSTRUCTION OF VALUES AND STANDARDS[64]

JAMES HAYDEN TUFTS

Writing about ethics has tended to take one of two directions. On the
one hand we have description of conduct in terms of psychology, or
anthropology. On the other a study of the concepts right and wrong, good
and bad, duty and freedom. If we follow the first line we may attempt to
explain conduct p