Chapter 20: Vocation and Circumstance

1. Duties -- Universal or Special?

Just as, in our economic life, there is a necessary division and specialization of labor, so in our moral life there is a necessary division and specialization of duty. Failure to recognize this has led to a great deal of confusion in ethical thought. It is commonly assumed that what is a duty for one must be a duty for all, and that what is not a duty for most of us cannot be made a duty for anyone. It is commonly assumed, in other words, that a duty must either be universal or it is not a duty at all. This is the common interpretation of Kant's rule: "Make the maxim of thy action that which thou wouldst at the same time to be universal law."

A little reflection will show, however, that each of us has special moral duties just as each of us has a special vocation and a special job. In fact, a large number of these special duties grow directly out of our special vocation and our special job. Just as it is the moral duty of each of us to fulfill the conditions of an economic contract, so it is the moral duty of each of us to fulfill the implied duties of any job we have accepted. And often, precisely because we have accepted these special duties, they are not the necessary duties of others.

Let us illustrate this by a few special situations. If you are walking alone along a deserted beach, and someone in the water is drowning and cries for help, and the distance from the shore, the waves and tide, your own swimming ability and other conditions are such that you can probably save him without excessive risk to your own life, then it is your duty to try.

But suppose, now, under the same conditions, a hundred people are on that beach? Your duty to undertake the rescue does not altogether disappear -- somebody must be the rescuer -- but it is considerably attenuated. The duty is heavier on the stronger swimmers than on the weaker ones -- because their chances for success are higher and their risks to themselves are lower. And if there is on the beach a professional lifesaver specifically employed to watch that beach, then the duty is clearly his. If the lifeguard were absent, or ill, or drunk, or had just announced that he had gone on strike, then it would become the duty of someone else on the beach to undertake the rescue -- but neither the law nor the rules of morality could say specifically whose duty. All one is entitled to say is that if no one at all undertook the rescue, and the victim drowned, everyone on that beach capable of having made the rescue would share the guilt of nonfeasance and would have good reason to feel ashamed of himself.

Clear specific vocation and specific assignment of duties solves many a moral problem of this sort. If you know that a helpless little girl or a woman invalid is in a burning building, is it your duty to try to save her? The answer depends on many circumstances -- on the possibility of a successful attempt or the apparent hopelessness of it; on your particular relationship to the victim; on whether other possible rescuers, better equipped, are present. But if professional firemen have arrived, with proper equipment, then the question whose duty it is -- if the rescue is feasible at all -- is practically settled.

Suppose a bandit on the street is holding someone up at the point of a gun. You happen to be there and are unarmed. Is it your duty to try to stop him, in spite of the huge risk? Suppose he starts to beat the victim with the butt of his gun? Does your duty to intervene become stronger? Or suppose -- a situation that sometimes occurs -- an armed bandit is robbing or shooting someone and a crowd of people are present? It is, most people would say, the crowd's duty to stop him. But one essential part of the question is usually left unanswered. Whose duty is it to make the first move -- to try to take the gun away from the bandit?

Again, the answer to these questions must depend to some extent on special circumstances -- for instance, on whether the object of the bandit's attack is your wife, say, or a stranger. But one circumstance would definitely settle the question, in most people's opinion. If an armed policeman were on the scene, it would be his duty to take the risks of intervention.

Thus certain duties become clear and unequivocal for the simple reason that they have already been accepted either explicitly or implicitly by the adoption of a vocation or the acceptance of a particular job or assignment. We often speak of the "duties" of a particular job when referring merely to the routine requirements of it. But whenever failure to perform these requirements would do appreciable harm, these are moral duties also. No man who has no intention of assuming the risks necessary to the vocation he has voluntarily chosen -- whether that of a policeman, soldier, ship captain, airplane pilot, fireman, lifeguard, night watchman, or doctor -- has any right to adopt such a vocation.

"Common-sense" ethics suggests, as we have seen in the course of this discussion, that we have certain duties which might almost be called duties of accident. If we happen to be the only person on a beach when someone calls for help in the water, if we are in the first car to arrive when someone has met an accident or some pedestrian lies groaning on the road, we cannot tell ourselves that it is a mere accident that we, and we alone, happen to be at this precise spot at this precise moment, that rescue or help by us would be inconvenient, that we are somewhat in a hurry, that this is none of our business, and that someone else will probably be along a little later. A duty has fallen upon us -- by accident, it is true -- but it is none the less a duty. So of the three people who came upon the man who went down from Jerusalem to Jericho, and fell among thieves, the two who passed by on the other side were ignoring the plainest duty of compassion, and only the good Samaritan was acting morally (Luke 10:30-33).

The rationale of this duty is clear enough. Any one of us would expect this of a passer-by if we were the man who had been beaten and robbed. And a world in which passers-by did not accept such a duty is one that no one could envisage as a truly moral world.

2. The Limits of Responsibility

Yet we would greatly underrate the importance of such duties if we called them "duties of accident." A much better term would be duties of circumstance or duties of relation. And the latter term would cover not only the duties that fall to us because of our blood relation to some other person or persons -- the duties of consanguinity -- but the duties that fall to us because of our relationships of all kinds, sometimes even spatial, to other persons -- the duties of proximity.

None of us is an abstract or disembodied spirit. Each of us is a citizen of a particular country, a resident of a particular city or a particular neighborhood, a son or daughter, a father or mother, a brother or sister, a husband or wife, a friend or acquaintance, an employer or employee, a business colleague, or fellow worker, a neighbor, a tradesman or his customer, a doctor or his patient, a lawyer or his client, or, temporarily, a fellow traveler with others in the same boat or the same bus. And in each of these capacities he has assumed certain explicit or implied duties to other specific persons. It is a man's duty to support and defend his own wife but not necessarily anybody else's. It is a man's duty to provide for the education of his own children but not necessarily for other people's children. If a man is driving his car along a lonely road and comes upon a motorist who has had a serious accident, it is his duty, even if he happens to be in a foreign country, or is on that road by the merest chance, to stop and do what he reasonably can to help.

But it is precisely because each of us has so many special duties of vocation, relation, or proximity that he cannot and does not have limitless duties in all directions. If we come upon someone in distress, and we are the only source of help available to him at the moment, it is our duty to do what we reasonably can to relieve him. But it is not therefore our duty to go around looking for people to help. It is not our duty to meddle in other people's affairs or to force our assistance on them. In the world today, someone is dying with almost every tick of the clock. In the United States alone three people die every minute. Somewhere, we may be sure, perhaps in Korea or in Paraguay, some people must be suffering or starving. But it does not follow that it is our duty to drop whatever we are doing and help; or even to let ourselves be endlessly taxed for bottomless "foreign aid" distributed by well-paid bureaucrats who constantly search for possible aid-recipients and derive a sense of immense self-righteousness from their vicarious generosity. Nor does it follow that, because of our abstract knowledge of death and suffering somewhere, we must develop a guilt-complex because we happen at the moment to be enjoying ourselves.

The conclusion that each of us has special duties, in brief, peculiar to his vocation, relation, or circumstances, must have as its corollary and obverse the conclusion that the duty of each of us has certain definite limits.

But the problem of defining the exact sphere and limits of our individual duties is one of the most difficult in ethics. I do not remember reading anywhere any fully satisfactory solution. In fact, few moral philosophers seem even to have been aware of the problem. One of those who has, and who has framed at least a partial criterion of the limits of individual responsibility, is F. A. Hayek:

The sense of responsibility has been weakened in modern times as much by overextending the range of an individual's responsibilities as by exculpating him from the actual consequences of his actions.... To be effective, responsibility must be both definite and limited, adapted both emotionally and intellectually to human capacities. It is quite as destructive to any sense of responsibility to be taught that one is responsible for everything as to be taught that one cannot be responsible for anything....

Responsibility, to be effective, must be individual responsibility.... As everybody's property in effect is nobody's property, so everybody's responsibility is nobody's responsibility....

The essential condition of responsibility is that it refer to circumstances that the individual can judge, to problems that, without too much strain of the imagination, [a] man can make his own....

We cannot expect the sense of responsibility for the known and familiar to be replaced by a similar feeling about the remote and the theoretically known. While we can feel genuine concern for the fate of our familiar neighbors and usually will know how to help them when help is needed, we cannot feel in the same way about the thousands or millions of unfortunates whom we know to exist in the world but whose individual circumstances we do not know. However moved we may be by accounts of their misery, we cannot make the abstract knowledge of the numbers of suffering people guide our everyday action. If what we do is to be useful and effective, our objectives must be limited, adapted to the capacities of our mind and our compassions. To be constantly reminded of our "social" responsibilities to all the needy or unfortunate in our community, in our country, or in the world, must have the effect of attenuating our feelings until the distinctions between those responsibilities which call for our action and those which do not disappear. In order to be effective, then, responsibility must be so confined as to enable the individual to rely on his own concrete knowledge in deciding on the importance of the different tasks, to apply his moral principles to circumstances he knows, and to help to mitigate evils voluntarily. (1)

Professor Hayek was writing primarily a political book; but we need merely substitute the word "duty" in the foregoing passage for the word "responsibility" to recognize that it applies equally in the ethical realm. The individual's duties are not limitless.

3. "All Mankind" -- or Your Neighbor?

Yet the typical utilitarian tells us that, "We have in each case to compare all the pleasures and pains that can be foreseen as probable results of the different alternatives of conduct presented to us, and to adopt the alternative which seems likely to lead to the greatest happiness on the whole." (2)

Or that, "The criterion of an action -- what constitutes it right or wrong -- is its tendency to promote for all mankind a greatest quantity of good on the whole." (3)

Now it is one thing to concede that this criterion may be a legitimate test for a system of moral rules considered as a whole. But it does not follow that each individual must make this a direct criterion to guide his own actions. For it may turn out (as I believe it does) that the most promising way to maximize the happiness of humanity as a whole is not by each individual's trying to achieve that result directly but, on the contrary, by each individual's acting in accordance with appropriate general rules, by doing his own special job well, and by cooperating with his immediate family and associates.

Some utilitarians tell us that each of us, on the basis of the goal of maximizing human happiness, should be willing by a benevolent action to sacrifice his own happiness at least up to the point where his action reduces it less than it can increase the happiness of another. Common-sense morality would reply, I think, that much depends on what the sacrifice is and on who this "other" is. If he or she is one's wife or daughter or other loved one, the rule seems acceptable enough: in such a case, in fact, it may be doubtful that one is really sacrificing any of his own happiness at all. But if the person for whom one is asked to make this sacrifice is a complete stranger, or someone that one knows but detests, I doubt that common-sense morality would accept any such mathematical calculation for "maximizing human happiness," even if it were in fact possible to measure the decrease in one's own happiness against the increase of the stranger's.

Is it possible to solve this problem in abstract terms or by definite general rules? Let us at least try; and let us begin by looking at the implicit but rather nebulous rules that have been worked out by common-sense morality, to see whether they can furnish us with any clue.

The spirit of that morality leads us to be properly suspicious, I think, of the modern reformer, typified by Rousseau or Marx, whose professed love for all mankind is so often accompanied by neglect of or callousness toward his own family and friends. "For the social courtesies and minor loyalties of life," once wrote Albert Jay Nock, "give me the old fogy every time in preference to radicals . . . or indeed most of us. We are so taken up with our general love for humanity that we don't have time to be decent to anybody." (4)

And perhaps this result is not accidental. I suspect that the classical utilitarians slipped into a confusion of thought, which can have, and has already had, some pernicious consequences. It is one thing, and correct, to say that our moral rules should be such as to promote the maximum happiness for all humanity. But it is a questionable corollary that it is therefore the duty of each individual himself to attempt to promote directly the maximum general happiness for all humanity. For the best way to promote this maximum general happiness may be for each individual to cooperate with, and perform his duties toward, his immediate family, neighbors, and associates.

I hope I may be forgiven if I attempt to clarify and illustrate the point by a graphic illustration. In the chart (Fig. 1) A has direct ties of family, friendship, business, or neighborhood with B, C, D, and E, and corresponding (reciprocal) obligations and duties. If A takes care of these, and B, C, D, and E respectively take care of their direct ties and duties, and so throughout, then total social cooperation and mutual helpfulness is assured. But if A is told or believes that he not only has direct duties toward B, C, D, and E, but equal duties and obligations toward N, and toward a practically infinite number of N's, the sheer impossibility of fulfilling any such duties and obligations may cause him to slight or abandon his direct duties to those near him. If his duty to N, a stranger (he may unconsciously reason), is no less than that to B, his brother, then his duty to B is no greater than his duty to N -- and he may therefore neglect both, or give them both mere lip-service. But if A fulfills his direct duties to B, etc., and B fulfills his direct duties to A, H, F, and G, then F and G can be depended on to cooperate with N, etc.

It may, perhaps, never be possible to reduce to any precise rule the strength and urgency of A's duty to B as compared with his remote and indirect duty to N, etc. Possibly one day some law may be formulated that is equivalent in the moral realm to the law of gravitation in the physical, according to which one's duties to others decrease, say, as the square of the "distance" (or increase inversely as the square of the "distance").

Meanwhile, we can only be guided by the rather nebulous rules that have been worked out by common-sense morality. But these nebulous rules do, I think, implicitly follow some such Principle of Proximity as the one I have here outlined: a duty of person-to-person rather than of person-to-people, of each-to-each rather than of each-to-all or each-to-humanity, which the classical utilitarians too hastily adopted. For there is much wisdom in the proverb: "What's everybody's business is nobody's business." And a corollary is: What's everybody's vague "responsibility" tends to be nobody's real responsibility.

But here we are brought to a major problem that has received astonishingly little discussion by moral philosophers. We have recognized validity in Kant's precept: "Act as if the law of thy action were to become by thy will law universal." Many have drawn from this the corollary that all moral rules should be "universalizable." But now we seem to be saying the opposite: that the duties of each of us are particular, depending upon our vocation, our "station," or our special relations with others.

Is there really a contradiction here? Or is there some way in which we can reconcile the necessary universality with the necessary particularity of duties? Such a reconciliation is possible, I think, if we state each person's duty correctly. Then we would say, for example, that every mother has duties toward her own children, every husband toward his own wife, every man toward his own job and his own employer, every employer toward his own employees, etc. Thus we can state the rule or the duty so that it is at once particular and of universal application.

Another way of reconciling the necessary universality with the necessary particularity of duties is to say that a man's duty depends on the particular circumstances in which he finds himself or in which he is asked to act; and that his duty in those circumstances would be anyone's or everyone's duty in the same circumstances. The difficulty with this solution is that no two people ever do find themselves in exactly the same circumstances, and that some circumstances are morally relevant and others are not.

But the only way we can decide which circumstances are morally relevant is to ask ourselves what would be the consequences of embodying those circumstances in a general rule.

Thus we can relevantly say that it is the duty not only of A, but of anybody in the same comfortable circumstances, to pay for a college education for his own son. But we cannot relevantly say that it is not only the duty of A, but of anybody else in the soap business, to pay for a college education of his own son. We can relevantly say that it is right not only for A, but for everyone, to tell a lie if he has to do so to save a life; but we cannot relevantly say that it is right not only for A, but for everyone, to tell a lie on Thursday night.(5)

In brief, the extent to which a moral rule or a duty should be generalized or particularized can only be determined by the social consequences that generalization or particularization would tend to have. And this once more points to the unsatisfactoriness of Kant's formulation of the principle of universalizibility. It is valid (in so far as it insists that no one is entitled to treat himself as an exception), but it is not of much use. It tells us only that what is a moral rule for A is a moral rule for B or for anybody, that what is a duty for A is a duty for B or for anybody else in those circumstances. But it gives us no hint of how we are to test the validity or expediency of one moral rule as against another, or of what our particular duty is in particular circumstances.

A practical problem for which it is even more difficult to draw specific rules is: When someone fails, for any reason, to perform his or her specific duty, whose duty is it to substitute? If a mother and father fail in their duties to their own children, and allow them to go hungry or carelessly expose them to some contagious disease, whose duty is it to try to rectify the situation? The common law finds no solution to this problem, and common-sense morality gives no definite answer.

4. The Choice of Vocation

But it is clear from the foregoing discussion that our special duties of relation and circumstance tend to merge with our special duties of vocation. Let us therefore return to our consideration of the latter.

Once we have adopted a vocation, we have either implicitly or explicitly adopted the special duties and risks that attend it. But this brings us to the problem: Have we any duty to adopt one vocation rather than another? Does each of us have one "true" vocation? Are we obliged to follow it? And how are we to determine what it is?

Obviously within a very wide range the choice of a trade or profession (when it is not more or less forced on us, as it often is) is a decision to be made mainly on economic grounds and on grounds of personal taste and preference. Within this wide range moral considerations cannot be said to enter. Yet the "duty" of choosing a profession has been called by one writer "the most important of all duties." (6) Certainly it is one of the most important decisions, and sometimes the most important, that each of us makes in his life. To what extent do or should moral considerations enter into this decision?

It is obvious that they must certainly enter in a negative sense. Nobody can excuse himself for a life of crime by declaring that he decided to adopt it because he thought this the quickest way to make a living, or because he had a special taste or talent for that kind of life. And even when we come to occupations that are within the law, many men will refuse even to consider going into a business that they feel to be ignoble or disreputable. Other men will feel that they have a positive "calling" or a positive duty to take up, say, the ministry or medicine.

We have said enough to indicate that the choice of a profession or vocation, though within certain limits it may be morally indifferent, must often involve a moral choice. Most of us recognize, in our judgments on our friends or on public figures, that a man owes a special obligation to his own gifts. Of the men whom we find throwing away their lives in drunkenness and dissipation, we condemn far more strongly a man whom we consider to be a great potential artist, scientist or writer, than one who has never shown any particular talent at all. We say of the former that he has sinned against his own talents. We are apt to be intolerant even of a mild laziness in him.

This may seem unjust and paradoxical. But common-sense morality is right in recognizing that special talents do impose special duties. For it recognizes that when such talents are unused, humanity loses far more than it does from the idleness or dissipation of mediocrities.

A man, then, has a duty to his own talents. He has a duty not to underestimate them, if this underestimate leads him to set his sights too low. "A man's reach should exceed his grasp." But only slightly. It is almost an equal sin for a man to overestimate his talents when it leads him into ambitious projects at which he cannot succeed rather than into a more modest but more useful career. It is the latter possibility that is today more often forgotten or neglected. If one were to judge from the bulk of novels and plays on this theme in the last generation, the world is full of men who would have made great novelists or artists but were forced by their in-laws to go into the advertising business instead. Yet the real truth seems to be that America has a surplus of incompetent novelists and painters who, given the true nature and level of their talents, might at least have made useful and successful advertising-copy writers or illustrators.

If a man does have a duty to his talents, however (and I am assuming he does), this implies that special talents impose special duties. These duties rest on two grounds. We assume that a man who does not fully employ his talents will be unhappy. And if it is a duty of all of us to maximize the general happiness, then those whose powers enable them to make a greater contribution must have a greater obligation.

But does this not also have its reverse side? Does the genius who is the slave of his talent not have in compensation certain immunities from the duties of ordinary men? Does he have the right, for example, to abandon his wife and children to pursue his chosen work -- or is he bound, like the rest of us, to the obligations he assumed by his earlier choice?

I shall not attempt here to answer this question, which has fascinated many novelists and dramatists (Somerset Maugham in The Moon and Sixpence, Bernard Shaw in The Doctor's Dilemma, Joyce Cary in Herself Surprised, The Horse's Mouth, etc.), but I can make one generalization. We have said that the great test of the morality of actions is their tendency to promote or contribute toward social cooperation. But an individual can sometimes cooperate best in the long run by declining all but the most imperative family duties and appeals for cooperation in specific "good causes" in order to concentrate all his time and energies on something that he alone can do, or at least on something that he can do superlatively well -- writing, painting, composing, scientific research, or whatnot. The moral judgment that we pass on him will depend both on whether his neglect of the ordinary duties and decencies was really necessary to his end, and whether we decide that he really was a genius, or only a mediocrity afflicted with megalomania.

5. A Moral Aristocracy?

One further question may be raised under the heading of Vocation. Can there be or should there be a specific Moral Vocation? As it is necessary to have policemen, but not necessary that everyone be a policeman, may it not be necessary to have saints and heroes, even though not everyone can be a saint or a hero? (7)

There are masters in all lines, whether in sports or games, like golf, tennis, swimming, chess, and bridge, or in industry, in science, in music, and in art. These masters in each line -- not only by what they have specifically learned and taught but by the inspiration of their very existence -- raise the level of performance in their line. Is there not similarly a need for an ethical elite, a moral aristocracy? And is there not similarly a need for this moral leadership not only in the ministry, the priesthood, or in religious orders, but in business and the professions? Where millions have been inspired by the example of Jesus of Nazareth and of the Christian saints, and other millions by the example of a Confucius or a Buddha, thousands also have found moral inspiration in the example of a Socrates, a Spinoza, a Washington, a Jenner, a Pasteur, a Lincoln, a Darwin, a John Stuart Mill, a Charles Lindbergh, an Albert Schweitzer. (I am speaking now, not of anyone in his capacity as a moral philosopher, but as a moral exemplar or character, distinguished by outstanding dedication, courage, singleness of purpose, compassion, or nobility.)

And if there is a need for such a moral elite, to serve as an inspiration to the rest of us, upon whose shoulders does the duty fall? Here we can only reply, I think, that the duty, if there is one, must be self-assumed. We can welcome, applaud, and admire it, but we cannot demand it. It probably requires, in fact, an inborn moral genius, as scientific or artistic mastery requires an inborn intellectual or artistic genius.

From the holders of certain positions, however, like a minister or a priest, a public official, a teacher, or a college president, we have a right to expect a much better than average conduct because of the greater good that its existence could do or the greater harm that its absence could do to the parishioners, the citizens, or the students who look to them for guidance.

6. Summary

To sum up, then: A large part of human duty consists of acts that are not the duty of everybody. There is and must be a division and specialization of duty as there is and must be division and specialization of labor. This is not merely an analogy: the one implies the other. Because we have to assume the full duties and responsibilities of our particular job, we are unable to take over the duties or responsibilities of other jobs. Most of an educator's duties are confined not merely to education, but to the education of his particular students in his particular subject, and not to other students or even to his own students in other subjects. A policeman cannot be held responsible for the efficiency of the police department even in another precinct, let alone for the efficiency of the fire department, or the efficiency of the fire department in another city.

And apart from the division and specialization of duty as the result of the division and specialization of labor, our duty is also limited and defined by our special talents, and by the vicinity, the relation, the particular circumstances, place, or "station" in which we find ourselves. It is because some of us have these special duties that others are relieved of them. This is precisely what we mean when we say that everyone has his own inescapable personal responsibilities, which he cannot foist on others.

This does not mean, of course, that there are no universal duties. Everyone has a duty to speak the truth, to keep his promises and agreements, to act honorably. And even much particularity of duties (as we saw on page 196) can be reconciled with universality. But every act does not depend for justification on its universalizability. Some courses (such as voluntary celibacy) can quite properly, in fact, only be chosen by some on condition of their not being chosen by all. (8)

And if we ask how we are to know our special duties, apart from those that inhere in the special vocation we have chosen, we are brought back for answer to two very old maxims, which may profitably be combined into one: Know thyself and Be thyself.

From our discovery of the necessary specialization of many duties we can come to a further conclusion. Our duties are not bottomless and endless. If the duties of each of us are specialized, they are also limited. No man is required to take the burdens of all mankind on his shoulders.

Many moral writers tell us that, "A man's duty under all circumstances is to do what is most conducive to the general good." (9) But this should not be interpreted as imposing on us the duty of trying to relieve the distress of everybody in the world, whether in India, China, or Upper Chad. The weight of such limitless duties, if we assumed we had them, would make us all feel constantly inadequate, guilty, and miserable. It would distract us from properly fulfilling our duties to ourselves and our immediate family, friends, and neighbors. These limited duties are as much as we can reasonably call upon most men to perform. Any generosity or dedication beyond that is optional, to be admired but not exacted. The professional do-gooders now rushing about the world, meddling in everybody's affairs, and constantly exhorting the rest of us that we are forgetting the wretchedness and poverty in Bolivia, Burma, or Brazil, and are relaxing, playing or laughing when somebody is suffering or dying somewhere, make a very dubious contribution to the betterment of the human lot.

The principal real duties of the average man are, after all, not excessively onerous or demanding. They are to do his own job well, to treat his family with love, his intimates with kindness, and everyone with courtesy, and apart from that not to meddle in other people's affairs. A man who does this much is in fact cooperating with his fellows, and very effectively. If everyone did as much, the lot of man might still be far from perfect, but it would show infinite improvement over its present state.

Notes

1. F. A. Hayek, The Constitution of Liberty, pp. 83-84.

2. Henry Sidgwick, The Methods of Ethics (1874), p. 425. It is only fair to add that Sidgwick goes on to point out some of the practical difficulties that follow from any direct effort to "take into account all the effects of our actions, on all the sentient beings who may be affected by them."

3. Hastings Rashdall, The Theory of Good and Evil, II, 1. Of Rashdall, too, it must in fairness be said that he was so far aware of the problems here under discussion that he devoted a special chapter to "Vocation"- one of the few ethical writers to do so. Yet many utilitarian moralists and others do try to apply directly the kind of sweeping criteria I have just quoted.

4. Selected Letters of Albert Jay Nock, collected and edited by Francis J. Nock (Caxton, 1962).

5. See John Hospers' discussion of "The Principle of Relevant Specificity," Human Conduct (New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1961), pp. 320-322.

6. Hastings Rashdall, who endorses the statement, attributes it to Sir John Seeley. The Theory of Good and Evil, II, 113.

7. Paul Janet, as quoted by Hastings Rashdall, The Theory of Good and Evil, II, 136.

8. I again refer the reader to J. O. Urmson's fascinating essay, "Saints and Heroes," in A. I. Melden's Essays in Moral Philosophy (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1958).

9. E.g., Hastings Rashdall, The Theory of Good and Evil, II. 135.

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