THE ETHICAL BASIS OF SOCIAL RELATIONS The central problem of social philosophy on its ethical side is the nature of political obligation and authority. In this, two essentially different questions are involved which it is important to distinguish. We have first of all to account for the concentra tion of coercive power in some determinate person or persons and for the growth of habits of obedience to those persons on the part of the other members of society. We have, secondly, to inquire into the ethical justification of social obedience or, looking at it from the point of view of the persons exercising political power, into the moral basis of their authority. Though the two problems have points of contact they are at bottom quite different in nature, the one being a matter for history and psychology, the other for ethics and political philosophy. Into the historical con ditions which have led to the emergence of different forms of political organization, we need not here enquire. It is sufficient to point out that although brute force and military conquest have played an important role in their determination, yet, in the long run, political power and habits of obedience and social co-opera tion rest upon a recognition, however vague or dim on the part of the members of society, that the public authority maintains and furthers common interests and common goods. The psychological factors involved, however, are extremely inchoate and obscure. They cannot be described accurately in terms of a common or cor porate will. They constitute rather "an impalpable congeries of hopes and fears" resting upon feelings of discomfort and mal adjustment experienced when an accepted rule is broken or a common requirement not fulfilled, a dim recognition, perhaps, that somehow order must be maintained and that somebody must be entrusted with the duty of maintaining the social peace. Consent for the majority of the people hardly rises above passive acquiescence, and in complex societies has not the character of voluntary decision. Power rests upon the will of the people in the sense that if stretched beyond a certain point, their acquiescence will not be secured, and social apathy and even disruption may result. Thus the degree of power exercised by a public authority depends ultimately on the amount of obedience it can command, and therefore varies greatly in duration, scope and intensity. If by the term sovereignty is meant supreme or unlimited coercive power vested in determinate persons, then clearly the notion is no more than a convenient fiction of jurisprudence, since no deter minate person ever had such power. The attempt to place sover eignty in the general will in the sense of the congeries of vague psychological elements underlying common or joint action must fail, since in this sense the general will is indeterminate and cannot therefore be vested in a person or persons.
The General Will.—In the discussion of the second problem psychology and history have been confused with ethics. It is true that psychologically obedience on the part of an individual may be influenced by his recognition that the law which he accepts is in the common interest, but this recognition by him does not give the law its authority and it is arguable that the law might still be right even if a given individual did not recognize its right ness. The problem here involved has given rise to the theory of a general will. It was thought that a moral imperative must be self-imposed and that obligation consists in this adoption by the self of its own law. Accordingly the problem of political obliga tion comes to be put as the question how self-government is possi ble, and the answer is found in the light of a distinction between our momentary or actual explicit consciousness at its ordinary level and our "real being" in which "we will our own nature as a rational being." This real being, it is then argued, is universal, is expressed in the State, and in obeying its injunctions the individual obeys his own real will and is therefore "self-governed." (See Bosanquet, The Philosophical Theory of the State.) Now it must be granted that to have true moral value obedience on the part of an individual must be self-imposed, but the ground of the obligation itself is not found in the acceptance or will of the individual, but in the constraint due to the worth or value of the end or ends to which the act in question is directed, and this value is not dependent upon its recognition or appreciation by a given subject or individual. The problem of obligation is not to be solved by an analysis of volition, but rather of the ends or objects which have value, by an analysis not of willing but of what is willed. But, it will be said, society is a condition of there being any ends or objects of will at all, or perhaps more precisely that just those ends which are of the greatest significance for the growth of individuality are those which society (or man's social nature) lays on him. (Hetherington, Aristot. Proc. 1917 18, p. 304.) It would follow that the constraint, control and stability which an individual owes to the ends in which he is interested are socially conditioned, and this, it may be said, is what is meant by the operation of the general will on the individual.