Royce's Urbana Lectures: Lecture I (1967)

60 HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY Nous avon d6ja dit que la necessit~ que nous avons d'user de signs exterieurs pour nous faire entendre, fait que nous attachons tellement nos idfies aux roots, que souvent nous considerons plus les mots que les choses. (CG 83) Our need to use external signs to make ourselves understood makes us bind our ideas so closely to words that often we attend more to the words than to the ideas expressed. (DJ 78) We have already said that the necessity which we have for employing outward signs in order to make ourselves understood, causes us so to attach our ideas to words, that we often consider the words more than the things. (B 76) RICHARD A. WATSON Washinqton University ROYCE'S URBANA LECTURES: LECTURE I In 1907, Josiah Royce gave a series of lectures on moral philosophy at the University of Illinois in Urbana. Four of these lectures, the first two of which are complete and extensively edited by the author, are preserved in the Harvard University Archives. On a piece of brown wrapping paper attached to the lectures, Royce wrote: "These lectures to be worked over for a book on 'Loyalty and Personality.'" The book was never written, although much of the material in the third and fourth lectures appeared in revised form in The Philosophy o] Loyalty (1908). The first two Urbana lectures, most of whose content never appeared in published form, are reproduced in their entirety below. A careful correlation of Royee's published and unpublished writings reveals that his maturc ethical theory has a multidimensional structure. Three phases or levels are distinguishable: (1) A "precritical" phase in which Royce examines the initial experiential situation in which we find ourselves when we predicate values and encounter value-conflicts. This phase marks Royce's attempt to define a formal or procedural moral attitude and to elucidate certain principles regulative of moral discourse in general, prior to the effort to determine critically substantive principles of moral value and moral obligation as such. (2) A "self-realizational" phase in which Royce attempts to show that the individual moral agent appeals to a principle of self-realization as criterion of what is morally good and obligatory for him. (3) A "communal" phase in which the principle of self-realization is embodied in a social context. While these three phases overlap to some extent, Royce makes clear that distinctive modes of moral argumentation and justification pertain to each of them. The first of the Urbana lectures confines itself almost exclusively to what I have called the precritical phase.1 The main burden of Royce's analysis is to show that in the face of interpersonal value-conflicts mere considerations of prudence are sufficient to lead individuals with a modicum of enlightened self-interest to perceive the need to regulate their quest for personal gratification by the adoption of certain procedural principles of conduct, consistent adherence to which tends in the long run to mitigate conflict and thereby to further the interests of all parties concerned. Royce distinguishes four such procedural principles: reasonableness, impartiality , respect for persons qua persons, and the harmonization of conflict. He emphasizes that it is not the purpose of these principles to appraise value claims directly. Instead, their role is to spell out feasible procedures for human interaction in the very face of irreducibly conflicting value claims. In the second lecture, Royce launches into the self-realizational phase of his mature ethical 1For a critical discussion of this phase, see my The Moral Philosophy of Josiah Royce (Harvard University Press: 1965), ch. 6. For further discussion of the material in the second Urbana lecture, see ch. 7. NOTES AND DISCUSSIONS 61 theory. In a continuing effort to reconcile the traditional demands of personal autonomy with those of moral objectivity and universality, Royce argues that whereas the moral agent necessarily determines what is valuable and right for him by reference to the more or less coherent development of his own life plan or purpose, that life plan or purpose is itself largely the result of a spontaneous internalization of models of self-fulfillment provided by his social environment . Of special noteworthiness are several corollaries which...