Abstract

Royce's theory of moral obligation developed through four distinct phases: an early pragmatic phase culminating in his adoption of a Kantian ethical framework; a dialectical phase, around 1885, consequent upon Royce's movement to objective idealism and involving major alteration in Royce's architectonic; a phase in which selfhood as the preeminent ethical category, combined with a set theoretic logic, led Royce to view the individual as a subset of the absolute self ; and a final phase, from 1908 until Royce's death in 1916, in which the ethical relations of individuals to communities and of communities to yet higher communities provide the foundation for an ethics of interpretation. ;Although Royce's ethical obligation theory retained a markedly Kantian form throughout all four periods, Royce's depiction of ethical relationships became increasingly complex. In the earlier phases this increased complexity resulted from changes in Royce's epistemological and ontological views. In the final two periods, however, Royce's ethics became an independent source of change within his philosophic system as a whole. In his essay on "The Absolute and the Individual" , Royce modified his metaphysics with a theory of will, ethical individuation and freedom: the result was a "moralization" of his idea of the absolute and a changed view of the relation of finite individuals to the absolute self. Two novel elements in The Philosophy of Loyalty --the individual's loyalty to a cause, and the relation of these individual loyalties to an overarching religious reality--are key elements in Royce's transition from the third to the fourth phases, for Royce developed a theory of community on the basis of a two levels doctrine derived from the self/cause distinction. Royce completed his view of the community with the addition of a theory of interpretation drawn from the early work of Charles Sanders Peirce on the triadic nature of signs; and in the final two years of his life appears to have been moving toward a theory of moral obligation based on these triadic interpretive relations.