GUIDE TO THE PHILOSOPHY 1938 - 1947.pdf - Rare Books at ...

154
ETHICS
human consciousness. Some writers hold that nothing is
either good or bad excejrt states of consciousness, and that
a world without consciousness would be a world without
ethics* However this may be, it is clear that the moral
judgments passed by individuals, their valuations of
good and bad, the temptations to which they are exposed,
and the moral conflicts through which they pass, are facts
with which ethics is intimately concerned. All these facts
are mental facts; they are events which take place in
human minds. Now psychology is the science which
takes for its province the human mind. To the psychologist
all mental events are of interest. They constitute, indeed,
his especial and peculiar concern and among them, therefore,
are included those events which also form part of
the subject matter of ethics. How, then, is ethics to be dis-
tinguished from psychology?
The line of demarcation which is usually drawn is as
follows. The purpose of psychology, it is said, is to examine
and to classify all mental events without seeking to assess
their value. It is enough for a psychologist that a mental
event should occur; he is not concerned to ask whether it
ought to occur or whether, when either of two mental
events might have occurred, it is better that one should
have done so than the other. Now it is precisely with the
issues raised by the words "ought" and "better" that
ethics is concerned. Ethics does not, in other words, merely
register and explore states of consciousness; it assesses them,
affirming as a result of its assessment that some are more
desirable than others; that some ought to occur, and that
others ought not to occur. Ethics is thus committed, as
psychology is not, to the task of trying to give some mean-
ing to such words as V ought" and "desirable".
An analogy may help to elucidate the point. There are
at least two ways in which we can give an account of a
picture; there is the way of the scientist, and the way of
the art critic. The scientist will analyse the matter of
which the picture is composed, resolving its paint and
canvas into their chemical compounds and elements,