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

156
tfTHICS
to these and similar questions will have a profound effect
upon our ethical Views. If, for example, we hold that
there is a reality underlying the familiar world, that the
familiar world expresses this reality and that this reality
is in some important sense good, then it will follow that
the features which even the familiar world exhibits must
be ethically admirable) and that evil is in some sense
illusory. It will also follow that men should try to penetrate
beneath the surface world of appearance to the reality which
underlies it; it will be their duty, in other words, to try
to know what the Greeks called the Good. From this
duty all others will be derivable. If, again, we hold that the
universe is not only changing but evolving, and that its
evolution is inspired by a principle which is also a purpose,
or which is imbued by a purpose, it will follow that our
conduct should be such as to promote that purpose.
Theology gives point and precision to the duties which
metaphysics leaves vague. If we may assume that there
is a God, that He is the creator of the familiar, everyday
world, that He is all-good and all-powerful, and that He
has bestowed upon us the gift of freewill, then an obligation
to use that gift in a particular way will clearly arise. For
it will be our duty, given the theological assumption,
to act in such a way as to please God, and it will be our
duty also to try to know Him and to try to love Him.
From these primary duties certain derivative duties
touching our conduct towards our neighbours will follow.
It is not too much to say that, granted assumptions of
this kind, the whole conduct of a man's life is, or at any
rate should be, determined by the corollaries that follow
from them. What, in the last resort, we ought to do and
the reason why we ought to do it can on this assumption
only be determined by reference to another plane of
existence and the Divine Being who dwells upon it. As the
philosophers put it, ethics derives both its content (what
we ought to do) and its authority (why we ought to do it)
from theology. Many ethical writers have, indeed, inain-
tained that in the absence of theological assumptions