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

OBJECTIVE INTUITIONISM 2CK)
people are prepared to accumulate property 'by lawful
methods, that it is worth while for some people to try and
disembarrass them of it by unlawful ones.
The fact that evil is in this sense parasitic upon good,
that it is, in other words, the prevalence of good conduct
among the many that mftkfff bod conduct attractive to some,
has a political significance, to which I shall have occasion
to refer to in a later chapter relating to the coercive
function of the State. 1
Its present relevance is to serve as an illustration of Kant's
general principle, that moral conduct can be universalized
without contradiction, while immoral conduct cannot.
Hence, he says, we should always act in a way such that
we can wiH everybody ebe to act in the same way without
producing conflict or contradiction.
Not Making Exceptions in the Self's Favour. Kant's
maxim has a further significance. A great part of what we
call wrong action consists in doing in one's own person
something that one would reprobate in another. Everybody
recognizes certain duties, even if it is only the duty
to promote his own maximum self-development. When
one acts in a way which one believes to be wrong, pre-
ferring the indulgence of one's own desires to following
the dictates of the moral imperative, one is condoning in
oneself a deviation from moral rules which one would
censure in another. One is, that is to say, making an
exception in one's owit favour. But if everybody habitually
made exceptions in his own favour, ordered society would
rapidly become impossible. For example, I may permit
myself to travel on a special occasion without a railway
ticket because, let us say, I have no money, or because
I want to spend whatever money I have on something
else; but if everybody habitually indulged himself in this
way at the expense of the railway company, the company
would go bankrupt and railway travel would cease. Kant,
therefore, makes the point that it is characteristic of moral
1 See Chapter XIX, pp. 778-781.