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

fl* ETHICS
faculty which makes them as innate and essential parts of
the nature of the person judging. Kant's account, which
ascribes the origin of moral judgments, to a part of
our natures whereby we participate in reality, makes
admirable provision for this characteristic of directness
immediacy*
Wrong Action Never an End in Itself. The theory
derives another source of strength from the sharp distinc-
tion which it draws between what are termed categorical
and hypothetical imperatives. The imperatives of desire
are, it affirms, hypothetical in the sense that they all
depend upon an 'if'. 'Do 9
this, they say, 'if you want so
and so/ What they do not say is, 'Do this for its own sake
and for no other reason at all.' Yet this precisely is what,
according to Kant, the moral imperative does say. It is a
characteristic of moral action, in other words, that we are
willing to regard it as an end in itself. That this distinc-
tion between categorical and hypothetical imperatives
does correspond to an admitted fact of experience is, I
think, clear. Actions of the kind which are usually termed
immoral are always prompted by some motive other than
the motive to perform the action. They are always, in
other words, means to an end beyond themselves. We
tell a lie because we want to deceive somebody. We forge a
cheque because we want to obtain money to which we are
not lawfully entitled. We do somebody a bad turn because
we want to pay off a grudge. But moral action serves no
particular purpose beyond the action. While we require
an incentive to tell a lie, we require none to tell the truth;
it is, we fed, the normal and natural thing to do. Similarly,
we tend to act honestly, unless we have a particular reason
for being dishonest. We help a person who is in distress,
unless there is some factor of personal inconvenience or
danger to deter us. Other things being equal, in short,
we do what we ought to do, because doing what we
ought to do is intuitively recognized by us to be an end
in itself. The fact that other things rarely are equal should