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

NATURE OF THE MORAL FACULTY 305
us to claim validity for the deliverances of the moral sense,
solely in virtue of the role which it plays in maintaining
and supporting that form. It is clearly not enough, then,
to show that morality has a social reference.
VARIETY OF ISSUES RAISED BY VIEW THAT
SOCIETIES EVOLVE AND PROGRESS. We agree
that it is not, upholders of the theory reply, but
societies evolve and progress and, since they do so, the
moral sense evolves and progresses with them. It is
at this point more particularly that we find ourselves
faced with questions which, as I have already mentioned,
take us beyond the confines of this book. The question
which we are now asked to consider is, do societies
progress or not? The answer to it involves (a) meta-
physics, since we must know what we mean by progress
and must have some view, therefore, as to the goal of
human evolution; (b) ethics, since we must know what
things are good; (c) politics, since we must know what
sort of political organization is best calculated to embody
and promote the things that are good; (d] biology, an-
thropology, and history, since having surveyed the past
of our species, we must be in a position to judge whether
the societies which exist now do or do not on the whole
embody more of the things that are good than the societies
which have existed in the past, and whether contemporary
political forms of organizations are or are not more likely
to promote an increase of the things that are good than
those which have existed in the past.
To sum up in a single question the many questions
that are involved, we have to ask whether, assuming that
we know what we mean by "better", human life does in
fact become "better". It is obviously impossible even
to attempt to answer this question here, although some
of the considerations involved, particularly those indicated
under (b) and (c) above, form part of the enquiry to which
this book is devoted. The most that I can hope to do is to
offer a number of brief observations upon those of the