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

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ETHICS
view is correct, it may sometimes be our duty to do a
wrong action. Thus, if I see a man drowning it will be
my duty to try to save him seeing that, apart altogether
from the demoralising effect of cowardice upon myself,
the consequences of his being saved may, since life is
assumed to be a good thing on the whole, be reasonably
expected to be better than the consequences of his dying.
If, however, he subsequently goes mad, beats his wife,
and murders his children, the actual consequences of my
act of rescue will have beeq bad. Therefore, I shall have
done a wrong action, which it was, nevertheless, my duty
to do.
In the second place, as it is impossible to know all the
actual consequences of any action, we can never tell for
certain whether any action is right or wrong. Thus, although
the utilitarian criterion of actual consequences provides
a rough and ready test which serves the purposes of
practical life, it is one which cannot, in practice, be applied
with absolute certainty. This consideration does not, how-
ever, invalidate the meaning which the utilitarians give to
the term "right action". It is obvious that we may know
what is meant by the phrase "the temperature of the
room", without knowing what its temperature is; and it
is logically perfectly conceivable that the correct meaning
of the expression "right action" should be "an action
which produces the best possible consequences", although
we can never know for certain in regard to any particular
action whether it is in fact right.
That the Possession of Good Judgment is a Necessary
Part of Virtue. This is not the place for a discussion of
the respective merits of the two forms of utilitarian theory.
One observation may, however, be permitted. It would,
I think, be generally agreed that a well-meaning man
who acts in such a way as to increase the happiness of
his neighbours is ethically superior to an equally well-
meaning man who habitually, or at any rate frequently,
acts in such a way as to diminish it. To take an extreme