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

SUBJECTIVIST THEORY OF ETHICS 373
"better", are questions to which no satisfactory answer
is given. Yet an answer is clearly necessary, especially to
the last of these questions. If the meaning of "good"
is fitness to survive, the "best" are presumably the fittest;
but fittest for what? Presumably, to survive. Why, then,
should it be "good" to survive? There is no answer. Nor,
unless we are prepared to assign some meaning to the
word "good" which is not exhaustively analysable into
survival value, can there be an answer.
Ethical Implications of Anthropology. While the
announcement and popularisation of the theory of evolu-
tion were chiefly responsible for the development in the
late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries of subject ivist
ethical theories, anthropology exerted an influence in the
same direction. Anthropologists show how modern notions
of right and wrong have developed by traceable stages
from tribal rules, which were demonstrably utilitarian
in intention. This they point out, was originally held to be
right, that wrong, because this conduced to, that militated
against, the welfare of the tribe. The argument from
origins, 1 is then invoked to show that there is no more in
moral notions to-day than the considerations of social
expediency from which they oan be shown to have derived.
Thus Spencer, who adopted in the first edition of his
Social Statics the standpoint of a member of the moral
sense school his attitude here is broadly that of an
objective intuitionist declares in the second edition,
published thirty years later, that the study of anthropology
has convinced him that what is called conscience is merely
an inherited social sense, which bestows moral approval
upon that which is socially useful. A similar standpoint
has been adopted by a number of writers in modern
times.
Views of Westeimttck* Edward Westermarck for example,
in & book entitled Tin Origin and Dmlopmtnt of Moral
Scc Chapter I, pp.