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

424
ETHICS
we do do it, or of approving of the disposition to do it
in others, any more than we can help having a good eye
at games or disliking marzipan. Now ethics, as has been
pointed out on a number of occasions, entails freedom,
and moral virtue must be freely achieved, or else it is not
moral virtue. In so far, then, as the subjectivisms account
of moral virtue in terms of its origins and predisposing
conditions is valid,
by moral virtue that is being so accounted for.
it turns out that it is not what we mean
THAT MORAL VIRTUE is NOT DESCRIBABLE IN
TERMS OF ITS EFFECTS. While subjectivist theories
specify the conditioning circumstances from which moral
virtue takes its rise, Utilitarianism looks to its results; when,
that is to say, it seeks to give an account ofwhat we mean by
moral virtue, Utilitarianism adopts the third of the methods
enumerated above. A right action, says the utilitarian, is
one which has the best consequences, and a virtuous
man is he who habitually performs actions which
have good consequences. Moral virtue, then, has what is
termed an instrumental value; it is valuable because it
is instrumental in producing certain effects. If moral virtue
is described as something which has a certain kind of
effect, and is regarded as desirable because it has that
effect, then it is being valued not for its own sake, but for
the sake of something else, namely, for the sake of its
effects. But just as, when we sought to give an account
of moral virtue by specifying the conditions and circumstances
in which it arose, it turned out that it was not
moral virtue that we had described, since moral virtue
entails freedom, and that which is a function of a set of
conditions could not have been other than what it is, so
it turns out that, when we try to give an account of mora 1
virtue in terms of its effects, it is, once again, not mora.
of some-
virtue that we are describing, itince, when we say
thing that it produces something else and then proceed
to attribute value to it for the sake of the something
else which it produces, the something in question which