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

* ETHICS
must live for and what is good. I and all men have only
one firm, incontestable, dear knowledge, and that know-
ledge cannot be explained by the reason it is outside it,
and has no causes and can have no effects.
if it has
'"If^goodness has causes, it is not goodness;
effects, a reward, it is not goodness either. So goodness it
outside the chain of cause and effect.
"'And yet I know it, and we all know it.
" 'What could be a greater miracle than that?"'
The truth which this passage embodies is that which
Kant sought to express by his theory that, when we acknow-
ledge the pull of moral obligation, we escape from the
operation of the law of cause and effect, which governs
the world of things as they appear. 1 I will try to state it
in terms of the language used in the preceding paragraphs.
If there is such a thing as moral virtue, then it is unique.
Consequently, although we can recognize it when we
meet it, we cannot describe its characteristics any more
than we can describe the characteristics of any other
thing which is* unique, such as, for example, colour. If,
however, we resort to one of the other categories of
explanation, and seek to give an account of moral virtue
in terms of its predisposing conditions or of its results,
we find, when we have finished, that it is not, in fact,
moral virtue that we have succeeded in describing, but
something quite different. For it is inherent in the conception
of moral virtue that it should not be a function
of predisposing conditions, and that it should not be
cultivated or valued for the sake of its results.
(4) Conclusion that the Morally Virtuous Man Must
Possess Good Judgment This conclusion emerged as a
result of the discussions contained in Chapter IX. (After
the preceding fajjffrnr* on the impossibility of describing
the characteristics of moral virtue, the statement that
moral virtue involves an element of judgment suggests
1 See Chapter VI, pp. 304-007.
See Chapter IX, pp. 510-319.