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

A THEORY OF GOOD OR VALUE 437
pursue the Good, it is impossible to account for the fact
of moral experience. As I have already pointed out, an
initial knowledge of good, an initial recognition of moral
obligation, are presupposed in the distinction which we
habitually make between the right and the expedient.
Unless from the very beginning, we were endowed with
the capacity to recognize the good and to distinguish it
from the expedient, it would be impossible to account for
this distinction. Nevertheless, it is also true that the
capacity to recognize the good remains, like any other
capacity, latent unless occasions are provided
for its
exercise. It is doubtful, that is to say, to revert to a familiar
example, whether in a man deposited
at birth on an
uninhabited island it would ever develop at all, for the
reason that it is doubtful whether a congenital Robinson
Crusoe could be considered fully human.
Just as in some the capacity to recognize and pursue the
good remains undeveloped, so in others its development
is warped. In a bad environment a man's innate inclina-
tion to pursue what he takes to be good may be directed
towards mistaken ends, so that he finds ifc money, place,
or privilege, the slaughter of his kind, or the rapid move*
ment of pieces of matter in space, the sufficient end of
human existence. As Socrates would put it, when we have
been improperly trained we may make misjudgments as
to what is really good, taking to be good what is not.
But the fact that we can make misjudgments about what
is good does not alter the fact that we value it, and that
it is our noblest qualities which are often enlisted in the
cause of ignoble ends; thus war and the miseries and
cruelties which, in pursuit of war, men have inflicted
upon one another, have often been prompted by motives
from which it is impossible to withhold our admiration.
Let me attempt to translate Plato's general conclusion
into my own terms: value is a universal of which all men
have an innate knowledge; all men, therefore, have an
innate capacity for recognizing the forms which value
assuniaL Of these, moral virtue is one, beauty another.