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

440
* ETHICS
this answer is correct, so far as it goes, but I would add
a fourth value,, happiness. Even if happiness is not the
only value it is, as 1 have tried to show, something which
is, in fact, valuable. Indeed, it seems probable that no
state of mind can be wholly valuable unless it contains
as an ingredient some happiness. If the traditional answer
is, as I am suggesting, correct, then it will be true to say
that all human beings do in the long run desire and value
the same things: That they should do so, is not, on reflection,
surprising. Human beings are the expressions of the same
creative impulse; they evolve in the same environment;
their natures are cast in the same mould. Running through
all the differences between man and man is the element
of their common humanity. Now the distinctive mark of
our common humanity is, I am suggesting, that all men
recognize truth, appreciate beauty, seek to attain virtue,
and desire happiness. That all men do not do these
things all the time is, of course, true. The reason for this
failure I shall consider in a moment: for the present, I
am content to make the point that, though our minds may
be clouded by ignorance, our desires distorted by passion,
our impulses led astray by bad training and education,
we are all human beings, and that the fact of what I have
called our common humanity, the fact that we are the
products of the same process, are cast in the same mould,
and react to the same environment, makes it plausible to
suppose that we should, on the whole, evince the same
basic tendencies, and that these tendencies are, other
things being equal, tendencies to pursue and desire value.
That Our Moral Notions are Never Purely Subjective.
The realization that our fundamental tendencies and
propensities are, at least in part, a function of the response
of the human spirit to what is, for all of us, fundamentally
the same environment, provides an important argument
against Subjectivism. Subjectivist .writers, as we have
seen, regard our notions of value as self-invented. The
human spirit, conscious of its loneliness in a universe