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

ETHICS
achievement 'of moral virtue. Plato and Aristotle were, I
think, wrong in supposing that there were at most two
kinds of good life to be lived by men. The Christian doctrine
of vocation suggests that there may be several. What is
essential and the greatest debt that we owe to modern
liberal and democratic thinking is that we should have
come to realize that it is essential 1
is that each man
should be permitted and enabled to choose for himself
the kind of good life best suited to him; permitted, that is
to say, by his fellows, and enabled by his training and
education. So far as the present discussion is concerned,
I am disposed to hazard the view that, while good conse-
some one
quences will be those which contain or promote
or other of the four values, it is probable that the best life
will contain or promote something of them all. I do not
know how to support this view. Values are, as I have tried
to show, intuitively perceived, and the proportions in
well be
which they should, in an ideal life, be mixed, may
the subject of another intuition.
Moore's Intuitionism of Ends. The conclusions just
outlined are in many respects similar to those reached
by Professor G. . Moore in his Principia Ethica, from
which, indeed, they are largely derived. Intuitions to the
effect that certain actions are right or wrong are* he holds,
1
for the reasons given in a previous chapter, untrustworthy.
To this extent Professor Moore is a utilitarian, who demands
that the worth of actions must be assessed by reference to
their consequences. But the value of consequences can, he
points out, only be established by intuitions in regard to
what is good, and he agrees that goods, or as I have called
them, values, may be of more than one kind although the
word " good " stands, he thinks, for a unique conception.
The Nature of Happiness as a Value. Between the four
values I have postdated, there is one important difference.
1 See Chapter XVIII, pp. 741 and 750-758, for m of this view.
development
See Chapter VIII, pp 295-301.