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

460
ETHICS
Right and the Good, Dr. Ross affirms that "moral goodness
is quite distinct from aod independent of lightness", his
point being that the value, which I am calling moral virtue,
and what the utilitarians call a right action are two different
kinds of ethical fact between which there need be no con-
nection. It is difficult to accept this view. Although I
^tq maintaining that moral virtue is -a form of value, and
that, as such, it is in the last resort unanalysable, the con-
ception of moral virtue includes, it is obvious, a willingness*
to do one's duty. And to do one's duty is to do what one
conceives to be right. As Professor Moore, to whose views
I have already referred, puts it in his Principia Ethica, "a
virtue is a habitual disposition to perform actions which
are duties or which would be duties, if a volition were
sufficient on the part of most men to ensure their performance".
In other words, moral virtue is a disposition to
perform those actions which are deemed to be right, and
which it falls within the competence of most men to
perform.
If this is agreed to, the following complication arises:
a right action I have defined as one which produces the
best consequences on the whole; the best consequences are
those which contain or promote the greatest quantity of
those things which are valuable in themselves, namely,
beauty, truth, happiness and moral virtue. The actions
which a morally virtuous man conceives to be right, and
endeavours, accordingly, to perform, will sometimes,
although not always, coincide with those which actually
art right in the sense just defined. We reach, then, the
position that the morally virtuous man will wish to act
in such a way as to promote, among other things, an
increase of moral virtue. This result has a circular appearanace,
but the circle is not, I think, vicious. There is no
paradox in conceiving of the good man as one who wishes
to increase the amount of goodness in the world, and it is
a commonplace that he does in fact increase it That the
way to make people trustworthy is to trust them, lovable to
love them, conscientious to rely upon them all the great