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

466
ETHICS
really valuable? The question is the most fundamental
question of ethics, and no satisfactory answer to it exists.
Let us survey the materials that have been collected for
an answer.
I have suggested that value has the power of attracting
man's consciousness and evoking the desire to pursue it.
I have argued, in fact, with Socrates that all men naturally
desire the Good, but I have admitted that they are also
free, and that the power of good over them is far from
amounting to compulsion. I have suggested also that evil
is a real and positive factor in the universe, which clouds
men's judgments, so that they mistake for good what is
not, and weakens their will, so that they do not wish to
do the good that they $ee.
The thinkers of the Middle Ages, the moralists of the
nineteenth century, pictured the soul of man as a battle-
ground on which the forces of good and evil struggled for
victory. Their conception seems to me to have been on the
whole the correct one. It symbolizes the view that I have
been trying to put forward, that value exists and that on
the whole we wish to pursue it, but that some factor in the
universe, which is also in ourselves, prevents us, or rather
can prevent us, if we let it. Whether we shall let it prevent
us or not, depends in the last resort upon ourselves. In
this sense and to this extent we are free. Yet though in
theory and in the last resort our choice of action is free,
it is to a very large extent determined by our environment.
The question of environment brings me back to the
relation of a man's individual morals to those of his community,
and at this point I come to the borderline between
ethics and political theory. In the light of the preceding
survey three conclusions may be suggested.
Formula for Progress in a Society. First, it is extremely
difficult to be a good man in a bad community. Since the
form ofour moral judgments is determined by our environ*
*
ment, a member of a bad community will hold actions
to be right which are not right, and judge consequences