Principia Ethica · G. E. Moore
ETHICS IN RELATION TO CONDUCT.
We shall think that we are proving that a thing is ‘good,’ when we are really only proving that it is something else; since unless we know what ‘good’ means, unless we know what is meant by that notion in itself, as distinct from what is meant by any other notion, we shall not be able to tell when we are dealing with it and when we are dealing with something else, which is perhaps like it, but yet not the same. And the second reason why we should settle first of all this question ‘What good means?’ is a reason of method. It is this, that we can never know on what _evidence_ an ethical proposition rests, until we know the nature of the notion which makes the proposition ethical. We cannot tell what is possible, by way of proof, in favour of one judgment that ‘This or that is good,’ or against another judgment ‘That this or that is bad,’ until we have recognised what the nature of such propositions must always be.
In fact, it follows from the meaning of good and bad, that such propositions are all of them, in Kant’s phrase, ‘synthetic’: they all must rest in the end upon some proposition which must be simply accepted or rejected, which cannot be logically deduced from any other proposition. This result, which follows from our first investigation, may be otherwise expressed by saying that the fundamental principles of Ethics must be self-evident. But I am anxious that this expression should not be misunderstood. The expression ‘self-evident’ means properly that the proposition so called is evident or true, _by itself_ alone; that it is not an inference from some proposition other than _itself_. The expression does _not_ mean that the proposition is true, because it is evident to you or me or all mankind, because in other words it appears to us to be true. That a proposition appears to be true can never be a valid argument that true it really is. By saying that a proposition is self-evident, we mean emphatically that its appearing so to us, is _not_ the reason why it is true: for we mean that it has absolutely no reason. It would not be a self-evident proposition, if we could say of it: I cannot think otherwise and therefore it is true.
For then its evidence or proof would not lie in itself, but in something else, namely our conviction of it. That it appears true to us may indeed be the _cause_ of our asserting it, or the reason why we think and say that it is true: but a reason in this sense is something utterly different from a logical reason, or reason why something is true. Moreover, it is obviously not a reason of the same thing. The _evidence_ of a proposition to us is only a reason for _our holding it_ to be true: whereas a logical reason, or reason in the sense in which self-evident propositions have no reason, is a reason why _the proposition itself_ must be true, not why we hold it so to be. Again that a proposition is evident to us may not only be the reason why we do think or affirm it, it may even be a _reason_ why we ought to think it or affirm it. But a reason, in this sense too, is not a logical reason for the truth of the proposition, though it is a logical reason for the rightness of holding the proposition.
In our common language, however, these three meanings of ‘reason’ are constantly confused, whenever we say ‘I have a reason for thinking that true.’ But it is absolutely essential, if we are to get clear notions about Ethics or, indeed, about any other, especially any philosophical, study, that we should distinguish them. When, therefore, I talk of Intuitionistic Hedonism, I must not be understood to imply that my denial that ‘Pleasure is the only good’ is _based_ on my Intuition of its falsehood. My Intuition of its falsehood is indeed _my_ reason for _holding_ and declaring it untrue; it is indeed the only valid reason for so doing. But that is just because there is _no_ logical reason for it; because there is no proper evidence or reason of its falsehood except itself alone. It is untrue, because it is untrue, and there is no other reason: but I _declare_ it untrue, because its untruth is evident to me, and I hold that that is a sufficient reason for my assertion. We must not therefore look on Intuition, as if it were an alternative to reasoning. Nothing whatever can take the place of _reasons_ for the truth of any proposition: intuition can only furnish a reason for _holding_ any proposition to be true: this however it must do when any proposition is self-evident, when, in fact, there are no reasons which prove its truth.
For we have _proved_ that these have never even asked themselves the question which they professed to answer. They have confused it with another question: small wonder, therefore, if their answer is different from ours. We must be quite sure that the same question has been put, before we trouble ourselves at the different answers that are given to it. For all we know, the whole world would agree with us, if they could once clearly understand the question upon which we want their votes. Certain it is, that in all those cases where we found a difference of opinion, we found also that the question had _not_ been clearly understood. Though, therefore, we cannot prove that we are right, yet we have reason to believe that everybody, unless he is mistaken as to what he thinks, will think the same as we. It is as with a sum in mathematics. If we find a gross and palpable error in the calculations, we are not surprised or troubled that the person who made this mistake has reached a different result from ours. We think he will admit that his result is wrong, if his mistake is pointed out to him. For instance if a man has to add up 5 + 7 + 9, we should not wonder that he made the result to be 34, if he started by making 5 + 7 = 25. And so in Ethics, if we find, as we did, that ‘desirable’ is confused with ‘desired,’ or that ‘end’ is confused with ‘means,’ we need not be disconcerted that those who have committed these mistakes do not agree with us. The only difference is that in Ethics, owing to the intricacy of its subject-matter, it is far more difficult to persuade anyone either that he has made a mistake or that that mistake affects his result.
In this second division of my subject--the division which is occupied with the question, ‘What is good in itself?’--I have hitherto only tried to establish one definite result, and that a negative one: namely that pleasure is _not_ the sole good. This result, if true, refutes half, or more than half, of the ethical theories which have ever been held, and is, therefore, not without importance. It will, however, be necessary presently to deal positively with the question: What things are good and in what degrees? =88.= But before proceeding to this discussion I propose, first, to deal with the _third_ kind of ethical question--the question: What ought we to do? The answering of this question constitutes the third great division of ethical enquiry; and its nature was briefly explained in Chap. I. (§§ 15-17). It introduces into Ethics, as was there pointed out, an entirely new question--the question what things are related as _causes_ to that which is good in itself; and this question can only be answered by an entirely new method--the method of empirical investigation; by means of which causes are discovered in the other sciences. To ask what kind of actions we ought to perform, or what kind of conduct is right, is to ask what kind of effects such action and conduct will produce. Not a single question in practical Ethics can be answered except by a causal generalisation. All such questions do, indeed, _also_ involve an ethical judgment proper--the judgment that certain effects are better, in themselves, than others. But they _do_ assert that these better things are effects--are causally connected with the actions in question. Every judgment in practical Ethics may be reduced to the form: This is a cause of that good thing.
That the assertion ‘I am morally bound to perform this action’ is identical with the assertion ‘This action will produce the greatest possible amount of good in the Universe’ has already been briefly shewn in Chap. I. (§ 17); but it is important to insist that this fundamental point is demonstrably certain. This may, perhaps, be best made evident in the following way. It is plain that when we assert that a certain action is our absolute duty, we are asserting that the performance of that action at that time is unique in respect of value. But no dutiful action can possibly have unique value in the sense that it is the sole thing of value in the world; since, in that case, _every_ such action would be the _sole_ good thing, which is a manifest contradiction. And for the same reason its value cannot be unique in the sense that it has more intrinsic value than anything else in the world; since _every_ act of duty would then be the _best_ thing in the world, which is also a contradiction. It can, therefore, be unique only in the sense that the whole world will be better, if it be performed, than if any possible alternative were taken.
And the question whether this is so cannot possibly depend solely on the question of its own intrinsic value. For any action will also have effects different from those of any other action; and if any of these have intrinsic value, their value is exactly as relevant to the total goodness of the Universe as that of their cause. It is, in fact, evident that, however valuable an action may be in itself, yet, owing to its existence, the sum of good in the Universe may conceivably be made less than if some other action, less valuable in itself, had been performed. But to say that this is the case is to say that it would have been better that the action should not have been done; and this again is obviously equivalent to the statement that it ought not to have been done--that it was not what duty required. ‘Fiat iustitia, ruat caelum’ can only be justified on the ground that by the doing of justice the Universe gains more than it loses by the falling of the heavens. It is, of course, possible that this is the case: but, at all events, to assert that justice _is_ a duty, in spite of such consequences, is to assert that it is the case.
Our ‘duty,’ therefore, can only be defined as that action, which will cause more good to exist in the Universe than any possible alternative. And what is ‘right’ or ‘morally permissible’ only differs from this, as what will _not_ cause _less_ good than any possible alternative. When, therefore, Ethics presumes to assert that certain ways of acting are ‘duties’ it presumes to assert that to act in those ways will always produce the greatest possible sum of good. If we are told that to ‘do no murder’ is a duty, we are told that the action, whatever it may be, which is called murder, will under no circumstances cause so much good to exist in the Universe as its avoidance. =90.= But, if this be recognised, several most important consequences follow, with regard to the relation of Ethics to conduct.
(1) It is plain that no moral law is self-evident, as has commonly been held by the Intuitional school of moralists. The Intuitional view of Ethics consists in the supposition that certain rules, stating that certain actions are always to be done or to be omitted, may be taken as self-evident premisses. I have shewn with regard to judgments of what is _good in itself_, that this is the case; no reason can be given for them. But it is the essence of Intuitionism to suppose that rules of action--statements not of what ought to _be_, but of what we ought to do--are in the same sense intuitively certain. Plausibility has been lent to this view by the fact that we do undoubtedly make immediate judgments that certain actions are obligatory or wrong: we are thus often intuitively certain of our duty, _in a psychological sense_. But, nevertheless, these judgments are not self-evident and cannot be taken as ethical premisses, since, as has now been shewn, they are capable of being confirmed or refuted by an investigation of causes and effects. It is, indeed, possible that some of our immediate intuitions are true; but since _what_ we intuit, _what_ conscience tells us, is that certain actions will always produce the greatest sum of good possible under the circumstances, it is plain that reasons can be given, which will shew the deliverances of conscience to be true or false.
Ethics, therefore, is quite unable to give us a list of duties: but there still remains a humbler task which may be possible for Practical Ethics. Although we cannot hope to discover which, in a given situation, is the best of all possible alternative actions, there may be some possibility of shewing which among the alternatives, _likely to occur to any one_, will produce the greatest sum of good. This second task is certainly all that Ethics can ever have accomplished: and it is certainly all that it has ever collected materials for proving; since no one has ever attempted to exhaust the possible alternative actions in any particular case. Ethical philosophers have in fact confined their attention to a very limited class of actions, which have been selected because they are those which most commonly occur to mankind as possible alternatives. With regard to these they may possibly have shewn that one alternative is better, _i.e._ produces a greater total of value, than others. But it seems desirable to insist, that though they have represented this result as a determination of _duties_, it can never really have been so. For the term duty is certainly so used that, if we are subsequently persuaded that any possible action would have produced more good than the one we adopted, we admit that we failed to do our duty. It will, however, be a useful task if Ethics can determine which among alternatives _likely to occur_ will produce the greatest total value. For, though this alternative cannot be proved to be the best possible, yet it may be better than any course of action which we should otherwise adopt.
We must, therefore, distinguish a possible action from an action of which it is possible to think. By the former we mean an action which no known cause would prevent, _provided_ the idea of it occurred to us: and that one among such actions, which will produce the greatest total good, is what we mean by duty. Ethics certainly cannot hope to discover what kind of action is always our duty in this sense. It may, however, hope to decide which among one or two such possible actions is the best: and those which it has chosen to consider are, as a matter of fact, the most important of those with regard to which men deliberate whether they shall or shall not do them. A decision with regard to these may therefore be easily confounded with a decision with regard to which is the best possible action. But it is to be noted that even though we limit ourselves to considering which is the better among alternatives likely to be thought of, the fact that these alternatives might be thought of is not included is what we mean by calling them possible alternatives. Even if in any particular case it was impossible that the idea of them should have occurred to a man, the question we are concerned with is, which, if it had occurred, would have been the best alternative? If we say that murder is always a worse alternative, we mean to assert that it is so, even where it was impossible for the murderer to think of doing anything else.
The utmost, then, that Practical Ethics can hope to discover is which, among a few alternatives possible under certain circumstances, will, on the whole, produce the best result. It may tell us which is the best, in this sense, of certain alternatives about which we are likely to deliberate; and since we may also know that, even if we choose none of these, what we shall, in that case, do is unlikely to be as good as one of them, it may thus tell us which of the alternatives, among which we _can_ choose, it is best to choose. If it could do this it would be sufficient for practical guidance. =93.= But (3) it is plain that even this is a task of immense difficulty. It is difficult to see how we can establish even a probability that by doing one thing we shall obtain a better total result than by doing another. I shall merely endeavour to point out how much is assumed, when we assume that there is such a probability, and on what lines it seems possible that this assumption may be justified. It will be apparent that it has never yet been justified--that no sufficient reason has ever yet been found for considering one action more right or more wrong than another.
Yet, if a choice guided by such considerations is to be rational, we must certainly have some reason to believe that no consequences of our action in a further future will generally be such as to reverse the balance of good that is probable in the future which we can foresee. This large postulate must be made, if we are ever to assert that the results of one action will be even probably better than those of another. Our utter ignorance of the far future gives us no justification for saying that it is even probably right to choose the greater good within the region over which a probable forecast may extend. We do, then, assume that it is improbable that effects, after a certain time, will, in general, be such as to reverse the comparative value of the alternative results within that time. And that this assumption is justified must be shewn before we can claim to have given any reason whatever for acting in one way rather than in another. It may, perhaps, be justified by some such considerations as the following.
As we proceed further and further from the time at which alternative actions are open to us, the events of which either action would be part cause become increasingly dependent on those other circumstances, which are the same, whichever action we adopt. The effects of any individual action seem, after a sufficient space of time, to be found only in trifling modifications spread over a very wide area, whereas its immediate effects consist in some prominent modification of a comparatively narrow area. Since, however, most of the things which have any great importance for good or evil are things of this prominent kind, there may be a probability that after a certain time all the effects of any particular action become so nearly indifferent, that any difference between their value and that of the effects of another action, is very unlikely to outweigh an obvious difference in the value of the immediate effects. It does in fact appear to be the case that, in most cases, whatever action we now adopt, ‘it will be all the same a hundred years hence,’ so far as the existence at that time of anything greatly good or bad is concerned: and this might, perhaps, be _shewn_ to be true, by an investigation of the manner in which the effects of any particular event become neutralised by lapse of time. Failing such a proof, we can certainly have no rational ground for asserting that one of two alternatives is even probably right and another wrong. If any of our judgments of right and wrong are to pretend to probability, we must have reason to think that the effects of our actions in the far future will not have value sufficient to outweigh any superiority of one set of effects over another in the immediate future.
It is important to insist that this question, limited as it is, is the utmost, to which, with any knowledge we have at present or are likely to have for a long time to come, Practical Ethics can hope to give an answer. I have already pointed out that we cannot hope to discover which is the _best_ possible alternative in any given circumstances, but only which, among a few, is better than the others. And I have also pointed out that there is certainly no more than a probability, even if we are entitled to assert so much, that what is better in regard to its immediate effects will also be better on the whole. It now remains to insist that, even with regard to these immediate effects, we can only hope to discover which, among a few alternatives, will _generally_ produce the greatest balance of good in the immediate future. We can secure no title to assert that obedience to such commands as ‘Thou shalt not lie,’ or even ‘Thou shalt do no murder,’ is _universally_ better than the alternatives of lying and murder. Reasons why no more than a _general_ knowledge is possible have been already given in Chap. I. (§ 16); but they may be recapitulated here.
In the first place, of the effects, which principally concern us in ethical discussions, as having intrinsic value, we know the causes so little, that we can scarcely claim, with regard to any single one, to have obtained even a _hypothetical_ universal law, such as has been obtained in the exact sciences. We cannot even say: If this action is performed, under exactly these circumstances, and if no others interfere, this important effect, at least, will _always_ be produced. But, in the second place, an ethical law is not merely hypothetical. If we are to know that it will always be better to act in a certain way, under certain circumstances, we must know not merely what effects such actions will produce, _provided_ no other circumstances interfere, but also that no other circumstances will interfere. And this it is obviously impossible to know with more than probability. An ethical law has the nature not of a scientific law but of a scientific _prediction_: and the latter is always merely probable, although the probability may be very great.
An engineer is entitled to assert that, if a bridge be built in a certain way, it will probably bear certain loads for a certain time; but he can never be absolutely certain that it has been built in the way required, nor that, even if it has, some accident will not intervene to falsify his prediction. With any ethical law, the same must be the case; it can be no more than a generalisation: and here, owing to the comparative absence of accurate hypothetical knowledge, on which the prediction should be based, the probability is comparatively small. But finally, for an ethical generalisation, we require to know not only what effects will be produced, but also what are the comparative values of those effects; and on this question too, it must be admitted, considering what a prevalent opinion Hedonism has been, that we are very liable to be mistaken. It is plain, then, that we are not soon likely to know more than that one kind of action will _generally_ produce better effects than another; and that more than this has certainly never been proved. In no two cases will _all_ the effects of any kind of action be precisely the same, because in each case some of the circumstances will differ; and although the effects, that are important for good or evil, may be generally the same, it is extremely unlikely that they will always be so.
Ideas discussed in this chapter
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