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I will now begin.
My subject, as you know, is Ethics and I will adopt the
explanation of that term which Prof. Moore has given in his book
“Principia Ethica”.
He says: “Ethics is the general enquiry into
what is good”.
Now I am going to use the term Ethics in a slightly wider sense,
in a sense in fact which includes what I believe to be the most essential
part of what is generally called Aesthetics.
And to make you see as clearly as possible what I take to be the
subject matter of Ethics I will put before you a number of more or
less synonymous expressions each of which could be substituted for
the above definition, and by enumerating them I want to produce the same
sort of effect which
Gallstone produced when he took a number of photos of
different faces on the same photographic plate in order to get the
picture of the typical features they all had in common.
And as by showing to you such a collective photo I could make you see
what is the typical – say – chinese face;
so if you look through the row of synonyms which I will put before you,
you will, I hope, be able to see the characteristic features they all
have in common and these are the characteristic features of
Ethics.
Now instead of saying “Etthics
is the enquiry into what is good” I could have said
Ethics is the enquiry into what is valuable, or, into what is
really important, or I could have said Ethics is
3) the enquiry into the meaning of life, or
into what makes life worth living, or into the right way of
living.
I believe if you look at all these phrases you will get a rough
idea as to what it is that Ethics is concerned with.
Now the first thing that strikes one about all these expressions is
that each of them is actually used in two very different senses.
I will call them the trivial or relative sense on the one hand
and the ethical or absolute sense on the other.
If for instance I say that this is a good chair this means
that the chair serves a certain predetermined purpose and the word good
here has only meaning so far as this purpose has been previously
fixed upon.
In fact the word good in the
relative sense simply means coming up to a certain predetermined
standard.
Thus when we say that this man is a good pianist we mean that he can
play pieces of a certain degree of difficulty with a certain degree of
dexterity.
And similarly if I say that it is important for me not to
catch cold I mean that catching a cold produces certain describable
disturbances in my life and if I say that this is the right
road that it I mean that it's the right road relative
to a certain goal.
Used in this way these expressions don't present any difficult or
deep problems.
But this is not how Ethics uses them.
Supposing that I could play tennis and one of you saw me playing and
said “well you play pretty badly” and suppose I
answered “I know, I'm playing badly but I don't want
to play any better”, all the other man could say would be
“Ah then that's all right”.
But suppose I had told one of you a preposterous lie and he came up to
me and said “You're behaving like a
beast” and then I were to say “I know I behave
badly, but then I don't want to behave any better”, could
he then say “Ah, then that's all
right”?
Certainly not; he would say “Well, you ought
to want to behave better”.
Here you have an absolute judgment of value, whereas the first instance
was one of a relative judgment.
The essence of this difference seems to be obviously this:
Every judgment of relative value is a mere statement of
4) facts and can therefore be put in such a
form that it loses all the appearance of a judgment of value:
Instead of saying “this is the right way to
Granchester I could equally well have
said “this is the right way you have to go if you want to get
to Granchester in the shortest time”,
this man is a good runner
simply means that he runs a certain number of miles in a certain number
of minutes, a.s.f.
Now what I wish to contend is, that although all judgments of relative
value can be shown to be mere statements of facts, no statement of fact
can ever be, or imply, a judgment of absolute value.
Let me explain this: Suppose one of you were an omniscient
person and therefore knew all the movements of all the bodies in the
world dead or alive and that he also knew all the states of mind of all
human beings that ever lived, and suppose this man wrote all he knew in a
big book, then this book would contain the whole description of the
world; and what I want to say is, that this book would contain nothing
that we would call an ethical judgment or anything that would
logically imply such a judgment.
It would of course contain all relative judgments of value and all true
scientific propositions and in fact all true propositions that can be
made.
But all the facts described would, as it were, stand on the same level
and in the same way all propositions stand on the same level.
There are no propositions which, in any absolute sense, are sublime,
important, or trivial.
Now perhaps some of you will agree to that and be reminded of
Hamlet's words: Nothing is either
good or bad, but thinking makes it so”.
But this again could lead to a misunderstanding.
What Hamlet
says seems to imply that good and bad, though not qualities of the world
outside us, are attributes of our states of mind.
But what I mean is that a state of mind, so far as we mean by that a
fact which we can describe, is in no ethical sense good or bad.
If for instance in our world-book we read the description of a
murder with all its details physical and psychological the mere
description of these facts will contain nothing which we could call an
5) ethical proposition.
The murder will be on exactly the same level as any other event, for
instance the falling of a stone.
Certainly the reading of this description might cause us pain or rage
or any other emotion, or we might read about the pain or rage caused by
this murder in other people when they heard of it, but there will simply
be facts, facts and facts but no Ethics. –
And now I must say that if I contemplate what Ethics really would
have to be if there were such a science, this result seems to me quite
obvious.
It seems to me obvious that nothing we could ever think or say should
be thech thing.
That we cannot write a scientific book, the subject matter of which
could be intrinsically sublime and above all other subject
matters.
I can only describe my feeling by the metaphor, that, if a man
could write a book on Ethics which really was a book on Ethics,
this book would, with an explosion, destroy all the other books in the
world. –
Our words used as we use them in science, are vessels capable only of
containing and conveying meaning and sense, natural meaning
and sense. |
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