WHY should I be moral? The question is natural, and yet seems strange. It appears to be one we ought to ask, and yet we feel, when we ask it, that we are wholly removed from the moral point of view.
To ask the question Why? is rational; for reason teaches us to do nothing blindly, nothing without end or aim. She teaches us that what is good must be good for something, and that what is good for nothing is not good at all. And so we take it as certain that there is an end on one side, means on the other; and that only if the end is good, and the means conduce to it, have we a right to say the means are good. It is rational, then, always to enquire, Why should I do it?
But here the question seems strange. For morality (and she too is reason) teaches us that, if we look on her only as good for something else, we never in that case have seen her at all. She says that she is an end to be desired for her own sake, and not as a means to something beyond. Degrade her, and she disappears; and to keep her, we must love and not merely use her. And so at the question Why? we are in trouble, for that does assume, and does take for granted, that virtue in this sense is unreal, and what
- ↑ Let me observe here that the word ‘moral’ has three meanings, which must be throughout these pages distinguished by the context. (1.) Moral is opposed to non-moral. The moral world, or world of morality, is opposed to the natural world, where morality can not exist. (2.) Within the moral world of moral agents, ‘moral’ is opposed to immoral. (3.) Again, within the moral world, and the moral part of the moral world, ‘moral’ is further restricted to the personal side of the moral life and the moral institutions. It stands for the inner relation of this or that will to the universal, not to the whole, outer and inner, realization of morality.
