Page:Philosophical Review Volume 12.djvu/568

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THE PHILOSOPHICAL REVIEW.
[Vol. XII.

preferred the 'good' of others to mine—not consciously identified it with mine" (p. 27). Green confuses, in short, "choice" with "judgment as to choice-worthiness"; his view, on the whole, is that "vicious choice is always made under an illusory belief that the end chosen is the chooser's greatest good" (p. 39). But while it is true that "'willing the best' is not the same thing as conceiving it," and that vicious choice is not reducible to intellectual error, Green's view, fairly interpreted, does not seem to carry these implications, and it cannot be maintained that the choice of evil differs from the choice of good, so far as the form of the action is concerned.

3. Coming to the properly ethical issue, Sidgwick admits that "if Green can consistently maintain an 'idea of true good' that 'does not admit of the distinction between good for self and good for others,' his system will, in this respect, have a fundamental superiority over hedonism" (p. 65). It was, indeed, one of Sidgwick' s own fundamental positions in The Methods of Ethics that on the hedonistic theory, even when based upon intuitional principles, such a dualism between egoistic and altruistic good is inevitable. He finds, however, two distinct interpretations of true good in Green's Prolegomena to Ethics, the one of which makes the good non-competitive, while the other makes it no less truly competitive than the hedonistic interpretation does. He "allowed his thought to swing like a pendulum between a wider and a narrower ideal of the good, sometimes expanding it to Culture, sometimes narrowing it to virtue and the good will" (p. 71). "He entirely fails to see how the acceptance of the proposed condition of true good, that it 'does not admit of the distinction between good for self and good for others,' inevitably alters, and alters radically, the common notions of virtue, even the notions to which he himself adheres most unquestioningly and emphatically in his delineations of the moral ideal" (p. 66). "His own conceptions of justice, self-denial, self-sacrifice, as he himself expounds them, involve the conception of possible incompatibility between benefit to one man and benefit to another" (p. 65). He speaks constantly of the 'sacrifices' made by the virtuous man, of his 'self-sacrificing will,' his 'habitual self-denial,' his 'self-renunciations.' Yet the virtuous man is aiming at 'good' or 'self-satisfaction,' and "what sacrifice is there in giving up things that are no sort of good to one" (p. 68)? "In all this I seem to find, in Green's account of moral action, pagan or neo-pagan elements of ethical thought—in which the governing conception takes the form of self-regard—combined with Christian or post-Christian elements, without any proper philo-