REASON AND FEELING IN ETHICS.
I.
THE present discussion will set out from Mr. Moore's critical analysis of the concept 'good.'[1] And I may admit at once that I find his thesis, that the content of the idea is ultimate and sui generis, and incapable of any definition, one which I should be inclined to adopt only as a kind of last resort after all other possibilities have failed. I do indeed understand what may be meant by an ultimate and unanalyzable quality. I agree that sense qualities are such; and when I am called upon to define the meaning of yellowness, for example, all I can say is that yellow is yellow. But for some reason this does not work so well, for me, in the case of goodness. When I try to think the proposition that good is just indefinable goodness, I confess that presently my head begins to swim. The trouble is that the conditions do not seem to be the same in the two instances. In the case of an elementary sense-content the matter is plain enough. It is a perfectly concrete and imaginable bit of stuff. So also in the case of a relationship. I know what I mean by 'difference'; it is just difference, and nothing more. But goodness, as ultimate, is not, as I understand it, held to be a relationship; it is rather analogous to a sense quality; and with Hume, I find it extremely perplexing to be called upon to allow a definite qualitative content for which there is in no sense that is intelligible to me an original impression. Certainly there is nothing that makes an impression on my sense organs; and if I am not allowed to identify the original with some concrete feeling content, I find myself very doubtful whether I am talking about anything in particular at all, and may not be only using words. If there is no other recourse, I am willing to waive this, and trust that I may come to see it more clearly in the future; but it makes me much inclined to try other alternatives first.
- ↑ G. E. Moore, Principia Ethica, 1903.
