calling a thing good, other than this fact of its ability to constrain my approving judgment, I am unable to discover any answer. I may desire a thing, and at the same moment refuse to call it good; but I do not see how I can approve a thing, and at the same moment refuse to call it good. There is indeed still a possible meaning to the question, 'Is this thing which I approve really good?'; but it is a different, and, I think, not a relevant one. The meaning is: On continued reflection, and further experience, shall I find it retaining my approval? But this only calls attention to the fact that my judgments of good no more than my judgments of truth are infallible; they may need to be corrected. But I could not correct them if I did not know in terms of my present attitude of assent what good means. The very question implies that so long as I approve a thing, it is for me good; and if the name ever ceases to apply, it will be because my attitude has changed.[1]
- ↑ Here it may be worth while repeating what I said above in the text, that when I declare that goodness is the quality of exciting approval, I do not mean that the meaning of good can be reduced to a particular fact of approval. Mr. Moore devotes some time to showing that what we think, when we think a thing good, is not that we prefer, or approve it. With this I am entirely in accord. When I think about an object's goodness, I am thinking precisely about that goodness, and not about my thought of it. So I agree that it is false to say that we should never know a thing was good unless we knew that we approved it, though I doubt very much whether in that case we should ever be able to understand our judgment philosophically. But when Mr. Moore goes on to call it still more 'utterly false' to suppose that we cannot distinguish the fact that a thing is good from the fact that we prefer (or, as I should rather substitute, approve) it, he would appear to be obscuring a distinction of some importance. I cannot of course expect to define goodness except by glancing back at actual value judgments; and when I do this, I discover, as I think, that they did involve approval. But in defining good in terms of approval, I am not identifying it with a particular psychological feeling of approval; I am defining it through the abstract content I find in the approval situation. Distinguish this abstract intellectual content from the psychological existence of a particular judging experience, and it seems to me that we can say, indeed are bound to say, that in the former sense the general notion of good cannot be separated from the notion of approval, though it can be distinguished from a particular case of approval, about which last I intend to pass no judgment at all. I can distinguish the content of my judgment from the existence of my judgment; but I cannot distinguish the content of the judgment, when I try to understand it, from an abstract reference to approval, except in the sense that this is something which I discover by a later analysis, instead of its being present to the intellectual consciousness in the original act. But if I am compelled to leave out of a description everything that I discover through reflection, I hardly see how psychology, at any rate, can stay in business.
