difference also of quality, and that this difference is a new intellectual content sui generis; this would appear to make necessary some revision of the definition of good if it is to meet ethical needs. The third is, that quality is something real, and distinguishable from quantity, but that it can be understood without adding anything essentially new to our previous results.
Now, to take the first alternative, while quantitative differences are undoubtedly highly important for us practically, I cannot see that by themselves they are competent to raise the strictly ethical question. We doubtless do as a matter of fact prefer more good to less; but I do not see, on the purely quantitative basis, why we ought to prefer it, or why such a preference is morally right. The most clearsighted attempt to connect the idea of obligation with quantitative good is that of Professor Sidgwick, whose ethical theory is based on the self evidence of certain propositions which are quantitative in their nature. But consider such a proposition as that more good is always better than less good. The statement might mean only this, that more good contains a larger quantity of good than less good. This is of course an identical proposition; but it is not such a purely quantitative meaning that it is supposed to have. What we really need to mean is, that more good is better in the sense that it ought always to be aimed at. But to this I should raise two difficulties. First, I am not at all sure that it is always true. Suppose I have a choice between a weaker and an intenser pleasure,—say between eating an orange which I like, and an apricot which I don't greatly care for. I am not arguing that I will take the apricot, for clearly that is not the case; I only say that I do not see that I am in the slightest degree under obligations to take the orange, though by failing to do so I am reducing by so much the content of good in the universe.[1] What the proposition ought to mean, in order to escape the charge of being a merely analytic one, is that to choose a greater good is better than to choose a lesser one,—that is, we ought always to do it. As I say, I do not see that this is always true; but even
- ↑ If it is a matter of choosing a less instead of a greater good for some one else, there may be a question whether the same thing holds; but this simply calls attention to the fact that it is not the self-evident quantitative statement which is involved.
