340 THE PHILOSOPHICAL REVIEW. [VOL. XXVI. able." What Utilitarians cannot get out of their ends is stringent obligation. What Rationalists cannot get out of their forms or laws is any actual end to be pursued. The moral law, however, assigns limiting conditions to the pursuit of different ends. Thus there is no specially "moral life" ; but morality in the distinctive sense is of universal obligation. Various types have the right to choose different kinds of good and to pursue them in their difference, and all may be equally moral in doing this. No one, however, can say that he has the right to disregard justice.
The generalized doctrine of right or justice Mr. Whittaker calls Abstract Ethics: it is a kind of logic of conduct. The pursuit of good in its detail, or the Art of Life, consists of many arts, instinctive, empirical, or deduced from some branch or branches of science as the case may be. Concrete or Applied Ethics is the application of the principles of abstract ethics to the pursuit of good. Abstract ethics does not need to be constructed: Mr. Whittaker finds it in Kant. The categorical imperative, however, has little value, he thinks, being too formal. It is the second maxim regarding the mutual respect of persons for one another as ends and not mere means that "is well entitled to a place of its own as a classical expression of the idea of justice for a society in which freedom is explicitly recognized." The third maxim concerning the autonomy of the will serves to bring out still more clearly the conditions of a moral personality. "Any action, whether altruistic or egoistic, and whether positively meritorious or not, may be called moral when it does not infringe the laws of justice, conceived of course in the ethical and not merely in the legal sense." "What remains of Kant's a priori method is the recognition that the supreme ethical maxims, though by themselves insufficient to determine a positive code of conduct, have a validity that no deduction from ends could confer on them. The law of justice is not a mere means to any good whatever; though action in accordance with it is undoubtedly a means to the greatest goods."
In emphasizing the law of justice as an a priori moral element, Mr. Whittaker has hit upon the notion which utilitarian moralists have had the greatest difficulty in explaining on the basis of their theory. Indeed, it may be said that they have tacitly or openly accepted it as a rational principle. Bentham insists that every one shall count for one and no one for more than one; Mill incorporates this principle as an essential clause in the utilitarian formula of the general happiness; and Sidgwick accepts certain absolute practical principles, of which justice in the sense that "it cannot be right for A to treat B in a manner in which it would be wrong for B to treat A," etc., is one. We are led to inquire, however, in reading Mr. Whittaker's interesting and suggestive book, what exactly he means by justice and whether there are not other a priori elements in morality. He finds in Kant's command: "So act as to treat humanity, whether in thine own person or in that of any other, in every case as an end withal, never as a means only," a classical expression of the idea of justice. This principle seems to me to include more than the idea of justice, as it is understood, for example, by Sidgwick; it emphasizes the worth
