ignore the wishes and opinions of other men, and expect to reach their goal.
Meanwhile such principles are hardly as yet constitutive of the good life; they are mostly negative, as the first were formal. And what we are most anxious to discover is, not what we have to avoid merely, but what we have to do; along what lines of effort and activity, positive and concrete, can we hope to find the satisfied life? And in order to clear the ground, I shall turn to begin with to two possible theories about the positive content of the good life, both of which I shall find occasion to reject. The first is the very plausible claim which sets out to find the governing principle of the moral life in terms of purely objective 'good.' It has often appeared to philosophers and to moral enthusiasts alike, that the thing we ought to do, the life we ought to aim to live, is that which shall realize the greatest possible quantity of value. The plausibility of this becomes perhaps most apparent in connection with our natural hesitation to give an affirmative answer to the question, Ought I to be content with anything short of the maximum of good within my power to produce? If I have a chance to create either more or less of good by my efforts, can I reconcile it with my conscience knowingly to choose the less?
Before starting to consider this, we should first make clear that we are not interpreting the thesis in a way to beg the question. Of course if by good we mean 'morally good,' or that which 'ought to be,' we can hardly escape the conviction that that which has the greater claim on our duty we ought to do. But this is to empty the supposed principle of any practical meaning. As a practical guide what it needs to maintain is, that 'natural' good, in its widest and most comprehensive sense, is capable of summation, and that our sense of duty arises only after we have completed the summation, and found on what side the maximum of natural good lies.
A first objection to this is, that it presents us with what on the practical side seems an almost hopeless task. How in the world are we ever going to find in the concrete an answer to the problem, Where lies the greatest amount of absolute good?
