Page:Ethics (Moore 1912).djvu/161

 to show that when we call a thing “good” we never mean simply that somebody has some mental attitude towards it. There are many reasons for thinking that the word “good” is ambiguous—that we use it in different senses on different occasions; and, if so, it is quite possible that, in some of its uses, it should stand merely for the assertion that somebody has some feeling or some other mental attitude towards the thing called “good,” although, in other uses, it does not. We are not, therefore, concerned to show that it may not sometimes merely stand for this; all that we need to show is that sometimes it does not. For what we have to do is merely to meet the argument that, if we assert, “It would always be wrong to prefer a worse set of total consequences to a better,” we must, in this proposition, mean merely by “worse” and “better,” consequences to which a certain mental attitude is taken up—a conclusion from which it would follow that, even though a set of consequences A was once better than a set B, a set precisely similar to A would not always necessarily be better