Page:Ethics (Moore 1912).djvu/201

 misses out one absolutely essential condition of right and wrong—the condition that, for an action to be right or wrong, it must be freely done. And moreover, many of them will hold also that the class of actions which we absolutely can do is often not identical with those which we can do, if we choose. They may say, for instance, that very often an action, which we could have done, if we had chosen, is nevertheless an action which we could not have done; and that an action is always right, if it produces as good consequences as any other action which we really could have done instead. From which it will follow that many actions which our theory declares to be wrong, will, according to them, be right, because these actions really are the best of all that we could have done, though not the best of all that we could have done, if we had chosen.

Now these objections seem to me to be the most serious which we have yet had to consider. They seem to me to be serious because (1) it is very difficult to be sure that right and wrong do not really depend, as they assert, upon what we can do and