Page:Ethics (Moore 1912).djvu/234

 What kinds of things are intrinsically better or worse than others?

And first of all it is important to be quite clear as to how this question is related to another question, which is very liable to be confused with it: namely the question whether the proposition which was distinguished in Chapter I, as forming the first part of the theory there stated, is true or not: I mean, the proposition that quantity of pleasure is a correct criterion of right and wrong, or that, in this world, it always is, as a matter of fact, our duty to do the action which will produce a maximum of pleasure, or (for this is, perhaps, more commonly held) to do the action which, so far as we can see, will produce such a maximum. This latter proposition has been far more often expressly held than the proposition that what contains more pleasure is always intrinsically better than what contains less; and many people may be inclined to think they are free to maintain it, even if they deny that the intrinsic value of every whole is always in proportion to the quantity of pleasure it contains. And so, in a sense, they are;