Page:Mind (Old Series) Volume 9.djvu/194

 182 HENRY SIDGWICK: standard would radically alter the common notions of virtue, even the notions to which he himself adheres most unquestioningly in his delineation of the moral ideal. Con- sider, for example, his description of the ideally just man, who is "so over-curious, as it seems to the ordinary man of the world, in inquiring, as to any action that may suggest itself to him, whether the benefit which he might gain by it for himself or for some one in whom he is interested would be gained at the expense of anyone else"; and so deter- mined not to " promote his own wellbeing or that of one whom he loves or likes, from whom he has received service or expects it, at the cost of impeding in any way the well- being of one who is nothing to him as a man, or whom he involuntarily dislikes " (p. 244). Surely all this scrupulous investigation, all this resolute impartiality, implies that, in the opinion of Green's ideally just man, it is at least possible that he and his friends may be benefited at the expense of others, that the promotion of one's own wellbeing may really involve the cost of impeding the wellbeing of others : in short, that good really consists at least to some extent in " objects that admit of being competed for ". How, after writing this description of an ideally just man, Green could go on to say that " the distinction of good for self and good others has never entered into that idea of a true good upon which moral judgments are founded," I cannot imagine. That the distinction ought to be banished from our moral judgments is an intelligible proposition though I think a moralist who makes it is rather bound to reconstruct our notions of justice and injustice, and show us the form they will take when the distinction is eliminated but the state- ment that it has " never entered in " I contemplate with simple amazement. So again, the " habitual self-denial," the " self-sacrificing will " which form an essential element of Green's moral ideal, seem to me notions with regard to which Kant's ques- tion Quid juris ? is very obviously raised by Green's theory of the true good ; and the question one that never finds an answer. If all self-conscious agents are always aiming each at his own good or self-satisfaction, and the most virtuous man only differs from the most vicious in that he seeks it with a truer insight into its nature, how can he in the strictness of philosophical discourse be said to " deny " or " sacrifice " himself in so seeking it ? What he Denies is not "himself" according to Green's psychology ences," or " tendencies " due to his animal soul with which
 * as expounded in Book ii. but those " impulses," " influ-