Page:Philosophical Review Volume 11.djvu/435

419 Such reconduction to identity is not possible in psychology since it deals with qualities. Cohn attacks the thesis that causality rests on identity. His arguments are: First, it is not possible in mechanics to represent causality by an absolutely identical equation; secondly, the special content of every causal law contains empirical factors, and consequently is only highly probable.

What principle governs our choice between the different kinds of good? Nothing can be right or wrong except in so far as it tends to produce a good. When we have to choose between goods, it is always right to choose the greater good. Such a doctrine implies that goods of all kinds can be compared, that we can place goods of all kinds on a single scale, and assign to each its value relatively to the rest. No amount of one kind of good can compensate for the absence of all the other kinds of good. But when circumstances make it impossible to secure all these kinds of good, then the decision has to be made in regard to which is best worth having. The choice between them implies that they are commensurable. If we were not capable of distinguishing between various elements of human life, all thinking or talking about the moral ideal, or indeed about practical aims or objects of any kind, would be impossible. And if when we have distinguished between them, we are not to say which of them is best, and to act upon our answers, there is an end to the possibility of any ethical system that admits that the morality of an act depends upon the consequences. The only way of escaping the admission that different kinds of good are commensurable would be to assert that it is always right to choose the highest. Such a contention involves all the difficulties of the formalistic ethics of Kant. As a matter of fact, when we appeal to the actual moral judgment of mankind, we do not find that a smaller quantity of a higher good is always pronounced to be of greater worth than a larger quantity of a lower good. The writer brings forward a number of examples to show that in judgments of worth we do actually weigh very heterogeneous goods against one another, and decide which possesses most value, and in making that estimate we do take into consideration the amount of the two kinds of good as well as the quality.

Kant's entire ethical system depends on the idea of freedom. The starting-point is the fact, real or assumed, of unconditional obligation. The inference from this fact is practical freedom, and practical freedom requires transcendental freedom for its speculative basis. Transcendental