Page:Philosophical Review Volume 27.djvu/546

534 standpoint, are matters which were discussed and in essence settled by the eighteenth century members of the so called 'moral sense* school.

There are two categories of which ethical theory is bound to give an account, namely, the good and the right. Either the one or the other is ignored, as far as any systematic discussion is concerned, in a very considerable proportion of the works on ethics. The result, of course, is that the omitted category appears sooner or later without having been compelled to give an account of itself, and usually much the worse for the immunity. Moral Values differs from such books in that it gives an equable share of attention to the study of both terms. With regard alike to the good and the right two questions can be asked, and they form the fundamental problems of ethics: What things are good, and what right, and what is the meaning of the terms good and right? The latter problems are constantly ignored in standard works on ethics. Yet they are absolutely fundamental, and no theory can proceed more than a step without assuming some solution. According to Professor Everett those actions are right or moral in which, where a choice is necessary, the less inclusive interest is subordinated to the more inclusive interest, whether of self or another. But now the question is inevitable: What is the meaning of the word right in this statement? Some writers take up this problem under the form of the source of moral distinctions. Unfortunately this fundamental question is nowhere discussed in a systematic way under any form in Moral Values. The same is true of the category of the good. We are indeed told that good is not the equivalent of an attained desire. Is it then entirely unrelated to desire? Is it, for example, what Sidgwick makes it in the first five editions of the Methods of Ethics, an unanalyzable concept of reason? Or is it what he makes it in the sixth edition? Or is it something different from either? Logically, and to a considerable extent practically, no satisfactory answer can be given to the question, what elements of experience are good, until we know what we mean by good, or in other words, till we know what we are driving at. This statement applies equally to the term right. It is indeed possible to show roughly by induction what modes of conduct a given society regards as morally praiseworthy. But the further question (a question in which Professor Everett is greatly interested) whether in this welter of conflicting opinions anything whatever is ultimately right cannot be answered without a clean-cut conception of what is meant by the word right. Professor Everett succeeds in reaching his solution of the problem only by ignoring or brushing aside a large body of recalcitrant facts.