Page:Principia Ethica 1922.djvu/85

Rh 33. Let us examine Mr Spencer’s own words. He begins this third chapter by an attempt to shew that we call good the acts conducive to life, in self or others, and bad those which directly or indirectly tend towards death, special or general’ (§ 9). And then he asks: Is there any assumption made’ in so calling them? ‘Yes’; he answers, an assumption of extreme significance has been made—an assumption underlying all moral estimates. The question to be definitely raised and answered before entering on any ethical discussion, is the question of late much agitated—Is life worth living? Shall we take the pessimist view? or shall we take the optimist view?… On the answer to this question depends every decision concerning the goodness or badness of conduct.’ But Mr Spencer does not immediately proceed to give the answer. Instead of this, he asks another question: But now, have these irreconcilable opinions [pessimist and optimist] anything in common?’ And this question he immediately answers by the statement: Yes, there is one postulate in which pessimists and optimists agree. Both their arguments assume it to be self-evident that life is good or bad, according as it does, or does not, bring a surplus of agreeable feeling’ (§ 10). It is to the defence of this statement that the rest of the chapter is devoted; and at the end Mr Spencer formulates his conclusion in the following words: No school can avoid taking for the ultimate moral aim a desirable state of feeling called by whatever name—gratification, enjoyment, happiness. Pleasure somewhere, at some time, to some being or beings, is an inexpugnable element of the conception’ (§ 16 ad fin.).

Now in all this, there are two points to which I wish to call attention. The first is that Mr Spencer does not, after all, tell us clearly what he takes to be the relation of Pleasure and Evolution in ethical theory. Obviously he should mean that pleasure is the only intrinsically desirable thing; that other good things are ‘good’ only in the sense that they are means to its existence. Nothing but this can properly be meant by asserting it to be ‘the ultimate moral aim,’ or, as he subsequently says (§ 62 ad fin.), ‘the ultimately supreme end.’ And, if this were so, it would follow that the more evolved conduct was