Page:What I believe - Russell (1925).pdf/47

 of the importance of prudence, it is not the most interesting part of morals. Nor is it the part that raises intellectual problems, since it does not require an appeal to anything bevant self-interest.

The part of morality that is not included in prudence is, in essence, analogous to law, or the rules of a club. It is a method of enabling men to live together in a community in spite of the possibility that their desires may conflict. But here two very different methods are possible. There is the method of the criminal law, which aims at a merely external harmony by attaching disagreeable consequences to acts which thwart other men’s desires in certain ways. This is also the method of social censure: to be thought ill of by one’s own society is a form of punishment, to avoid which most people avoid be-