CHAPTER I.. The Subject-Matter of Ethics.

THE SUBJECT-MATTER OF ETHICS.

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=1.= In order to define Ethics, we must discover what is both common and peculiar to all undoubted ethical judgments; 1

=2.= but this is not that they are concerned with human conduct, but that they are concerned with a certain predicate ‘good,’ and its converse ‘bad,’ which may be applied both to conduct and to other things. 1

=3.= The subjects of the judgments of a scientific Ethics are not, like those of some studies, ‘particular things’; 3

=4.= but it includes all universal judgments which assert the relation of ‘goodness’ to any subject, and hence includes Casuistry. 3

=5.= It must, however, enquire not only what things are universally related to goodness, but also, what this predicate, to which they are related, is: 5

=6.= and the answer to this question is that it is indefinable 6

=7.= or simple: for if by definition be meant the analysis of an object of thought, only complex objects can be defined; 7

=8.= and of the three senses in which ‘definition’ can be used, this is the most important. 8

=9.= What is thus indefinable is not ‘the good,’ or the whole of that which always possesses the predicate ‘good,’ but this predicate itself. 8

=10.= ‘Good,’ then, denotes one unique simple object of thought among innumerable others; but this object has very commonly been identified with some other--a fallacy which may be called ‘the naturalistic fallacy’ 9

=11.= and which reduces what is used as a fundamental principle of Ethics either to a tautology or to a statement about the meaning of a word. 10

=12.= The nature of this fallacy is easily recognised; 12

=13.= and if it were avoided, it would be plain that the only alternatives to the admission that ‘good’ is indefinable, are either that it is complex or that there is no notion at all peculiar to Ethics--alternatives which can only be refuted by an appeal to inspection, but which can be so refuted. 15

=14.= The ‘naturalistic fallacy’ illustrated by Bentham; and the importance of avoiding it pointed out. 17

=15.= The relations which ethical judgments assert to hold universally between ‘goodness’ and other things are of two kinds: a thing may be asserted either to be good itself or to be causally related to something else which is itself good--to be ‘good as a means.’ 21

=16.= Our investigations of the latter kind of relation cannot hope to establish more than that a certain kind of action will generally be followed by the best possible results; 22

=17.= but a relation of the former kind, if true at all, will be true of all cases. All ordinary ethical judgments assert causal relations, but they are commonly treated as if they did not, because the two kinds of relation are not distinguished. 23

=18.= The investigation of intrinsic values is complicated by the fact that the value of a whole may be different from the sum of the values of its parts, 27

=19.= in which case the part has to the whole a relation, which exhibits an equally important difference from and resemblance to that of means to end. 29

=20.= The term ‘organic whole’ might well be used to denote that a whole has this property, since, of the two other properties which it is commonly used to imply, 30

=21.= one that of reciprocal causal dependence between parts, has no necessary relation to this one, 31

=22.= and the other, upon which most stress has been laid, can be true of no whole whatsoever, being a self-contradictory conception due to confusion. 33

=23.= Summary of chapter. 36