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trinsically immoral. A man is moral or immoral, so far as he expresses his own nature, so far as he lives his life knowingly.

§ 2

Given, then, the examined life, or the life that knows or expresses itself, I say that nothing else is needed. This gives the central point of my position and at the same time the issue with which the discussion will be everywhere confronted. For there will be many to retort by saying, Granting the examined life, something else is needed. It is not enough to live your life thoughtfully, you must reach the right conclusions. Otherwise your thinking will be valueless. And morality is not so much a matter of what you think as of what you do. It is a question not of motive, but of act. The road to hell is paved with good intentions. The Grand Inquisitors were doubtless thoroughly conscientious-therefore all the more dangerous. The more intelligent man may be only morally the more corrupt; and to be self-conscious may be only to be self-centred. To know what you are doing, or to act knowingly, is doubtless a necessary condition of morality-since morality cannot be predicated of such things as rivers, volcanoes, or motor-cars; but to identify morality with this condition is to define it negatively and insufficiently. Positively defined, it is not enough to act knowingly, one must also do what is right.

What is right! This suggests a set of terms wholly foreign to those which I have used in the answer given above. What is it now to be moral? In this vocabulary the answer would be, to be faithful to your duty; to obey the moral law, to conform to the approved standards; which are securely based upon fundamental and eternal principles. By placing the two sets of terms side by side-on the one side, right, duty, law, standard, principle, and on the other knowledge, intelligence, thoughtfulness-we may see, in the contrast of implications, the general character of the issue. I may state the issue more formally by distinguishing

two classes of ethical theories: absolutistic, or authoritarian theories, in which morality is based upon authority, or law, assumed to be superior to and binding upon human choice; and what I shall call humanistic or libertarian theories, in which morality is derived from human nature and human choice. Stoicism marks the direction of absolutistic theories, Epicureanism of humanistic. My own view I will describe as humanistic, though I shall also state its implications in other terms. And I shall freely refer to the authoritarian view as the "orthodox" view, not for the sake of the epithet which this term has become, but because, as a matter of sober terminology and of etymology, it is the word best fitted to indicate the view of those who conceive intelligence to consist in "right thinking" and morality to be "a question of right and wrong".

This enables me to add a further point of definition to the motive of the essay. For, as against this orthodox view, I shall deny that morality is "a question of right and wrong" and also that intelligence consists in "right thinking". The word that I shall use as best marking the meaning of both is "criticism". And what I will present is a "critical" philosophy of life. To define this word is of course the task of chapters to come. But the nature of the question may be suggested by pointing to the difference of attitude represented by "the moralist", traditionally conceived as stern, forbidding, and exclusive in his judgments, i and by "the critic", i.e., the critic of art and literature, supposed to represent a genial catholicity of taste. The critic may by chance indeed be also a "moralist", intent upon establishing standards of orthodoxy in the field of criticism. The typically "pure" critic, however, is commonly little interested in questions of orthodoxy. His mind is working upon a very different question: not whether the object of his criticism, novel, poem, picture, or symphony, is in any sense "right "or "wrong", orthodox or heterodox, but is it interesting? Is it worth while? Is there anything in it? And what he means is, Is there any meaning in it? This novel, this picture, this poem, this song—is it a merely con

ventional echo of tones, colours, words, or is it the immediate utterance of individual experience and thought? And if there be a meaning in it, the only thing interesting is to understand that meaning. Such, as I conceive, is the attitude of the critic of literature and art; and such likewise, in opposition to the orthodox distinction of right and wrong, I take to be the attitude of any genuine inquiry concerning morality.

It may also help to define the issue if I point to the difference in theories of the state (where indeed, as Plato truly observes, we find ethics "writ large") corresponding to the divergence of ethical theory; to the difference, namely, between the absolutistic theory, embodied in the popular conception of "the German state", and the theories variously described as liberal, democratic, or individualistic. The latter might be called the humanistic theories of the state. And also the critical theories; as teaching that political life and virtue consist less in obedience to law than in popular criticism.

In the literature of moral philosophy these two classes of theory may be said to represent respectively two motifs, corresponding to two traditional elements of the moral problem. On the one hand it seems that morality is the fulfilment of an obligation (in the traditional literature of ethics "moral" and "obligation" are the two words most often conjoined); on the other hand it seems that moral action must be freely chosen action. The difficulty is then to see how it can be both. We seem to be faced with an antinomy. We warn the moral agent that he must fulfil his obligations-just because they are binding; and then we add that he must freely choose to fulfil them-as if they were not binding. Faced with this difficulty, the absolutistic theories tend to stress the obligation and let the freedom come in where and how it can-perhaps only in a Pickwickian sense. The humanistic theories lay stress upon the freedom. They may offer a Pickwickian definition of obligation, or, in anarchistic fashion, repudiate it altogether.

I would not make light of obligation. Rather would I say that he who wants anything is thus far obliged; and that he who loves is in loyalty bound. The conception of obligation that I shall dispute is the following. Authoritarian moralists, seeking a secure anchorage for the conception of obligation, are accustomed to fasten it to some conception of absolute power or supreme authority, such as the will of God, the sovereignty of the state, the paramount interests of society, or possibly, in these latter days, the biological laws of nature. This authority, whatever it be, is assumed to be morally prior to that of the choices and judgments of individual men and to furnish the criterion by which to measure the moral validity of these judgments. My conception of morality rejects all such moral absolutes. A morality thus based upon authority does not differ in principle, I should say, from the old-fashioned morality of hell-fire. This does not require me to deny the existence of God-not any more than to deny the existence of society. Nor does it commit me to an especially "worldly" view of life. What I dispute is the relevance of "authority". If authority be the basis of morality, the latter term might as well be abandoned. For its "right" is no longer distinguishable from might.

CHAPTER II

THE MORAL PHILOSOPHER

§ 3. The orthodox moralist. § 4. The moralist as a naturalist. § 5. Moral insight.

D

EFINITIONS of ethics, or discussions of the meaning and function of ethics, are supposed to be (as they often are) as remote from a productive analysis of morality as surveying is from farming; the idea being that it is one thing to plot the field of ethics and quite another thing to say what the field will produce. It is upon the contrary assumption, namely, that a conception of ethics is in itself a description of morality, that I venture to open the discussion with a chapter on the study of ethics and the moral philosopher.

As a formal definition of ethics (to stand in the background) I will propose the following. Morality has been defined as the self-conscious living of life. The study of morality, or ethics, may then be defined as a study of the meaning and value of life. Or, since the study of morality is ever the discussion of a problem, ethics may be defined as a study of the problem of life. Or againand this is the aspect of the subject to be emphasised here as a study of the varieties of life and their individual significance.

Such a conception of ethics may at first glance seem so broad as to be meaningless. Yet any narrower conception fails, it seems to me, to reveal the full significance of the subject or to explain why the discussion of moral problems should be, as it always is, a matter of absorbing interest to every more thoughtful man. The development of the

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