IV.  HYPOSTATIC ETHICS

If Mr. Russell, in his essay on “The Elements of Ethics,” had wished to propitiate the unregenerate naturalist, before trying to convert him, he could not have chosen a more skilful procedure; for he begins by telling us that “what is called good conduct is conduct which is a means to other things which are good on their own account; and hence ... the study of what is good or bad on its own account must be included in ethics.”  Two consequences are involved in this:  first, that ethics is concerned with the economy of all values, and not with “moral” goods only, or with duty; and second, that values may and do inhere in a great variety of things and relations, all of which it is the part of wisdom to respect, and if possible to establish.  In this matter, according to our author, the general philosopher is prone to one error and the professed moralist to another.  “The philosopher, bent on the construction of a system, is inclined to simplify the facts unduly ... and to twist them into a form in which they can all be deduced from one or two general principles.  The moralist, on the other hand, being primarily concerned with conduct, tends to become absorbed in means, to value the actions men ought to perform more than the ends which such actions serve....  Hence most of what they value in this world would have to be omitted by many moralists from any imagined heaven, because there such things as self-denial and effort and courage and pity could find no place....  Kant has the bad eminence of combining both errors in the highest possible degree, since he holds that there is nothing good except the virtuous will—­a view which simplifies the good as much as any philosopher could wish, and mistakes means for ends as completely as any moralist could enjoin.”

Those of us who are what Mr. Russell would call ethical sceptics will be delighted at this way of clearing the ground; it opens before us the prospect of a moral philosophy that should estimate the various values of things known and of things imaginable, showing what combinations of goods are possible in any one rational system, and (if fancy could stretch so far) what different rational systems would be possible in places and times remote enough from one another not to come into physical conflict.  Such ethics, since it would express in reflection the dumb but actual interests of men, might have both influence and authority over them; two things which an alien and dogmatic ethics necessarily lacks.  The joy of the ethical sceptic in Mr. Russell is destined, however, to be short-lived.  Before proceeding to the expression of concrete ideals, he thinks it necessary to ask a preliminary and quite abstract question, to which his essay is chiefly devoted; namely, what is the right definition of the predicate “good,” which we hope to apply in the sequel to such a variety of things?  And he answers at once:  The predicate “good” is indefinable.