But perhaps what suggests this hypostasis of good is rather the fact that what others find good, or what we ourselves have found good in moods with which we retain no sympathy, is sometimes pronounced by us to be bad; and far from inferring from this diversity of experience that the present good, like the others, corresponds to a particular attitude or interest of ours, and is dependent upon it, Mr. Russell and Mr. Moore infer instead that the presence of the good must be independent of all interests, attitudes, and opinions.  They imagine that the truth of a proposition attributing a certain relative quality to an object contradicts the truth of another proposition, attributing to the same object an opposite relative quality.  Thus if a man here and another man at the antipodes call opposite directions up, “only one of them can be right, though it may be very hard to know which is right.”

To protect the belated innocence of this state of mind, Mr. Russell, so far as I can see, has only one argument, and one analogy.  The argument is that “if this were not the case, we could not reason with a man as to what is right.”  “We do in fact hold that when one man approves of a certain act, while another disapproves, one of them is mistaken, which would not be the case with a mere emotion.  If one man likes oysters and another dislikes them, we do not say that either of them is mistaken.”  In other words, we are to maintain our prejudices, however absurd, lest it should become unnecessary to quarrel about them!  Truly the debating society has its idols, no less than the cave and the theatre.  The analogy that comes to buttress somewhat this singular argument is the analogy between ethical propriety and physical or logical truth.  An ethical proposition may be correct or incorrect, in a sense justifying argument, when it touches what is good as a means, that is, when it is not intrinsically ethical, but deals with causes and effects, or with matters of fact or necessity.  But to speak of the truth of an ultimate good would be a false collocation of terms; an ultimate good is chosen, found, or aimed at; it is not opined.  The ultimate intuitions on which ethics rests are not debatable, for they are not opinions we hazard but preferences we feel; and it can be neither correct nor incorrect to feel them.  We may assert these preferences fiercely or with sweet reasonableness, and we may be more or less incapable of sympathising with the different preferences of others; about oysters we may be tolerant, like Mr. Russell, and about character intolerant; but that is already a great advance in enlightenment, since the majority of mankind have regarded as hateful in the highest degree any one who indulged in pork, or beans, or frogs’ legs, or who had a weakness for anything called “unnatural”; for it is the things that offend their animal instincts that intense natures have always found to be, intrinsically and par excellence, abominations.