Then what is good is not good for me or for you, but is simply good.”  “It is, indeed, so evident that it is better to secure a greater good for A than a lesser good for B, that it is hard to find any still more evident principle by which to prove this.  And if A happens to be some one else, and B to be myself, that cannot affect the question, since it is irrelevant to the general question who A and B may be.”  To the question, as the logician states it after transforming men into letters, it is certainly irrelevant; but it is not irrelevant to the case as it arises in nature.  If two goods are somehow rightly pronounced to be equally good, no circumstance can render one better than the other.  And if the locus in which the good is to arise is somehow pronounced to be indifferent, it will certainly be indifferent whether that good arises in me or in you.  But how shall these two pronouncements be made?  In practice, values cannot be compared save as represented or enacted in the private imagination of somebody:  for we could not conceive that an alien good was a good (as Mr. Russell cannot conceive that the life of an ecstatic oyster is a good) unless we could sympathise with it in some way in our own persons; and on the warmth which we felt in so representing the alien good would hang our conviction that it was truly valuable, and had worth in comparison with our own good.  The voice of reason, bidding us prefer the greater good, no matter who is to enjoy it, is also nothing but the force of sympathy, bringing a remote existence before us vividly sub specie boni.  Capacity for such sympathy measures the capacity to recognise duty and therefore, in a moral sense, to have it.  Doubtless it is conceivable that all wills should become co-operative, and that nature should be ruled magically by an exact and universal sympathy; but this situation must be actually attained in part, before it can be conceived or judged to be an authoritative ideal.  The tigers cannot regard it as such, for it would suppress the tragic good called ferocity, which makes, in their eyes, the chief glory of the universe.  Therefore the inertia of nature, the ferocity of beasts, the optimism of mystics, and the selfishness of men and nations must all be accepted as conditions for the peculiar goods, essentially incommensurable, which they can generate severally.  It is misplaced vehemence to call them intrinsically detestable, because they do not (as they cannot) generate or recognise the goods we prize.

In the real world, persons are not abstract egos, like A and B, so that to benefit one is clearly as good as to benefit another.  Indeed, abstract egos could not be benefited, for they could not be modified at all, even if somehow they could be distinguished.  It would be the qualities or objects distributed among them that would carry, wherever they went, each its inalienable cargo of value, like