(3) The “ought” seems more objective than “conscience,” more impersonal.  Just so does “beauty” seem more impersonal and objective than our pleasure in contemplating nature and art.  It is a constant tendency of the mind to project its values out of itself; to create “universes of discourse” that seem more stable and real than its own fleeting states.  All that exists psychologically is a sense of pleasure at looking at certain combinations of outer objects; but that pleasure is constantly evoked by that peculiar combination, both in our own mind and in others’.  So we objectify that pleasure and call it the “beauty” of the object.  Similarly, all that exists psychologically is a certain felt pressure, certain emotions and ideas and pushes whose teleology is not realized.  But we objectify that constantly and pretty universally felt pressure and think of an impersonal, objective “ought.”  All the arts are expressible in “oughts”; and if there is a more authoritative and categorical nature to moral laws than there is, for example, to the aesthetic laws that art-study reveals, it is because aesthetics deals with only one aspect of human good and ethics with its totality.  Indeed, every impulse is, in its initial push, categorical, offering no reasons, simply pressing upon us with its requirements.  Hunger and thirst and sex-desire do not say to us, “If you desire to be happy, eat, drink, and gratify your passion”; they call to us with an imperious and immediate demand.  The demand of the moral law is more insistent and more authoritative simply because it represents a far more widespread and lasting need.

(4) Kant’s “categorical imperative” is purely formal and empty.  We ought, we ought-but what?  It leads, if to anything, to a mere emotional reinforcement of our preexisting moral conceptions, to that canonization of good will as the one and only good, which is Kant’s own position, but which we have found inadequate and misleading.  When we come to new situations it has no clue to offer.  How do we actually decide in such cases?  By imagining the consequences of acts and seeing their relative productiveness of happiness and pain.  Or else by finding some already decided case under which we can put the new instance.  We are tempted to an act that promises profit, but something checks us.  Ought we to do this?  Gradually it comes over us that this would be stealing; and stealing we have already decided, or the race has decided for us, is wrong.

We have to decide things in terms of our welfare, or of those already stereotyped decisions which represent the half-conscious strivings of past generations for human welfare.  There is no other way; the conception of an imperious impersonal “ought” bearing ruthlessly down upon us gives no help whatsoever.