For these reasons, most have abandoned the attempt to define the moral good in terms of maxims, which they take rather to be hypothetical goods in disguise. They are rules indeed, but only rules of thumb holding “for the most part.” If they vary with the time and place, if within the most circumscribed communities they contradict one another, this is because they cannot pretend to be good in themselves, but are only the means which the community accepting them has found by experience to be best fitted for attaining a certain end. It is indeed the end that justifies the means, it alone is the categorical good, and the whole meaning of morality is to be sought in its purpose. But those who, like David Hume, have sought the purpose common to all the discordant moral maxims of history, have found it not in some quality this purpose might be assumed to have, without question of him whose purpose it was. No, the moral purpose founds its right to have all other purposes bow to it on nothing but the authoritative position of the one that has chosen this purpose as his. Suppose, with Hume, we found no harmony in the moral ordinances of all the many peoples of history save that each maxim at the time and under the conditions of its acceptance was held to serve the well-being of the community. Now communities are not so different from particular men but that they must, like men, hold their well-being to lie in having the objects of their desire accorded to them. From which it follows that to act virtuously is to make your will conform to the will of the community to which you belong. Descartes has somewhere said that God did not choose this world because it was good, but the world is good because God chose it. Just so, a community does not choose its purpose because it is good, but that purpose is good which the community chooses. We might say that, not the good will, but the Good Willer is morality’s last word on the subject of the categorical good.