Recent Tendencies in Ethics: Three Lectures to Clergy Given at CambridgeSorley, W. R. (William Ritchie)
Philosophy
Recent Tendencies in Ethics: Three Lectures to Clergy Given at Cambridge
Sorley, W. R. (William Ritchie)
Ethics
Mr Bradley draws a distinction between a general and a more special
or restricted meaning of goodness. For the former it is enough that
existence be "_found_ to be in accordance with the idea"; for the
latter, it is necessary that the idea itself produce the fact.[1]
In the former sense "beauty, truth, pleasure, and sensation are all
things that are good,"[2] quite irrespective of their origin; in the
latter sense, only that is good which the idea has produced, or in
which it has realised itself, which is the work, therefore, of some
finite soul. In this narrower meaning goodness is the result of will:
"the good, in short, will become the realised end or completed will.
It is now an idea which not only _has_ an answering content in fact,
but, in addition also, has _made_, and has brought about, that
correspondence.... Goodness thus will be confined to the realm of
ends, or of self-realisation. It will be restricted, in other words,
to what is commonly called the sphere of morality,"[3] Even in its
more general meaning, as we have seen, Mr Bradley has not succeeded in
giving an objective account of good. For the correspondence of idea
and existence in which it is said to consist is defined in relation
to desire, and to some kind of feeling on the part of the conscious
subject. Nor was his account successful in distinguishing good from
evil: to that distinction feeling is a blind guide. When he goes on
to discuss goodness in the narrower sense, in which it belongs to the
results of finite volition, he adopts, as expressing the nature of
goodness, that conception of 'self-realisation' which, as put forward
by Green, has been found inadequate. The same conception was used by
Mr Bradley, in his first work, as "the most general expression for the
end in itself," "May we not say," he asked, "that to realise self is
always to realise a whole, and that the question in morals is to find
the true whole, realising which will practically realise the true
self?"[4] It is easy to make the distinction between good and evil
depend upon this, that in the former the true self is realised, and
that what is realised in the latter is only a false self. But it is
equally easy to see that this is only to substitute one unexplained
distinction for another. This short and easy method is not that which
Mr Bradley adopts in his later work. He has something of much greater
interest to say regarding the nature of the self-realisation in which
goodness is made to consist; and upon it he lays stress, "solely with
a view to bring out the radical vice of all goodness."[5] Goodness,
it is said, is self-realisation; and Reality--it was assumed at the
outset--is harmonious and all-comprehensive. These last characters are
also criteria of degrees of reality, and consequently of degrees
of self-realisation. There are, therefore, two marks of
self-realisation--harmony and extent; and these two may and do
diverge. No doubt "in the end," they will come together; but "in that
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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