“Pure” ethics consists of _a priori_ arguments about the teachings of philosophy concerning such abstract concepts as the moral judgment, the nature of the Good, the idea of Duty in general, not of my particular duties. Such study may be good training in logic, but it has no more to do with conduct than has formal logic, and not as much as mathematics, for one may apply the principles of mathematics to concrete problems. Perhaps the greatest gain for the student from such study is the discovery that philosophers do not agree upon any one system of morals, and that in strict logic we do not know what we mean by our moral generalizations. The more universal an ethical concept is, the more it exists wholly within and for reason, the less is it a deduction from experience and the less use is it as a guide to behavior. Ethics, as moral philosophy, is not a descriptive study of the customs and practices of people, or of what things men in diverse times and places have held to be good or evil, right or wrong; this is anthropology. It is not the study of the mental processes of judging or of forming habits or of that quality of actual experience which men call good; this is psychology. Ethics, moreover, is not a scientific study of the means of accomplishing any good whatsoever; for this at once leads out of pure ethics into economics, mechanics, medicine, etc. Pure ethics is pure logic applied to ultimate concepts _about_ morality in general. It is the “formulation of the Good as it would hold for all possible worlds,” a kind of speculation or contemplation. Its good does not exist in experience anywhere; it is metaphysical and exists only for philosophizing. Hence ethic, strictly speaking, is concerned with ends not with means, and the ends are not experienced, they are only thought about. As an example of such an approach to morals, there is Kant’s Categorical Imperative, from the consideration of which everything concrete, empirical, personal is removed. I quote some typical passages from the discussion of the teaching of ethics in a contemporary Journal of Philosophy, “The task of moral philosophy is, by analysis of the moral judgments men actually make, to arrive at clear notions about obligation, rights, good, punishment and the like. And the point of honor, the chastity of the philosopher’s mind, should be never to suffer his genuine moral judgments to be warped in deference to his theory. For that is to poison the wells of truth. All that is valuable in ethics is formal....