Good Will and Ill Will, A Study of Moral Judgments by Frank Chapman Sharp (review)

138 BOOK REVIEWS Good Will and Ill Will, A Study of Moral Judgments. By FRANK CHAPMAN SHARP. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1950. Pp. 260. $5.00. Moral judgment and not the whole field of ethics is here discussed, and special attention is given to benevolence (good will) and malevolence (ill will) as being the two forms of volition underlying moral judgments. These judgments concern what is " right," and do not deal directly with the " good." For this reason, there is no discussion of the nature of the " good," which the author treated in his Ethics (New York: The Century Co., pp. 402 ff.). The specific problem of this volume is that of good and ill will as the basis for eudemonic and dysdemonic judgments, the former being concerned with the good of one to another, while the latter approve or disapprove of the doing of evil to another. These are the only two forms of true moral judgment, and they both are " teleological " in nature. The teleological judgment is one judged " according to its believed relationship a:s a means to welfare as an end." It is concerned with motive, intention, and results; and is distinguished from aesthetic judgment in which conduct is approved or disapproved of in virtue of the intrinsic worth of the act, and not according to the results of good or evil done to another. (pp. 100, 126-129) For those who hold that the aesthetic judgment is a form of the moral judgment, some goods are higher than others; and right doing consists in choosing the higher good. (pp. 90 ff.) Or again, the aesthetic judgment does not have as its object the nature of the adopted end, but " a certain quality (power of will) exhibited in the pursuit of an end." (p. 129) These two descriptions show that Sharp does not have too clear a notion of the " aesthetic judgment," but in any case he strongly denies that such a judgment is in any manner a moral judgment; and he lists Aristotle and his followers as being among those who consider the aesthetic judgment as the true moral judgment. It is manifest that such a view includes some confusion as to the nature of morality in Aristotle who certainly did not conceive of the moral judgment as a merely " formal " or '' aesthetic " judgment. The most important chapter of the volume is that on " The Subject, Sources and Predicate of the Moral Judgment" (Ch. V), in which the author studies the teleological judgment in its eudemonic and dysdemonic forms. Since " the moral judgment is directed primarily to a certain aspect of human person~lity, namely, our active attitude toward the welfare of our fellows," and since this involves a volition, it follows that " volitions aiming at the good or harm of conscious beings are thus the subject of the moral judgment." (p. 127) " The subject of the moral judgment is voluntary action." (p. 159) Such a volition will be moral or immoral depending on whether or not it is actuated by an approved motive; it will BOOK REVIE"WS 189 be right or wrong if the volition itself aims to produce results which the approved or disapproved motive would produce, abstraction being made of the actual motive. An act may be subjectively right if the agent intends to produce results believed to be good; or objectively right if the intention is determined by " an accurate and complete view " of the values and results of the action. In speaking of the sources of the moral judgment, Sharp finds the fundamental principle to be this: " The thought of a good as such tends to arouse a desire for its realization or attainment." (pp. 188-184} This force includes both egoism and altruism, which are but " two different directions of the same force," and the force itself is called " benevolence." In his Ethics (pp. 177 ff.) , Sharp had defined benevolence ~ " willing well to anyone." It is not only the motive, but also the standard of moral actionj and it is the basis of eudemonic judgments, while malevolence is the source of the dysdemonic judgment. B~nevolence is ultimately a " feeling," and Sharp associates himself with Shaftesbury, Hutcheson...