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SECTION I The Concept of the Good 1. Hedonism and Perfectionism Criticized Lecture V. October 10, 1900 THE QUESTION OF the nature of the good would naturally arise to your minds. This cannot be adequately answered except by the course as a whole. It is not a question of logic, which deals only with form; it is a question of conduct, a material question, one of experience. We have to simply find out what the good is. If not by experience in the more empirical sense, we must at least find it out by examination of man's moral consciousness, see what man's conscience declares to be good. There is a sense in which that distinction between the empirical and the formal is justifiable. There is a sense in which no logic can prove that this or that is good or not, as health [or] wealth. But there are none the less reasons for holding that in a certain aspect the question ofthe nature ofthe good is a question ofform which cannot be separated from the question of material. Every material must assume a certain form if it is good. Whatever it is that is regarded as good must be for some generic reason. There must be something common in all this variety of contents or materials of experience which are regarded as good which justifies the application ofthis term to them all. Ifthe good represents a concept it must be because there is a certain unity of form or principle running through all this variety of actual concrete experience (which logic cannot anticipate). And the sphere of logic comes in conducting that unity ofform which binds the concrete variety together and makes them samples of good. There must be some conditions which any experience must fulfil in order to observe the title 'good'. That, of itself, does not prove that it is a logical question. That conditions must be fulfilled is really a further 16 Logic of Ethics 17 assumption. It means that these conditions which must be fulfilled grow out ofthe very structure ofour experience itself, so that an examination of the concept of good is virtually an examination of a certain position and function in our experience. It means that our experience is such that it necessarily manifests itselfin the form ofthe good, and the logical examination comes in then in detecting this necessity of experience showing itself as good. So that, from this examination, formal as it is in certain ways, yet material conclusions can be drawn. I shall attempt to show that the good cannot be identified with pleasure, not simply on psychological grounds, but that the idea of pleasure does not fulfil the conditions which are absolutely indispensable to the notion of the good. Because it cannot take the place and fulfil the function in experience which any material which lays claim to being the good must fulfil. Ifone asks what the good is, the natural answer is to begin from the material side and enumerate the various sorts of goods, for example, health, wealth, attainment of knowledge. The question then arises, which Socrates was apparently the first to put: Is there any common principle in virtue of which all these particular goods and results are termed good? That was about the way that Socrates or Plato got at it. Socrates is represented in one place as saying, "It is as if I asked what a bee was and you brought me a swarm. I am not asking for a sample but what makes these things good."! It is at least a question whether there is a concept there or whether we must put up with a mere aggregate of things which on the whole men have agreed to regard as good. When men came to put that more general question as to some unity of good in these various goods, two types ofanswer appeared. Historically, they have been put in a great variety of statement but the two types are found from the beginning of reflective thought. One theory is that it is in virtue ofthe fact that some things conduce to happiness, or at least a surplus of pleasure over pain, that they are unified under the category ofthe good. The most attractive and sensible presentation of this point of view which has been made in modern thought, the classic presentation, is probably that ofJohn Stuart Mill in his Utilitarianism. (See p. 10, paper edition.2 Also, Spencer, The Data of...

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