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[Chapter 12. Badness and Negative Judgment] 244. What is the nature of the negative judgment? On the theory above developed we cannot work from the ideal bad back to the act [as1wrong. No person ever followed any end as evil. The process of finding out the end is the process of finding the good. Nobody ever chooses an end as bad. What a man does is what his real judgment of the good is. 245. The real difficulty is said to be to get the will to accept what is intellectually perceived as good. But this conventional, second-hand recognition of good (moral recognition of good) has to pass over into action. The end and the good are always synonymous terms. The act has to work back from the ideal good. 246. The Socratic theory was easily recognized by the Greeks because they did not have the mass of material, books, etc., that we have. Then, the conception of knowledge was different. Knowledge, then, meant not information but the getting hold of things. Juvenal and later moralists had an accumulated store of knowledge to fall back on. The Greek had only his life to fall back on. The act of realizing the supreme value and the act ofchoice are the same things. Socrates's interest was in showing that impulse-action was non-moral. We must say, with this theory, that a man had a good end and his act was evil. 247. In science how do we determine that a certain proposition is false? Is it because offalsity or truth that we determine the falsity ofa particular statement? The discovery of falsity is not the discovery of inherent falsity but the application of the truth. Then the really good man is most conscious of badness. The badness of the bad man ultimately consists in the fact that he is not conscious of it. The test ofgoodness is the ability to detect badness. The end, when acted on, reveals the goodness or badness of the act. The end sought as end is always the good. Therefore we cannot determine the wrong by subsuming it under the end. 248. The act is the complete concrete approbation, the completed judgment. The act both tests and determines the value. Because the act is the completed judgment it always transcends both subject and predicate. It is a new organization ofexperience in which the ideal is verified through new material and has therefore grown. Every act therefore, in setting up a new situation or organizing a new self, gives a basis for judging the previous subject and predicate. The good as acted upon throws light upon the good intended or aimed at. Or, we do not know the good at which we have aimed until we have expressed it in action. 249. The attempt to get a good guaranteed before action is a moral fallacy in 91 92 Lectures on the Logic ofEthics hedonism, and in man's ordinary consciousness. The feeling that one ought not to act until he can see that good is guaranteed hampers action. The element of faith or spontaneity cannot be eliminated. Part of the condition of determining whether the act is good or not is in the act itself. The new situation is a standpoint from which to judge previous situations. 250. The reflection back upon the former conditions gives rise to the category of right and wrong. To say that past civilizations were bad is to judge the past conditions by the standard which is the outcome ofthe intervening experience. The past acts were bad because they could not be organized into the present self. 251. But it is not true that the people who did the acts were wicked. To say that they were wicked because they did what would be wrong for us is Pharisaism . A false hypothesis rightly followed without prejudice tends to correct itself. So a false ideal followed without prejudice tends to correct itself. A good man frequently follows bad ends, but we call him good if he follows it unreservedly because he will come out right in the end. The person who takes advantage ofthe new situation reconstructs his ideal. It is never possible to realize a bad ideal because the conditions do not permit it. 252. Method is more important than end because the right method will tend to correct a wrong law. The normal thing is to redefine the ideal. Yet some persons never identify themselves with their actions; they...

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