1. Introduction

“GOD IS DEAD.” This was Nietzsche’s proclamation, and nowadays, it is something that nearly everyone accepts without question. The proposition has come to be such a truism that no one remembers to give Nietzsche the credit for it. We don’t even bother to proclaim it any more; we just act on it. For the import of Nietzsche’s proclamation is simply that there is no objectively grounded moral order anywhere in the universe:^* morality can appeal neither to God nor to nature nor to reality of any kind as sources from which it may derive its basis and its justification. And “if the belief in God and in an essentially moral ordering of things is no longer tenable,” why not accept the consequence, viz., “the belief in the absolute immorality of nature and in the utter purposelessness and meaninglessness of our psychologically necessary human impulses and affections”?¹

The purpose of the present book is to suggest that, in Nietzsche’s terms, God is not dead after all, that nature itself, or at least human nature, does involve a moral order, which it should be the concern of human beings to recognize and to act upon. Yet we still have not fully and honestly faced up to the fact that Nietzsche’s dictum is widely accepted by our contemporaries, and might well be used as the epigraph of practically every contemporary treatise on ethics. In our first chapter we argued that ethical relativism and skepticism are untenable and inconsistent; but we have still to meet head-on the unshakable current conviction that ethics has no objective basis or foundation whatever. To this end, it will be appropriate to consider certain characteristic examples of present-day ethical positions, in which an attempt is made to convert Nietzsche’s ethical skepticism into a position of strength.

2. Utilitarianism

a. The indifference of utilitarianism to questions regarding
an objective basis for ethics

With a combination of naïve exuberance and English smugness, Jeremy Bentham confidently insisted that the whole business of morals and ethics could be reduced simply to a matter of promoting the greatest happiness of the greatest number. This position makes sense to many men and women living in present-day society. Why worry about whether nature is amoral, or whether our psychologically determined feelings and impulses have any meaning? We know what we want, don’t we? So let’s try to get what we want, and get it for as many of our fellow human beings as we can, without troubling ourselves over whether this principle of conduct is sanctioned by God or by nature or by some ultimate moral order of the universe.

b. Altruism as an ethical red herring

Another feature of this utilitarian program recommends it to many people, although it might have disturbed some of the original proponents of the doctrine, particularly John Stuart Mill. Most people today, we would suggest, tend to assume that morals or ethics involves only their relations with others and never their relations with themselves. Everyone knows what he himself likes and enjoys, what would be a source of pleasure and happiness to himself. The problem thus is not one of knowing what one wants, but of knowing how to get it without injuring too many other people and depriving them of what they want. From such a standpoint morality consists in nothing but having regard for others. One has no obligation to pursue one’s own happiness; one will do that anyhow; but one does have an obligation to consider the happiness of others, the greatest happiness of the greatest number.

The utilitarians have always had some difficulty in showing why anyone has any obligation to think about others. If one begins by basing one’s ethics on straightforward hedonistic principles, asserting that pleasure is the only thing of any value in life and recommending that the moral agent simply do as he pleases, it is patently difficult to make the transition from such a starting point to the further assertion that this same moral agent ought to concern himself not merely with his own pleasure, but equally with the pleasure of others.

To be sure, a utilitarian can try to justify having regard for others simply on the ground that this is in one’s own best interests. This would be an altruism based on purely egoistic grounds. But, as has often been remarked, this would not be genuine altruism at all: the happiness of others or the greatest happiness of the greatest number would not be intrinsically valuable or worth while; the only value attaching to the happiness of others would be the purely instrumental one that it would somehow contribute to one’s own greater happiness.

Again, one can try to launch an argument, involving purely logical or linguistic considerations, to show that it can’t be just one’s own happiness that is of value, but rather the happiness of all, or at least the greatest happiness of the greatest number. Many people will recall Mill’s argument to this effect:

Questions about ends are, in other words, questions what things are desirable. The utilitarian doctrine is that happiness is desirable, and the only thing desirable, as an end; all other things being only desirable as means to that end. What ought to be required of this doctrine, what conditions is it requisite that the doctrine should fulfill—to make good its claim to be believed?

The only proof capable of being given that an object is visible is that people actually see it. The only proof that a sound is audible is that people hear it; and so of the other sources of our experience. In like manner, I apprehend, the sole evidence it is possible to produce that anything is desirable is that people do actually desire it. If the end which the utilitarian doctrine proposes to itself were not, in theory and in practice, acknowledged to be an end, nothing could ever convince any person that it was so. No reason can be given why the general happiness is desirable, except that each person, so far as he believes it to be attainable, desires his own happiness. This, however, being a fact, we have not only all the proof which the case admits of, but all which it is possible to require, that happiness is a good, that each person’s happiness is a good to that person, and the general happiness, therefore, a good to the aggregate of all persons.²

As stated, this argument is dubious, to say the least. Whether it can be saved from collapse by a more subtle formulation of the refutation of egoism in the manner of G. E. Moore³ is a question with which we need not concern ourselves here. Nevertheless utilitarianism does commend itself to many people, as an ethical doctrine that seems to rest on no more than the fact that human beings know the difference between being happy and being miserable. It commends itself for the very reason that it requires no questionable presupposition of a moral order rooted in the nature of things. It commends itself, also, as a doctrine which tends to center our moral concern almost exclusively on the welfare and happiness of others. For some strange reason most people today seem to assume that morality begins and ends with helping others. Utilitarianism appeals to them because it fits their preconceived notions⁴ of what an ethical or moral theory should be.

Whether or not such a utilitarian type of altruism can be justified, any such identification of ethics with altruism is radically at variance with the sort of ethics of the rational man that we have been trying to defend in this book. In Aristotle’s eyes ethics does not begin with thinking of others, it begins with oneself. The reason is that every human being faces the task of learning how to live, how to be a human being, just as he has to learn how to walk or to talk. No one can be truly human, can live and act as a rational man, without first going through the difficult and often painful business of acquiring the intellectual and moral virtues, and then, having acquired them, actually exercising them in the concrete, but tricky, business of living.

This is not to say that for Aristotle ethics has no concern with the welfare of others. Nor are we arguing that Aristotle is necessarily any more successful than the utilitarians in providing an adequate justification for the obligation, which is certainly incumbent upon us all, to concern ourselves with the rights and the well-being of our fellow men. Personally, I think that Aristotle does provide a better justification than the utilitarians. But since the investigation in this book is restricted to individual ethics, as contrasted with social ethics, to problems of the individual’s development and perfection as contrasted with those of the state and society, we can pass over this issue as not being relevant to our present purpose.

c. The insufficiencies of trying to conceive happiness apart
from any objective criterion

To return to questions that are relevant, we observed earlier that in the eyes of many people nowadays there is no problem in defining what they themselves want or what would make them happy or be best for them; the only problem is whether in pursuing their own best interests they may come into conflict with the interests of others. Socrates, however, far from supposing that everyone pretty much knows what is best for him, assumes that the primary, if not the exclusive, problem of ethics is precisely that of knowing oneself. In the light of our whole rather elaborate analysis of the human moral situation, can any of us any longer be under any misapprehension as to what fools we mortals be? We do not know ourselves, we are forever deluding ourselves, making ourselves believe we are something which we are not, trying always to strike a pose or to act a part, refusing constantly to see ourselves as others see us.

The source of this self-blindness, which utilitarianism so often seems to foster, can be located in that very tendency on the part of utilitarian moralists to try to erect an ethics merely on the basis of human pleasure and happiness, and not on the basis of human nature or the moral order of nature as whole. Nothing would seem to be easier than for a man to be contented with himself, when in fact the self he is so contented with falls woefully short of what his self might be expected to be, in the light of man’s natural human capacities for an intelligent and examined life. The example of Sir Walter Elliott should be enough to convince us that the whole task of morals and ethics is not to make men happy and contented; on the contrary, the task of ethics is to make them unhappy with what they are at present, to rouse them from their smugness and complacency. For in Aristotle’s eyes the thing to be sought in life is not happiness as such, but happiness or satisfaction in the attainment of one’s natural human end of perfection. This is why we earlier spoke of Aristotle’s “objective definition”⁵ of happiness and of his effort to make of happiness something objectively determinable.

To make this point against the utilitarians, we have cited the happy and satisfied existence of Sir Walter Elliott. We might even more aptly have used the example of Marcel’s “man on the underground,”⁶ whose life was obviously blighted and miserable when judged by the standards of men’s natural human capacities, but who nevertheless might have been thoroughly happy and satisfied with his own estimate of himself.

Now, perhaps, we can begin to see how Huxley’s Brave New World is a far more devastating refutation of utilitarianism than all the subtle and elaborate philosophical arguments that one can muster. Huxley clearly perceives, as we all must nowadays if we stop to think about it, that the most efficient and painless way of achieving the greatest happiness of the greatest number is to condition human beings so as to make them unquestioningly and unquestionably happy in their roles as Alphas, Betas, Gammas, or Deltas of the twentieth-century Leviathan.

As the Controller reminded the Savage,

‘You can’t make flivvers without steel—and you can’t make tragedies without social instability. The world’s stable now. People are happy; they get what they want, and they never want what they can’t get. They’re well off; they’re safe; they’re never ill; they’re not afraid of death; they’re blissfully ignorant of passion and old age; they’re plagued with no mothers or fathers; they’ve got no wives, or children, or lovers to feel strongly about; they’re so conditioned that they practically can’t help behaving as they ought to behave. And if anything should go wrong, there’s soma. Which you go and chuck out of the window in the name of liberty, Mr. Savage. Liberty!’ He laughed. ‘Expecting Deltas to know what liberty is! And now expecting them to understand Othello! My good boy!’

The Savage was silent for a little. ‘All the same,’ he insisted obstinately, ‘Othello’s good, Othello’s better than those feelies.’

‘Of course it is,’ the Controller agreed. ‘But that’s the price we have to pay for stability. You’ve got to choose between happiness and what people used to call high art. We’ve sacrificed the high art. We have the feelies and the scent organ instead.’

‘But they don’t mean anything.’

‘They mean themselves; they mean a lot of agreeable sensations to the audience.’⁷

John Stuart Mill himself recognized this sort of danger when he declared, “It is better to be a human being dissatisfied than a pig satisfied; better to be Socrates dissatisfied than a fool satisfied.”⁸ But in thus voicing his own honest convictions, Mill utterly betrayed his own utilitarian principles. Besides, Mill lived in the comfortable Victorian era. Had he lived today, when totalitarian dictators seem to possess such limitless resources for making men happy by turning them into pigs and fools, one wonders whether Mill would not have been among the first to recognize that mere pleasure and happiness, when understood in abstraction from the moral requirement of man’s nature as a human being, so far from being sufficient criteria of the good life, may well prove to be the instruments of man’s utter degradation and brutalization.

3. G. E. Moore and the problem of the naturalistic fallacy

a. Philosophical sophistication and utilitarianism

But isn’t all this criticism of utilitarianism rather like whipping a dead horse? Although utilitarian principles may be among the staple presuppositions of the comparatively uncritical ethical thinking of present-day intellectuals, utilitarianism does not seem to be taken too seriously by academic philosophers. Ever since G. E. Moore propounded his famous argument about the “naturalistic fallacy,”⁹ both hedonism and utilitarianism have seemed thoroughly discredited.

Or have they? Ironically enough, while the effect of Moore’s argument has been to leave utilitarianism completely undone, it seems to have left undone every other type of ethics as well; nor have more recent English writers on ethics come forward with anything much to take the place of utilitarianism. On the contrary, their activity seems to have been diverted from properly ethical concerns to concern with the mere analysis of ethical language. Should you ask these analysts to what sort of ethics they would be inclined personally to commit themselves, they would probably say that a man’s personal commitments are in no wise a philosophical matter, and hence no one’s business but their own. Should you persevere, assuring them that you realize that philosophy is above anything so personal as convictions and beliefs, and that all you are doing is manifesting a very unphilosophical curiosity as to what their moral convictions may happen to be, it is just possible that they might come out from behind their sophistication long enough to admit that they were utilitarians, though largely as a matter of course and because they hardly know what else to be. Just try scratching the skin of an up-to-the-minute Oxford philosopher, and you may find that he is nothing but a simple utilitarian underneath.

b. The naturalistic fallacy: the attempt to turn the merely
natural into the good

However, we cannot avoid facing up to G. E. Moore’s argument regarding the naturalistic fallacy. For this argument not only strikes at the root of utilitarianism, it also appears to cut the ground right out from under the Aristotelian ethical position, according to which the good for man is simply man’s natural end, that toward which a human being is naturally oriented simply by virtue of being human. Indeed, all of the considerations which we raised in our first chapter about the separation of fact from value, of the “is” from the “ought”—all these might be said to find their ultimate justification in Moore’s exposure of the naturalistic fallacy.

For our purpose, a recapitulation of the argument precisely in Moore’s terms might not be very illuminating. Instead we shall attempt to give a somewhat simplified version of it, in order to better exhibit its pertinence in the present context.

As we have seen, for Aristotle “the good” is simply “that at which all things aim.”¹⁰ More specifically, with respect to human beings, if you want to know what the human good is, Aristotle’s counsel is that you try to determine what it is that man aims at, what his natural end is, what that fullness or perfection is toward which a human being naturally tends. This will never do, Moore thinks, because in such an account of what the human good is, Aristotle is offering at least implicitly, if not explicitly, a definition of goodness;¹¹ and the definition, unfortunately, commits the naturalistic fallacy.

What is this naturalistic fallacy anyway? In answer to such a question Moore would undoubtedly point out, first, that in his definition of goodness Aristotle seems to equate the good of man, or of anything else for that matter, with that toward which the thing in question naturally tends. The good of an acorn is to be a full-grown oak; the good of man is to lead an examined life.

But there is something very dubious, Moore thinks, about this attempt to identify the good of anything with that toward which it naturally tends. Why should a natural tendency necessarily be a tendency toward the good? To confine our attention to human beings for the moment, why should the mere fact that I aim at something, or that you do, or that all men do, necessarily mean that what we are aiming at is good? Is it not at least conceivable that what men do in fact aim at might well be anything but good, might even be evil, or might be neither one nor the other?

In other words, Moore is accusing Aristotle of trying to convert a mere fact of nature into a value, and it can’t be done. In order to see that this is what Aristotle is up to, let us briefly recapitulate the main considerations in support of the Aristotelian view that man’s natural end is simply to live intelligently. To begin with, Aristotle urges that the characteristic end for a human being cannot be simply to stay alive in the manner of a vegetable. Neither can it be to live on an animal level, since even a cow or a horse does this. Therefore, Aristotle concludes, man’s true end can only be to use the intelligence which he alone possesses—to live intelligently, to lead an examined life.

Suppose that, for the purposes of argument, we admit that the examined life is man’s natural end. Does that prove that it is good? Moore would say “No.” Yet this is precisely what Aristotle must undertake to show if his argument is to have any pertinence for ethics. But he cannot show this, since his argument commits the naturalistic fallacy, being an attempt to pass from the fact that something is natural to the fact that it is good, from the “is” to the “ought,”¹² from fact to value.

c. The conceivability of the opposite as the criterion of the
naturalistic fallacy

But we still have not gotten to the root of the fallacy as Moore sees it. Moore is not content to rest his case simply on the seeming implausibility of Aristotle’s equation of fact with value, of the natural with the good. Moore wants also to show that this is logically impossible, because Aristotle has violated the logical criteria of good definition. How has he done so?

By way of answer, we might note that the epigraph of Moore’s book is a quotation from Bishop Butler: “Everything is what it is, and not another thing.” Accordingly, to define a thing, one must define it as what it is and not as something else. No one could very well take exception to this. But it is not hard to guess what the thrust of such a truism is likely to be in the present context. Moore is obviously going to insist that to define the good as that at which all things aim—or, more accurately, to define the good of anything as that at which it aims or toward which it tends by nature—clearly violates Butler’s canon, for it defines the good as the natural, i.e., it defines it not as what it is, but rather as something else. It equates value with fact, the “ought” with the “is.”

What’s more, Moore thinks he has a touchstone by which he can determine in any given case, and particularly in the instant case of Aristotle, whether a definition does violate the canon of never equating the thing to be defined with anything other than itself. The device is this: if a definition of a thing is a legitimate definition, it must be such that its opposite is simply inconceivable or self-contradictory. Thus suppose the definition of x to be thus and so, say “y.” Then it must be absolutely inconceivable that x should be other than y. For to suppose otherwise would be like saying that it was conceivable that x might be other than x, which is absurd.

Applying this touchstone to the Aristotelian definition of the good, the latter is at once found to be wanting, Moore thinks. As we have already seen, no sooner does one try to identify the good of a thing with that toward which it is naturally ordered or toward which it naturally tends, than the question immediately becomes meaningful and pertinent: is such a natural end necessarily good, after all; might not the natural in this case be anything but good? In other words, the opposite of the proposed definition is at least conceivable; and if so, then the definition is not a proper definition at all.

Nor does Moore stop with this. Suppose that instead of trying to equate the good with the object of some natural tendency, we tried to equate it with some other natural property, say with the pleasant as the hedonists propose, or with the desired, or with any object of any interest, as R. B. Perry held. In each of these cases the same touchstone can be applied and with the same result. For instance, one can quite meaningfully ask with respect to the hedonistic definition: “But if a thing is pleasant, does that necessarily mean that it is good?” No more is needed than that such a question should be meaningful, in order to show that the proposed definition is no definition at all.

Apparently, then, according to Moore’s criterion goodness cannot be equated with any natural property at all, or with any supernatural property either. It cannot be equated with any other property of any kind whatever. The property of goodness, therefore, cannot be identified with any property save that of goodness itself; which means that it cannot be defined at all. It is an indefinable property, as Moore would say.

d. The naturalistic fallacy entraps its own inventor

So much for Moore’s point about the naturalistic fallacy. The point is certainly ingenious, but is it sound? The interesting thing about it is that it seeks to upset Aristotle’s account of goodness—or for that matter any account of goodness, whether naturalistic or super-naturalistic—not by an appeal to the facts, but by an appeal to logic. Aristotle’s definition of the good is held to be mistaken, not because it does not fit the facts, but because it violates the logical canons of good definition: it attempts to define something not in terms of what it is, but in terms of what it is not.

Unassailable as this seems, one wonders whether Moore may not have argued himself into a cul-de-sac. If any definition of the good must commit a fallacy, then on the same principles just about any definition of anything must also commit a fallacy. If one defines A as A, this is merely a tautology, not a definition. On the other hand, if one defines A as B or C, then one is defining A in terms of what is other than A, and this violates the principle that everything is what it is and not another thing. However, one must define A either in terms of A or in terms of something other than A. Hence, on such principles, it would seem impossible ever to define anything. And this is far more than Moore himself ever bargained for.¹³

Nor is this all. Moore insists that the criterion of any genuine definition is that its opposite is inconceivable, because self-contradictory. On the basis of this criterion he was able to rule out Aristotle’s definition of good, or any similar definition. From this it follows that no definition can ever be of a form other than that of an empty tautology, A is A. For if the opposite of any proper definition is perforce self-contradictory, then such an opposite will be of the form A is non-A. But then, the definition itself can only be of the form, A is A. This means that a definition can never tell us anything, or convey any sort of information whatever. We can only say that cats are cats, or that yellow is yellow. We cannot really say anything about cats or about yellow. In order to perceive the truth of a statement to the effect that cats are cats, I don’t even need to know what a cat is. The statement is true in virtue of its form alone, “A is A.” It is a mere formal truth or logical truth. But such a definition as the statement, “Cats are cats,” does not really give us any information about cats at all.

Here’s a howdy-do. Any definition that meets Moore’s criterion must be of a form that makes it quite impossible for it to be a definition at all, at least in the sense of telling us what the thing being defined is. In short, to define anything is, on Moore’s principle, to fail to define it, and to aim at knowing what anything is, is to commit oneself to the logical impossibility of ever knowing what it is.

To say, therefore, that Moore’s famed doctrine of the naturalistic fallacy is self-defeating is an understatement. The simple truth is that it is a logical mess, which we need not try to clean up here. We shall content ourselves with a few suggestions as to where Moore seems to have taken a wrong turning.

e. Where Moore went wrong

Suppose we grant that everything is what it is and not another thing. Does it follow from this that as soon as we think we have found out what a given thing is, it must at once become impossible that we could ever be wrong? According to Moore, if it is conceivable that we might be wrong, then this in itself is sufficient indication that we do not know what the thing in question is. This does seem far-fetched. What we are suggesting is that while we may grant Moore his basic principle, taken from Butler, we cannot grant him his criterion for determining whether or not our knowledge of a thing (i.e., our definition of that thing) is accurate knowledge. He held, you remember, that if a definition is legitimate, its opposite must be inconceivable or self-contradictory. Thus it is Moore’s criterion of definition, not Butler’s principle, that causes all the trouble.

Once we discard Moore’s criterion,^* and continue our efforts to know things for what they are, it will always be meaningful to ask whether what, in a given instance, we have supposed something to be is really what that thing is. We can ask such a question without prejudicing the possibility that what we have supposed a given thing to be is what it actually is, or that what we have taken the thing’s definition to be is really its definition. To take a crude illustration, we may suppose that there are such things as human beings and that they are what they are and not anything else. We may suppose further that in answer to the question, “What is a human being?” we give as our definition, “A human being is a rational animal.” And we may then raise the question whether or not this is the right definition of “human being” without prejudicing the possibility that it is the right definition.

More generally, of any natural kind of species—silver, amoebas, hydrogen, electricity—we can ask what such types or kinds of thing are and we can offer definitions of them. Then we can always ask ourselves: “Is my definition correct? Is the kind of thing I am considering really of the sort I have supposed it to be? Or must I change my definition?” Because questions of this kind are always meaningful, it does not follow that the things we encounter in the world are undefinable, or that any attempted definition of them must be either unquestionable or else not a definition at all. That would be fantastic.

Indeed, if we mistake not, what Moore’s criterion of definition amounts to is something like this: if a rational animal is simply what a human being is, if this is what we mean by “man,” then it should be as absurd to ask whether man is, after all, really a rational animal, as it is to ask whether man is man or not. To use such a criterion of definition seems both gratuitous and far-fetched.

To return, then, to Aristotle and his proposed definition of the good as that at which all things aim, why shouldn’t it be perfectly proper to ask whether such a definition is sound or adequate? Is this really what we mean by “good”? Is that at which something naturally aims necessarily good? But if Moore is right, and if what Aristotle is proposing as a definition of “good” is properly a definition, then it is as absurd to ask whether the good is really that at which all things aim as it would be to ask whether the good is the good.

Isn’t it obvious that Moore’s criterion of definition is too severe? As regards Aristotle and his proposed definition of “good,” isn’t the real question whether his definition is sound, not whether his definition is a definition? Aristotle may have been entirely mistaken in his conception of the nature of goodness. Yet merely because it is conceivable that he may have been mistaken, we cannot say for that reason alone that his definition is not even a definition because it commits the naturalistic fallacy. It may not be a good definition, but surely it isn’t logically or linguistically fallacious. But if not, then isn’t this whole business about the naturalistic fallacy nothing more than a red herring?

Having thus (we hope) cleared the naturalistic fallacy out of our path, we can now go ahead and try to understand goodness and value in terms of real tendencies and dispositions in nature. We may even hope that if the bugbear of Moore’s naturalistic fallacy can be removed, there is a chance that British moral philosophers may once more take heart and actually seek to find real distinctions between good and bad, and right and wrong.

f. The naturalistic fallacy as a source of skepticism

It was certainly not Moore’s intention that his doctrines should influence ethical thinkers in a skeptical direction; but this is precisely the effect that they have, by and large, tended to produce. Moore seemed to feel that he had only to show that notions of value could not possibly be understood in terms of the facts of nature, and philosophers would immediately recognize that value terms would have to designate properties that were somehow non-natural. But subsequent thinkers concluded otherwise. They contended that the argument designed to show that value terms could not designate natural properties also showed that such terms did not designate properties at all. Hence words like “good” and “bad,” “right” and “wrong,” were not descriptive of anything in the real world; in fact, they just weren’t descriptive. In the final analysis there could be no sense in seeking to know what the good life is or whether a certain action is right or wrong, for these things cannot be matters of knowledge, since it is a simple fact of logic—and indirectly a fact of life too—that moral and ethical judgments are ultimately non-cognitive.

Contemporary English writers on ethics are quite as convinced as Nietzsche that God is dead. But being committed to the British practice of understatement, they would never dream of uttering dramatic, Zarathustra-like pronouncements on the subject. They would only treat defenders of God or of a moral order with supercilious contempt, much as they would treat a man who ate peas with his knife. To anyone so naïve as to speak of a divinely grounded or naturally grounded moral order they would merely say, “My good man, don’t you realize that you are committing the naturalistic fallacy?”

g. The old bugbear of the separation of fact and value;
let’s have done with it

Granting that a deliverance from the naturalistic fallacy is also a deliverance from the mortmain of contemporary English ethics, we are still far from having established that the good is that at which all things aim. All we have done so far has been to show that such a definition of “good” is not logically or linguistically fallacious. But this still does not prove that the definition is correct.

In fact, must we not admit that in the Aristotelian definition, the good is being defined in terms of a natural property, that value is being equated with fact? If so, then is not Aristotle defining goodness and value, not in terms of what they are, but in terms of something which they definitely are not?

Evidently we can no longer evade facing up to the problem of the separation of fact and value. If these are separate and incommensurable, as is customarily assumed, then there is no way in which, through a consideration of the natural order of things, we can ever determine the moral order of things. If fact and value are wholly separate and distinct, then no investigation of the facts of human nature can ever disclose what human good is or what is the good life for man. As we remarked in the preceding section, it makes not the slightest difference how convincingly it can be shown that the examined life is the life toward which man is ordered and directed by nature. That still will not prove that the examined life is the good life, unless it can first be shown that, with respect to any being, not only human beings, that toward which such a being is naturally ordered is the good of that being. From such a proposition it would certainly follow that man’s natural end is man’s true good. But without such a major premise, the latter conclusion must appear baseless and without warrant.

What, then, of this major premise? What of Aristotle’s own formulation of the principle, “The good is that at which all things aim”? How may this be substantiated? The answer we must give to such questions may seem not only unduly simple, but unduly dogmatic. For we propose to challenge directly the initial separation of values from facts, and we should like to suggest, instead, that all facts, if not identical with values, at least have value aspects.

The opposite view may have arisen from an excessively static and atomistic conception of facts; if we put this conception out of our minds, the whole picture changes. Look at it this way: is there any fact at all that does not suggest all sorts of possibilities of how it might become other and different? Is there any fact at all that has not proceeded from some prior state of facts, this last having been, as it were, big with the new fact even before the latter came into being? In other words, the whole of reality is shot through with the distinction between potentiality and actuality, between what is still only able to be and what actually is. The potential is related to the actual as the imperfect to the perfect, the incomplete to the complete, the empty to the full.

And what about goodness? Why not consider that, in this all-embracing context, the good is simply the actual as related to the potential? It is that toward which the potential is ordered and directed, that which fulfills and completes and actualizes it. The good, in other words, is any actual state or condition of things which is the fulfillment or completion of some prior state that was only potential with respect to it.

On such a view there is clearly a sense in which “good” is not an absolute term at all, for anything that is good is always good for, or of, or with reference to, something else. One might even tear a leaf from some of the contemporary English writers and say that “good” does not designate a “property” of things at all—“property” being a quality like redness or weight. But one cannot conclude from this that “good’ is therefore not a descriptive term. Rather it is a term which always points to that relational posture of things according to which anything that exists can always be compared both to what it might be but as yet is not, and to what formerly might have been it, or could have become it, but which now is no more, having actually become it.

“But,” you will say, “this can hardly be a true account of things, for in the natural sciences we do not consider the facts of nature as being thus intimately associated with values and as each having its own value aspects or value relationships.” To which the answer is that if science chooses to abstract from, or not to consider, the value aspects of things or the value-relatedness of things, that is science’s privilege; but this does not mean that things in the natural world are not shot through with relations of potencies to acts and of acts to potencies, with the result that nothing in the natural world, no fact of nature, is ever really separated from its own value aspects. Values are always there in nature, if we choose to look for them.

Thus to anyone who feels it simply incredible that facts should ever imply values or that “is” should ever imply “ought,” our reply is that it is far more incredible that these two should ever have been separated in the first place. Moreover, if we mistake not, the reason such a separation has come to be generally accepted nowadays, and even to seem almost self-evident, is that the attempt to associate the two is always made to appear as an exception and an anomaly. Accustomed as we are to identifying the natural world with the scientific universe, and values having been excluded from the scientific universe altogether and a priori, it is not surprising that we should take it as a matter of course that water flows down hill not because it ought to, but simply because it does, or that an acorn develops into an oak, not because this is best for the acorn, but simply because this is the way acorns are in fact observed to behave. Accordingly, when against this background we turn to consider our human values and the judgments of success or failure that in our everyday lives we pass upon ourselves and others, it is bound to seem as though such judgments were concerned with something outside the realm of nature.

But is this anything more than a simple distortion or loss of perspective? For no sooner do we go behind the somewhat artificial construct of the scientific universe, and consider the lived world of every day, where things are everywhere in process of change and development, where one kind of thing naturally changes or matures in its accustomed way and another thing in its different way, where certain things have their capacities and potentialities and others theirs—when once we place ourselves in this lived context of our everyday lives, then ends and goals, values and purposes, healthy specimens and diseased ones, the perfect and the imperfect, the good and the bad, all of these come to be recognized as things that are natural, not exceptional or anomalous. We do not have to apologize and try to make room for the ideas of change and of value, or consider them as concepts valid only with reference to our human purposes. On the contrary, the whole of nature is permeated with values; we cannot conceive the natural world as stripped of values, unless we conceive of it as stripped of all those manifold and varied powers, capacities, potentialities, and abilities which characterize the objects of nature. The good of any thing is to that thing as the actual is to the potential.

At the same time, it should be noted that since values and “goods” are always values and “goods” for something, it is understandable that as human beings we should be almost exclusively concerned with what is valuable and good for ourselves and for man. For this reason—to revert to our old example—while the full-grown oak may be the acorn’s good, that is, its natural end, it is not, clearly, the natural end of man. We might choose to call a tree “good,” because it happened to serve our human purposes. But that it should be something good or of value for the undeveloped seed does not usually occur to us; nor should we be inclined in such a context to ascribe to it such terms as “good” or “valuable.” But it would nonetheless be good, if the good is defined simply as the perfect with respect to the imperfect, the complete with respect to the incomplete, the actual with respect to the potential.

And what about this way of defining “good”? Is it the correct definition after all? We should not make any claims to absolute certainty on this score, certainty being no doubt unattainable by finite, fallible human beings. Moreover, as we have made clear in our opposition to Moore, this definition of “good” is not one the opposite of which is inconceivable or self-contradictory. But it is a plausible definition, and many signs point to its soundness. Also it is based on the assumption that, though fact and value are by no means the same thing, they are nevertheless inseparable, in certain respects at least. If they are inseparable, it is a meaningful enterprise to try to discover the good for man by investigating the nature of man—or for that matter, the good of anything by investigating its nature.