THE RELATIONS OF ETHICS 395 



will: if there were no will there would be no law; apart from con- 

 scious agency good and evil would disappear. 



The question thus raised is one of real and fundamental import- 

 ance. " Ethics " by its very name may seem to have primary refer- 

 ence to conduct; and that is the view which most moralists have, 

 in one way or another, adopted. But the other view which gives to 

 the concept "good" an independence of all relation to volition is not 

 always definitely excluded, even by these moralists; by others it 

 has been definitely maintained: it seems implied in Plato's idealism, 

 at one stage of its development; and quite recently a doctrine of 

 the principles of ethics has been worked out which is based on its 

 explicit recognition. 1 



If we would attempt to decide between these two conflicting 

 views of the ethical concept, we must, in the first place, imitate the 

 procedure of science and examine the facts on which the concept 

 is based. To get to the meaning of such scientific concepts as "mass," 

 "energy," or the like, we begin by a consideration of the facts which 

 the concepts are introduced to describe. These facts are in the last 

 resort the objects of sense perception. No examination of these 

 sense percepts will, as we have seen, yield the content of the ethical 

 concept; good and evil are not given in sense perception they are 

 themselves an estimate of, or way of regarding, the immediate 

 material of experience. Moral experience is thus in a manner reflex, 

 as so many of the English moralists have called it. Its attitude to 

 things is not merely receptive; and the concepts to which it gives 

 rise have not mere understanding in view. Objects are perceived as 

 they occur; and experience of them is the groundwork of science. 

 There is also, at the same time, an attitude of approbation or dis- 

 approbation; this attitude is the special characteristic of moral 

 experience; and from moral experience the ethical concept is formed. 



This reflex experience, or reflex attitude to experience, is exhibited 

 in different ways. There is, to begin with, the appreciation of beauty 

 in its various kinds and degrees and the corresponding depreciation 

 of ugliness or deformity. These give rise to the concepts and judg- 

 ments of aesthetics. They are closely related to moral approbation 

 and disapprobation, so closely that there has always been a tendency 

 amongst a school of moralists to strain the facts by identifying them. 

 A certain looseness in our use of terms favors this tendency. For 

 we do often use good of a work of art or even scene in nature when 

 we mean beautiful. But if we reflect on and compare our mental 

 attitudes in commending, say, a sunset and self-sacrifice, it seems 

 to me that there can be no doubt that the two attitudes are different. 

 Both objects may be admired; but both are not, in the same sense, 

 approved. It is hard to express this difference otherwise than by 



1 Principia Ethica, by G. E. Moore (1903). 



