G. E. Moore

“ And can any one pretend that such a view necessarily contradicts the laws of arithmetic? or that it is self-evident that it cannot be true? I cannot see any ground for saying so; and if there is no ground, then the argument which sought to show that we can never add to the value of any whole except by adding pleasure to it, is entirely baseless. ”

“ It seems to me quite self-evident that it must always be our duty to do what will produce the best effects upon the whole, no matter how bad the effects upon ourselves may be and no matter how much good we ourselves may lose by it. ”

“ All that could be agreed upon was that a voluntary action is right whenever and only when its total consequences are as good, intrinsically, as any that would have followed from any action which the agent could have done instead. ”

“ Indeed, so far as I can see, there is no characteristic whatever which always distinguishes every whole which has greater intrinsic value from every whole which has less, except the fundamental one that it would always be the duty of every agent to prefer the better to the worse, if he had to choose between a pair of actions, of which they would be the sole effects. ”

“ It involves our saying, for instance, that a world in which absolutely nothing except pleasure existed—no knowledge, no love, no enjoyment of beauty, no moral qualities—must yet be intrinsically better—better worth creating—provided only the total quantity of pleasure in it were the least bit greater, than one in which all these things existed as well as pleasure. ”

“ Suppose A does his duty and sacrifices his life, but B does not, and continues to live for thirty years more. Those who hold that the agent’s own good always coincides with the general good, must then hold that B’s sixty years of life, no matter how well the remaining thirty years of it may be spent, cannot possibly have so much intrinsic value as A’s thirty years. And surely this is an extravagant paradox, however much intrinsic value we may attribute to those final moments of A’s life in which he does his duty at the expense of his life ”

“ Now the question, whether this view is true, in either of these two different forms, would, of course, be of no practical importance, if it were true that, as a matter of fact, every action which most promotes the general good always also most promotes the agent’s own good, and vice versa. And many philosophers have taken great pains to try to show that this is the case: some have even tried to show that it must necessarily be the case. But it seems to me that none of the arguments which have been used to prove this proposition really do show that it is by any means universally true. ”

“ Suppose there are two men, A and B, who up to the age of thirty have lived lives of equal intrinsic value; and that at that age it becomes the duty of each of them to sacrifice his life for the general good. ”

“ And those who maintain that, even in such a case, he will absolutely always be securing the greatest possible amount of good for himself, must either maintain that in some future life he will receive goods sufficient to compensate him for all that he might have had during many years of continued life in this world—a view to which there is the objection that it may be doubted, whether we shall have any future life at all, and that it is even more doubtful, what, if we shall, that life will be like; or else they must maintain the following paradox. ”

“ In the first place, people are apt to assume with regard to things, which really are very good indeed in senses (1) or (2) , that they are scarcely any good at all, simply because they do not seem to be of much use—that is to say, to lead to further good effects; and similarly, with regard to things which really are very bad in senses (1) or (2) , it is very commonly assumed that there cannot be much, if any, harm in them, simply because they do not seem to lead to further bad results. Nothing is commoner than to find people asking of a good thing: What use is it? ”

“ The fact is that the view which seems to me to be true is the one which, apart from theories, I think every one would naturally take, namely, that there are an immense variety of different things, all of which are intrinsically good ”

“ Indeed, as regards the first, it is not only true that many wholes which contain both feeling and some other form of consciousness are intrinsically bad; but it seems also to be true that nothing can be intrinsically bad, unless it contains some feeling. ”

“ That if any set of consequences A is once intrinsically better than another set B, any set precisely similar to A must always be intrinsically better than a set precisely similar to B. We have, indeed, not considered all the objections which might be urged against these three principles ”