[262] The admission that these maxims are self-evident must be taken subject to the distinction before established between “subjective” and “objective” rightness. It is a necessary condition of my acting rightly that I should not do what I judge to be wrong: but if my judgment is mistaken, my action in accordance with it will not be “objectively” right.
[263] It may be noticed that a view very similar to this has often been maintained in considering what God is in justice bound to do for human beings in consequence of the quasi-parental relation in which He stands to them.
[264] It is not irrelevant to notice the remarkable divergence of suggestions for the better regulation of marriage, to which reflective minds seem to be led when they are once set loose from the trammels of tradition and custom; as exhibited in the speculations of philosophers in all ages—especially of those (as e.g. Plato) to whom we cannot attribute any sensual or licentious bias.
[265] For example, many seem to hold that wealth is, roughly speaking, rightly distributed when cultivated persons have abundance and the uncultivated a bare subsistence, since the former are far more capable of deriving happiness from wealth than the latter.
[266] I refer later (p. [360]) to the difficulty before noticed in respect of such prior obligations as are not strictly determinate.
[267] I have omitted as less important the special questions connected with promises to the dead or to the absent, or where a form of words is prescribed.
[268] It was this conception that seemed to give the true standard of Humility, considered as a purely internal duty.
[269] It should be observed that I am not asking for an exact quantitative decision, but whether we can really think that the decision depends upon considerations of this kind.
[270] It should be observed that the more positive treatment of Common-sense Morality, in its relation to Utilitarianism, to which we shall proceed in chap. [iii.] of the following Book, is intended as an indispensable supplement of the negative criticism which has just been completed.
[271] In Green’s Prolegomena to Ethics, Book ii. chaps. i. and ii. a peculiar view is taken of “motives, of that kind by which it is the characteristic of moral or human action, to be determined.” Such motives, it is maintained, must be distinguished from desires in the sense of “mere solicitations of which a man is conscious”; they are “constituted by the reaction of the man’s self upon these, and its identification of itself with one of them.” In fact the “direction of the self-conscious self to the realisation of an object” which I should call an act of will, is the phenomenon to which Green would restrict the term “desire in that sense in which desire is the principle and notion of an imputable human action.”