Having previously sorted the manifold significations of the word “right” among these nine classes, and having subsequently shown what the organism was doing when it employed this word with respect to each of these classes, it now remains to discover whether any one action-tendency is commonly hinted by each and all of these nine classes. If such a common tendency can be discovered, the word “right” may then indeed be said to possess all these various significations indicated in our array; otherwise, we shall err in considering it to be one and the same word in all the examples previously cited. In attempting to discover and certify such a common tendency, moreover, we shall employ the same method suggested for the summarizing of the meanings of the word “good.” We recognize that in the title by which each class of “right” is denoted, there is no presumption that such a title does more than indicate the general trend of that class; logically, the titles merely imply the greatest common divisors of the many phrases included in the classes. So that when we now attempt to define the common tendency in all the action-patterns we have just deduced from these nine classes, we are to consider only their similarities, while discarding their differences. There is nothing novel in this method; it is simply the way in which all concepts have been unconsciously derived.
Such a common tendency is not difficult to discover. Each class as we defined it in behavioristic terms turned out to imply an action-tendency that played an important part in the behavior of human beings while in the pursuit of the objects they desire, or in the attainment of their ends, however variously conceived or projected. Let us, then, bring the whole matter to a focus by saying that whenever we describe a behavior situation in which the dominant feature is the controlling and directing of human energies, the employment of technique to further man’s purposes, or the attaining of any good whatsoever, the critical word is “right.” This is, indeed, what our concept, as we have analysed it, finally means.
Further than this a strictly scientific ethics does not go, and, moreover, further than this no intellectually honest man will go. Right simply means what people use the word to signify,—employing it either as a gesture to point out some object or relationship in the environment, or else as an index of what sort of behavior may be expected of them in the future. Accordingly, all insistence on a “higher and immutable right” as the one real meaning of the term is either a sign of mal-observation or of logorrhea. And if anyone still insists on knowing how one determines what is right, we refer such a person to our array of 114 terms, where in each case the basis for such determination can be inferred. But if such a person still demands an ultimate and irrefutable criterion, the only thing left for him to do is to attempt to be God; but it is suggested in advance that the role of deity might, under the circumstances, be even more difficult to play than the more familiar rôle of man.
FOOTNOTES:
[11] Class A is divided into the following sub-classes:
I. Straight.
1. That which is not bent, curved, or crooked in any way; for example, a straight line.
2. That which is formed by, or with reference to, a line drawn to another line or surface by the shortest course (i. e., a perpendicular), as, for example, right line, right angle, right ascension, etc.
3. Used to describe solid figures having the ends or base at an angle of 90 degrees with the axis, e. g., right solid, right sphere, right cone, right helicoid, etc.
4. Right circle; in the stereographic projection, a circle represented by a straight line.