From the monistic view of reality, as set forth by Mr Bradley, there is no direct route to the distinction between good and evil. If the distinction is reached at all, it will be found to be psychological rather than cosmical, to be relative to the attitude of the human mind which contemplates the facts, and in this strict sense to be, what Mr Bradley calls it, appearance.
And this is the view which Mr Bradley takes when he proceeds to describe what he means by the 'good.' It is, he says, "that which satisfies desire. It is that which we approve of, and in which we can rest with a feeling of contentment."[1] "Desire"—"approval"—"feeling"—to these mental attitudes the good is relative: they are expressed in its definition. Mr Bradley, it will be seen, re-states Green's doctrine with a difference which makes it at once more logical and less ethical. Green had said that "the moral good is that which satisfies the desire of a moral agent"; and in so saying had simply walked round the difficulty, for he was unable to say wherein consisted the peculiarity of the moral agent without reference to the conception of moral good which he had started out to define. But Mr Bradley dispenses with the qualification, and says simply that the good "satisfies desire." And in so far his definition is more logical. The question is whether it distinguishes good from evil. Both the practical importance and the theoretical difficulty of the problem arise from the fact that evil is sometimes desired, and that the evil desire may be satisfied. The desire of a malevolent man may be satisfied by another's downfall, and his mind may even "rest with a feeling of contentment" in that result, much in the same way as the benevolent man is satisfied and content with another's happiness. Fortunately, the case is not so common: the dominant leanings of most men are in sympathy with good rather than with evil: but it is common enough to make the emotional characteristics of the individual an uncertain basis on which to rest the distinction of good from evil.
[Footnote 1: Appearance and Reality, p. 402.]
There is also another way of putting the matter: "the good is coextensive with approbation."[1] If by 'approbation' we mean simply 'holding for good,' then the sentence will mean that the good is what we hold for good—that is to say, that our judgments about good are always true judgments,—a proposition which either ignores the divergence between different individual judgments about good, or else implies a complete relativity such that that is good to each man at any time which he at that time approves or holds to be good; and this latter view would make all discussion impossible. But this is not what Mr Bradley means. "Approbation is to be taken in its widest sense"; in which sense "to approve is to have an idea in which we feel satisfaction, and to have or imagine the presence of this idea in existence."[2] And here the criterion is the same as before, and equally subjective. In desire idea and existence are separated; they are united in the satisfaction of desire; and approbation is said to be just the feeling of satisfaction in an idea which is also present (or imagined as present) in existence. Not only actual satisfaction of the desire but also imagined satisfaction is covered by "approbation"; but this approval is still simply a feeling of some individual person.
[Footnote 1: Appearance and Reality, p. 407]
[Footnote 2: Appearance and Reality, p. 418.]
We need not concern ourselves at present with the adequacy of this statement as an account of the way in which we come to 'approve' or hold something as good. The point is, that it does not advance us at all towards determining the validity of this approval, or towards an objective criterion for distinguishing 'good' from evil.
Mr Bradley draws a distinction between a general and a more special or restricted meaning of goodness. For the former it is enough that existence be "found to be in accordance with the idea"; for the latter, it is necessary that the idea itself produce the fact.[1] In the former sense "beauty, truth, pleasure, and sensation are all things that are good,"[2] quite irrespective of their origin; in the latter sense, only that is good which the idea has produced, or in which it has realised itself, which is the work, therefore, of some finite soul. In this narrower meaning goodness is the result of will: "the good, in short, will become the realised end or completed will. It is now an idea which not only has an answering content in fact, but, in addition also, has made, and has brought about, that correspondence…. Goodness thus will be confined to the realm of ends, or of self-realisation. It will be restricted, in other words, to what is commonly called the sphere of morality,"[3] Even in its more general meaning, as we have seen, Mr Bradley has not succeeded in giving an objective account of good. For the correspondence of idea and existence in which it is said to consist is defined in relation to desire, and to some kind of feeling on the part of the conscious subject. Nor was his account successful in distinguishing good from evil: to that distinction feeling is a blind guide. When he goes on to discuss goodness in the narrower sense, in which it belongs to the results of finite volition, he adopts, as expressing the nature of goodness, that conception of 'self-realisation' which, as put forward by Green, has been found inadequate. The same conception was used by Mr Bradley, in his first work, as "the most general expression for the end in itself," "May we not say," he asked, "that to realise self is always to realise a whole, and that the question in morals is to find the true whole, realising which will practically realise the true self?"[4] It is easy to make the distinction between good and evil depend upon this, that in the former the true self is realised, and that what is realised in the latter is only a false self. But it is equally easy to see that this is only to substitute one unexplained distinction for another. This short and easy method is not that which Mr Bradley adopts in his later work. He has something of much greater interest to say regarding the nature of the self-realisation in which goodness is made to consist; and upon it he lays stress, "solely with a view to bring out the radical vice of all goodness."[5] Goodness, it is said, is self-realisation; and Reality—it was assumed at the outset—is harmonious and all-comprehensive. These last characters are also criteria of degrees of reality, and consequently of degrees of self-realisation. There are, therefore, two marks of self-realisation—harmony and extent; and these two may and do diverge. No doubt "in the end," they will come together; but "in that end goodness, as such, will have perished."[6] "We must admit," says Mr Bradley, "that two great divergent forms of moral goodness exist. In order to realise the idea of a perfect self a man may have to choose between two partially conflicting methods. Morality, in short, may dictate either self—sacrifice or self—assertion,"[7] "The conscious duplicity of the hypocrite," according to an outspoken adherent of Mr Bradley's, is "but the natural exaggeration of the unconscious duplicity which resides in the very heart of morality."[8]
[Footnote 1: Appearance and Reality, p. 412.]
[Footnote 2: Ibid., p. 410.]