A CASE STUDY
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tivist, which Stevenson clarified for us in our day and which we can
trace back through William James through Hobbes, to Thrasymachus."
But this does not follow in the least any more than the kindred
notion of Monsignor Sheen that if we do not worship God,
his
God,
we must worship Hitler or Stalin. It is the most fundamental blunder
anyone can make about naturalism in ethics.
If
I define the good as
that which I choose after reflection or as that which fulfills most com–
pletely basic needs and desires, or as that which gives the deepest felt
satisfaction- to mention only a few naturalist positions-and if I relate
the right, as all naturalists must, ultimately to the good, then nothing
in logic or experience can ever show that might is or makes right.
The equation between might and right implies that wherever one
term
is
employed the other can be substituted without making a differ–
ence to the intended meanings, or the actual usages, of the expressions
in which the terms appear.
If
we perform this operation in any natural
language in which "might" and "right" appear, simple observation of
the usage of the expressions in which the terms have been substituted,
show this to be false. Those who say that "might" and "right" have the
same meaning can easily be shown that such an identification
is
inade–
quate to account for their own usage of the terms.
And if we look beyond linguistic facts to the non-linguistic facts
of experience and history, what do the latter show? Merely that might
can defeat me, not prove my point of view wrong. Only evidence and in–
telligence can prove my judgments of good and bad wrong. Mr. Vivas
assumes that no moral judgment can be objectively true unless it is
universally true, that anything which is truly valid for some interests
is truly valid for all interests. But it is obvious that the standard of per–
fection for a tiger
cannot
be human and that of a Martian who looks
like a man
need not
be human. And whether tigers or Martians con–
quer man would not affect the truth of the judgment that a certain
course of conduct would be better for man than some other. The
extent
to which a
common
objective morality or standard can be established
among men depends upon the degree to which they share common needs,
upon the extent to which when at odds they are still sufficiently alike to
work out co-operative ways of becoming more alike, or sufficiently alike to
agree about the perrnissable limits of being different. This is an empiri–
cal question.
Mr. Vivas' notions that there must subsist a criterion of human per–
fection which is valid for everybody, everywhere, and always; that this
criterion must have an ontic status whose nature
is
independent of the
existence of human nature, and that its discovery
is
really the aim of all
