Human Society in Ethics and Politics by Russell Bertrand

Author:Russell, Bertrand
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Humanities
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
Published: 2009-09-01T04:00:00+00:00

11

PRODUCTION AND DISTRIBUTION

We shall be concerned in this chapter with matters in which the problems of ethics are almost indistinguishable from those of economics and politics. I shall henceforth assume as accepted the definitions of “intrinsic value” and “right conduct” arrived at in an earlier chapter, namely:

Intrinsic value is the property of a state of mind which is enjoyed or which, having been experienced, is desired. The opposite of intrinsic value is called intrinsic disvalue. A value and a disvalue are considered equal when a person who has the choice is indifferent as to whether he experiences both or neither.

Right conduct is conduct which maximizes the balance of value over disvalue or minimizes the balance of disvalue over value, the choice being among acts that are possible.

Right conduct, so defined, is not quite the same thing as moral conduct or virtuous conduct in the sense generally given to these terms. It includes moral conduct, but has a slightly larger scope. We do not, as a rule, say that a man is virtuous because he abstains from eating to excess, we merely say that he is sensible from a purely egoistic standpoint; whereas virtuous conduct, as generally understood, usually involves some non-egoistic element. There are, in fact, two different departments of ethics, one concerned with the production of intrinsic value and the other with distribution. Morality, except when it is superstitious, is mainly concerned with distribution. We decided in an earlier chapter that ethics is not concerned with the question, “Who enjoys what has intrinsic value?” but only with producing as great a quantity of intrinsic value as possible. This, however, is not the way that people’s feelings work. We want intrinsic value for ourselves and for the people of whom we are fond. We may perhaps extend our feelings to all our compatriots, but it is only very few people who extend them to all mankind. It follows that the distribution of intrinsic value which people naturally desire is not impartial, and is therefore not at all likely to be what makes the total of intrinsic value as large as possible. Morality is to a very large extent an attempt to combat this partiality and to lead people in action to attach as much importance to the good of others as to their own.

There is much more disagreement about distribution than as to what constitutes intrinsic value. It is because there is so little disagreement as to intrinsic value that it is suitable as the fundamental concept of ethics. Let us endeavour to give concrete content to the conception of intrinsic value.

The first thing to observe is that intrinsic value does not belong to external objects in their own right, but only to their psychological effects. It is states of mind that have the quality in question, and the things that cause these states of mind do not have intrinsic value on their own account. They have value as means for those in whom they produce the desired results, but not for others.

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