The Nature of Goodness | Page 9

means of arriving at an answer would be to stop each function and then
note the comparative consequence to the organism. Without digestion,
life ceases; without sight, it is rendered uncomfortable. If we are
considering merely the relative amounts of bodily gain from the two
functions, we must call digestion the greater good. In a table,
excellence of make is apt to be a greater good than excellence of
material, the character of the carpentry having more effect on its
durability than does the special kind of wood employed. The very
doubts about such results which arise in certain cases confirm the truth
of the definition here proposed; for when we hesitate, it is on account
of the difficulty we find in determining how far maintenance of the
organism depends on the one or the other of the qualities compared.
The meaning of the terms greater and lesser is clearer than their
application. A function or quality is counted a greater good in
proportion as it is believed to be more completely of the nature of a
means.

III
Another question unsettled by the diagram is so closely connected with
the one just examined as often to be confused with it. It is this: Are all
functions of the same kind, rank, or grade? They are not; and this
qualitative difference is indicated by the terms higher and lower, as the
quantitative difference was by greater and less. But differences of rank
are more slippery matters than difference of amount, and easily lend
themselves to arbitrary and capricious treatment. In ordinary speech we
are apt to employ the words high and low as mere signs of approval or
disapproval. We talk of one occupation, enjoyment, work of art, as
superior to another, and mean hardly more than that we like it better.
Probably there is not another pair of terms current in ethics where the
laudatory usage is so liable to slip into the place of the descriptive. Our
opponent's ethics always seem to embody low ideals, our own to be of
a higher type. Accordingly the terms should not be used in controversy
unless we have in mind for them a precise meaning other than eulogy
or disparagement.
And such a meaning they certainly may possess. As the term greater
good is employed to indicate the degree in which a quality serves as a
means, so may the higher good show the degree in which it is an end.
Digestion, which was just now counted a greater good than sight, might
still be rightly reckoned a lower; for while it contributes more largely to
the constitution of the human organism, it on that very account
expresses less the purposes to which that organism will be put. It is true
we have seen how in any organism every power is both means and end.
It would be impossible, then, to part out its powers, and call some
altogether great and others altogether high. But though there is purpose
in all, and construction in all, certain are more markedly the one than
the other. Some express the superintending functions; others, the
subservient. Some condition, others are conditioned by. In man, for
example, the intellectual powers certainly serve our bodily needs. But
that is not their principal office; rather, in them the aims of the entire
human being receive expression. To abolish the distinction of high and
low would be to try to obliterate from our understanding of the world
all estimates of the comparative worth of its parts; and with these
estimates its rational order would also disappear. Such attempts have
often been made. In extreme polytheism there are no superiors among

the gods and no inferiors, and chaos consequently reigns. A similar
chaos is projected into life when, as in the poetry of Walt Whitman, all
grades of importance are stripped from the powers of man and each is
ranked as of equal dignity with every other.
That there is difficulty in applying the distinction, and determining
which function is high and which low, is evident. To fix the purposes
of an object would often be presumptuous. With such perplexities I am
not concerned. I merely wish to point out a perfectly legitimate and
even important signification of the terms high and low, quite apart from
their popular employment as laudatory or depreciative epithets. It
surely is not amiss to call the legibility of a book a higher good than its
shape, size, or weight, though in each of these some quality of the book
is expressed.

IV
A further point of possible misconception in our diagram is the number
of factors represented. As here shown, these are but four. They might
better be forty. The more richly functional a thing or person is, the
greater its goodness. Poverty of powers