Page:Ethics (Moore 1912).djvu/168

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anybody’s needing to have another feeling towards it. The point may be simply illustrated by taking the case of pleasure. Let us suppose, for the moment, that nothing can be intrinsically good unless it contains some pleasure, and that every whole which contains more pleasure than pain is intrinsically good. The question we are now discussing is merely whether, supposing this to be so, any whole which did contain more pleasure than pain, would not be good, even if nobody had any further feeling towards it. It seems to me quite plain that it would be so. But if so, then, to say that a state of things is intrinsically good cannot possibly be the same thing as to say that anybody has any kind of feeling towards it, even though no state of things can be intrinsically good unless it contains some feeling towards something.

But, after all, I do not know whether the strongest argument against any view which asserts that to call a thing “good” is the same thing as to say that some mental attitude is taken up towards it, does not merely consist in the fact that two propositions about “right” and “wrong” are self-evident: