Russell's own way of arguing,
whenever he approaches some concrete ethical question. For instance,
to show that the good is not pleasure, he can avowedly do nothing but
appeal "to ethical judgments with which almost every one would agree."
He repeats, in effect, Plato's argument about the life of the oyster,
having pleasure with no knowledge. Imagine such mindless pleasure, as
intense and prolonged as you please, and would you choose it? Is it
your good? Here the British reader, like the blushing Greek youth, is
expected to answer instinctively, No! It is an _argumentum ad hominem_
(and there can be no other kind of argument in ethics); but the man
who gives the required answer does so not because the answer is
self-evident, which it is not, but because he is the required sort of
man. He is shocked at the idea of resembling an oyster. Yet changeless
pleasure, without memory or reflection, without the wearisome
intermixture of arbitrary images, is just what the mystic, the
voluptuary, and perhaps the oyster find to be good. Ideas, in their
origin, are probably signals of alarm; and the distress which they
marked in the beginning always clings to them in some measure, and
causes many a soul, far more profound than that of the young
Protarchus or of the British reader, to long for them to cease
altogether.
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