" To the question, as the logician
states it after transforming men into letters, it is certainly
irrelevant; but it is not irrelevant to the case as it arises in
nature. If two goods are somehow rightly pronounced to be equally
good, no circumstance can render one better than the other. And if the
locus in which the good is to arise is somehow pronounced to be
indifferent, it will certainly be indifferent whether that good arises
in me or in you. But how shall these two pronouncements be made? In
practice, values cannot be compared save as represented or enacted in
the private imagination of somebody: for we could not conceive that an
alien good _was_ a good (as Mr. Russell cannot conceive that the life
of an ecstatic oyster is a good) unless we could sympathise with it in
some way in our own persons; and on the warmth which we felt in so
representing the alien good would hang our conviction that it was
truly valuable, and had worth in comparison with our own good. The
voice of reason, bidding us prefer the greater good, no matter who is
to enjoy it, is also nothing but the force of sympathy, bringing a
remote existence before us vividly _sub specie boni_. Capacity for
such sympathy measures the capacity to recognise duty and therefore,
in a moral sense, to have it.
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