Yet if we push the question farther, and ask why these particular ends do not justify these particular means, we discover that it is because these means employed are destructive of an end vastly higher and greater than the particular ends they are employed to serve. They break down the structure and undermine the foundations of the industrial and social order; an end infinitely more important than the maintenance of any particular school, or the support of any individual family. Hence these means are not to be judged by their promotion of certain specific ends, but by their failure to promote the greatest and best end of all; the comprehensive welfare of society as a whole, of which all institutions and families and individuals are but subordinate members.
Throughout our discussion of Aristotle we must understand that the word "end" always has this large social reference, and includes the highest social service of which the man is capable. If we attempt to apply to particular private ends of our own what Aristotle applies to the universal end at which all men ought to aim, we shall make his teaching a pretext for the grossest crimes, and reduce it to little more than sophisticated selfishness. With this understanding of his terms, we may venture to plunge boldly into his system and state it in its most paradoxical and startling form.
We are not either good or bad at the start. Pleasure in itself is neither good nor bad. Laws in themselves are neither good nor bad. It is impossible to say with Plato that some faculties are so high that they always ought to be exercised, and others are so low that as a rule they ought to be suppressed. The right and wrong of eating and drinking, of work and play, of sex and society, of property and politics, lie not in the elemental acts involved. All of these things are right for one man in one set of circumstances, wrong for another man in another set of circumstances. We cannot say that a man who takes a vow of poverty is either a better or a worse man than a multi-millionnaire. We cannot say that the monk who takes a vow of celibacy is a purer man than one who does not. For the very fact that one is compelled to take a vow of poverty or celibacy is a sign that these elemental impulses are not effectively and satisfactorily related to the normal ends they are naturally intended to subserve. All attempts to put virginity above motherhood, to put poverty above riches, to put obscurity above fame are, from the Aristotelian point of view, essentially immoral. For they all assume that there can be badness in external things, wrong in isolated actions, vice in elemental appetites, and sin in natural passions; whereas Aristotle lays down the fundamental principle that the only place where either badness or wrong or vice or sin can reside is in the relation in which these external things and particular actions stand to the clearly conceived and deliberately cherished end which the man is seeking to promote. A simpler way of saying the same thing, but a way so simple and familiar as to be in danger of missing the whole point, is to say that virtue and vice reside exclusively in the wills of free agents. That, every one will admit. But will is the pursuit of ends. A will that seeks no ends is a will that wills nothing; in other words, no will at all. Whether an act is wrong or right, then, depends on the whole plan of life of which it is a part; on the relation in which it stands to one's permanent interests. For these many years I have defied class after class of college students to bring in a single example of any elemental appetite or passion which is intrinsically bad; which in all circumstances and relations is evil. And never yet has any student brought me one such case. If brandy will tide the weak heart over the crisis that follows a surgical operation, then that glass of brandy is just as good and precious as the dear life it saves. The proposition that sexual love is intrinsically evil, and those who take vows of celibacy are intrinsically superior, is true only on condition that racial suicide is the greatest good, and all the sweet ties of home and family and parenthood and brotherly love are evils which it is our duty to combat. To deny that wealth is good is only possible to him who is prepared to go farther and denounce civilisation as a calamity. He who brands ambition as intrinsically evil must be prepared to herd with swine, and share contentedly their fare of husks.