If we are dissatisfied with custom and habit and seek to take philosophy for the guide of life we have two possibilities: (1) we may look for the good, and treat right and duty as subordinate concepts which indicate the way to the good, that is, consider them as good as a means, or (2) we may seek first to do right irrespective of consequences, in the belief that in willing to do right we are already in possession of the highest good. In either case we may consider our standards and values either as in some sense fixed or as in the making.[68] We may suppose that good is objective and absolute, that right is discovered by a rational faculty, or we may consider that in regarding good as objective we have not made it independent of the valuing process and that in treating right as a standard we have not thereby made it a fixed concept to be discovered by the pure intellect. The position of this paper will be (1) that good while objective is yet objective as a value and not as an essence or physical fact; (2) that a social factor in value throws light upon the relation between moral and other values; (3) that right is not merely a means to the good but has an independent place in the moral consciousness; (4) that right while signifying order does not necessarily involve a timeless, eternal order since it refers to an order of personal relations; (5) that the conception of right instead of being a matter for pure reason or even the "cognitive faculty" shows an intimate blending of the emotional and intellectual and that this appears particularly in the conception of the reasonable.
(1) We begin with the question of the synthetic and objective character of the good. With G. E. Moore as with the utilitarians the good is the ultimate concept. Right and duty are means to the good. Moore and Rashdall also follow Sidgwick in regarding good as unique, that is, as "synthetic." Sidgwick emphasized in this especially the point that moral value cannot be decided by physical existence or the course of evolution, nor can the good be regarded as meaning the pleasant. Moore and Russell reinforce this. However true it may be that pleasure is one among other good things or that life is one among other good things, good does not mean either pleasure or survival. Good means just "good."