acid or the product of 9 and 7. As Dr. Rashdall
has put it, when we say that a given act is right, we do not pretend to
be infallible. We know that we may fall into mistakes about right and
wrong just as we may make mistakes in working a multiplication sum. But
we do mean to say that _if_ our own verdict 'that act is right' is a
true one, then the verdict of any one who retorts 'that act is wrong' is
false, just as when we state the result of our multiplication we mean to
assert that _if_ we have done the sum correctly any one else who brings
out a different answer has worked it wrongly. Indeed, we might convince
ourselves that these verdicts are not meant to be expressions of private
and personal liking in a still simpler way. All of us must be aware that
the line of action we pronounce 'right' is not always what we like nor
the conduct we call 'wrong' what we dislike. We often like doing what we
fully believe to be wrong and dislike doing what we believe right,
without being in the least confused in our moral verdicts by this
collision of liking and conviction. So again it is a common thing to
like one poem or picture better than another, and yet to be fully
persuaded that the work we like the less is the better work of art.
Indeed, the whole process of moral and aesthetic education may be said
to exist just in learning to like most what is really best.

All this, put into so many words, may seem too simple to call for
statement, but it makes nonsense of a great deal that has been written
about ethics of late years. It disposes once for all of the theory that
moral and aesthetic verdicts are 'subjective', that is, that they mean
no more than that the persons who make them have certain personal likes
and dislikes of which these verdicts are a record. Of course, it might
be urged that all of us do indeed mean to express truths which are
independent of our personal likings when we make moral and aesthetic
judgements, but that we never succeed in doing so. A man might
conceivably hold that there is no real distinction between right and
wrong or between beautiful and ugly, but that it is a universal illusion
of mankind to suppose that there are such distinctions. Or he might hold
that the distinctions are real, but that we do not know where to draw
them. He might suggest that some ways of acting are really right and
others really wrong, but that we do not know which are the right acts
and so regularly confuse what we like