your organism,
and its opportunity for exercise in certain definable and predictable
circumstances. This is what you mean when you acknowledge that _you
will desire_ to go to the play {59} to-morrow. But the evidence of the
existence of still another interest, in this case mine, is no less
convincing. Like your own latent interest, it does not at the instant
move you. But it has the specific character of an interest, and its
place in the existent world through its relation to my organism.
Recognizing it as an interest, you cannot in the given case fail to
observe that it qualifies your action as good or bad, through being
affected by it. If your action fulfils your interest and thwarts mine,
it is again mixed, both good and bad. In order to define the good act
in the premises it is necessary, as in the previous case, to define a
purpose which shall embrace both interests and regulate action with a
view to their joint fulfilment.

It is customary to argue this principle of impartiality, according to
which the merely personal consideration is declared to be irrelevant to
the determination of moral value, by a critique of _egoism_. The
_reductio ad absurdum_ of egoism has recently been formulated by G. E.
Moore in as thorough and conclusive a manner as could be desired.[8]
That writer analyzes egoism into a series of propositions all of which
are equivocal, false, or, so far as true, non-egoistic in their
meaning. I shall reduce Moore's propositions to two, and modify them
to suit my own conception of goodness.

{60}

As an egoist you may, in the first place, affirm that _there are no
interests but yours_. This proposition, however, is manifestly false.
Accept any definition of an interest or desire that you will, and I can
find indefinitely many cases answering your definition and falling
outside the class of those which you claim as your own. None of these,
if it conforms fully to your definition, is any the less an interest or
desire than the one that happens to be moving you at the instant.
There would be as good ground for saying that your brother was the only
brother, or your book the only book. Even if you abate the rigor of
the proposition, you cannot escape its essential falsity. If you
affirm that there are no interests but the interests of _each_, or that
_each_ man's interests are the only interests, you flatly contradict
yourself. If you affirm that your interests are of superior
importance, t