ependent 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."

A similar thought underlies Croce's division of the Practical into the
two spheres of the Economic and the Ethical. "The economic activity is
that which wills and effects only what corresponds to the conditions of
fact in which a man finds himself; the ethical activity is that which,
although it correspond to these conditions, also refers to something
that transcends them. To the first correspond what are called
individual ends, to the second universal ends; the one gives rise to the
judgment concerning the greater or less coherence of the action taken in
itself, the other to that concerning its greater or less coherence in
respect to the universal end, which transcends the individual.[69]
Utilitarianism is according to Croce an attempt to reduce the Ethical to
the Economic form, although the utilitarians as men attempt in various
ways to make a place for that distinction which as philosophers they
would suppress. "Man is not a consumer of pleasures. He is a creator of
life." With this claim of the distinctive, synthetic, character of the
moral consciousness and of the impossibility of testing the worth of
ideals by cosmic laws, or by gratification of particular wants as
measured by pleasure, I have no issue. The analysis of the moral
judgment made above points out just how it is that good is synthetic. It
is