One more way of expressing our criticism upon the Kantian system shall be attempted, because it will supply a convenient opportunity of giving a definite answer to an ethical question of fundamental importance--the question which is the logically prior conception, the idea of good or the idea of right. Kant never thoroughly made up his mind about this question. He always started with the idea of right; and all his difficulties arose from the attempt to give a meaning to, and to find a content for, this idea of right without appealing to the idea of good. In our view the idea of good or value is logically the primary conception, though psychologically the idea of right may often in modern men be the more early developed. There is no attempt here to get rid of the ultimate unanalysable ought. The good is that which ought to be^[111]. The difference between the two terms is this: that the term right is applicable only to voluntary actions; the term good is applicable to many things besides acts. Entirely apart from the question who caused such things? I judge that pain or discordant music or ugly pictures (i.e. of course the enduring of pain by conscious beings, the listening to discords or the contemplation of bad pictures by conscious beings) are bad things. They seem to me bad whether they arise from chance or necessity or voluntary action. Only because I have so judged is there any ground for the judgement it is right, in so far as it is possible to get rid of these things; but, whether they can be got rid of or not, they are equally bad^[112]. The will that deliberately causes or refuses to fight against such things may be, and I believe is, a worse evil than the pain or the bad music or the ugly pictures. But unless these things were evils, the will that refused to remove them would not be evil either; its acts would not be acts of a wrongly directed will. Kant generally ends by coming round to this view--that the right or rational act is the act which wills the good. Unfortunately he did not see that with that admission his attempt to avoid the appeal to experience completely breaks down. It is possible, though it is irrational, to will particular acts without attending to the consequences which experience shows likely to result from them^[113]; it is impossible to pronounce that something is good until one knows what it is. No experience will tell us what is good unless we include in our idea of experience an unavowed judgement of value; but without experience of what a thing is it is impossible to say whether it is good or not. It is obvious that this necessity of experience for sound ethical judgements goes a long way to explain the actual divergences of moral codes. When the Caliph Omar (if the story be not a myth) ordered the Alexandrian library to be burned, it is probable that he knew very imperfectly what the Alexandrian library or any other library really was. I do not eny that there might be fanatics who knowing a good deal about the contents of these books would still have ordered them to be burnt; but it is probable that a more extensive acquaintance with their contents would have modified the Caliph's judgement. The consistent Kantian, i.e. a disciple of Kant in his most logical but least rational movements, ought to be able to say whether they should be burned without knowing what sort of books they were or even that they were books at all.(Bk. 1 Ch. 5 § 8 ¶ 1)

Our moral judgements are ultimately judgements of Value. The fundamental idea in Morality is the idea of Value, in which the idea of ought is implicitly contained. The advantage involved in the use of the term value lies in its freedom from many of the exaggerations and mystifications which have sometimes created a prejudice against the term ought, even in minds which have no prejudice against the reality which it signifies. The idea of good and the idea of right are, as it seems to me, correlative terms. It is implied in the idea of good that it ought to be promoted; the idea of right is meaningless apart from a good which right actions tend to promote. If, finally, we ask what is the relation of the idea of value to the idea of moral value, I should answer that all that has value has moral value, in the sense that it must be moral, in due proportion to the amount of that value, to promote it; but by moral value we generally mean the particular kind of value which we assign to a good character. That value is, as I believe, the greatest of all values. Pleasure is a good, and it is right for a man to promote it in himself as in others. We assign value to the pleasure, but we do not assign any particular value to the acts or to the characters from which it springs, since this promotion of private pleasure does not necessarily indicate a good character, and even the promotion of the highest ends may have no moral value when the promotion of such ends forms no part of the man's motive; only when we recognize a man's conduct as exhibiting the preference of the good because it is the good or the preference of some higher to some lower good for its own sake do we assign to it the peculiar kind and degree of value which we usually term moral value^[114].(Bk. 1 Ch. 5 § 8 ¶ 2)