Project Gutenberg #73782
What I Believe
Bertrand Russell
1925Russell's short statement of his outlook on nature, the good life, moral rules, and the place of science in happiness.
Project Gutenberg #73782 Public domain in the United States Cover source Local typographic cover created for The Missing Workbook from public-domain source metadata
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are desired, and that right conduct is what conduces to them. Of course, if the definition of right conduct is to make a wide appeal, the ends must be such as large sections of mankind desire. If I defined right conduct as that which increases my own income, readers would disagree. The whole effectiveness of any ethical argument lies in its scientific part, i. e. in the proof that one kind of conduct, rather than some other, is a means to an end which is widely desired. I distinguish, however, between ethical argument and ethical education. The latter consists in strengthening certain desires and weakening others. This is quite a different process, which will be separately discussed at a later stage.
We can now explain more exactly the purport of the definition of the good life with which this chapter began. When I said that the good life consists of love guided by knowledge, the desire which prompted me was the desire to live such a life as far as possible, and to see others living it; and the logical content of the statement is that, in a community where men live in this way, more desires will be satisfied than in one where there is less love or less knowledge. I do not mean that such a life is “virtuous” or that its opposite is “sinful,” for these are conceptions which seem to me to have no scientific justification.