ABSTRACT
T. H. Green seems to be attempting here to extend such Utilitarian insights as had in his view proven essential for meaningful political and social reform, and had served to destroy the basis of aristocratic dominance. Green never really gave explicit formulation to the vital prerequisite for a developmental view of man's essence: a concept of action. His substitute for it was probably his notion of individual appropriation; and it is this that ties him to the Utilitarian outlook and prevents the break from Utilitarianism that he hoped his theory would accomplish. Green's critique of naturalist ethics follows from his analysis of empiricist epistemology. Clearly, an empiricist position implies the moral view that the test of the rightness or wrongness of actions must be based solely upon whether such actions promote the presence of pleasure and absence of pain – the Utilitarian creed.
