ABSTRACT
Hence the first task of Ethics is to investigate the nature of ‘good’ in general. This once grasped, the nature of ‘good conduct’ will follow from it, as a corollary, important only in as much as it might furnish the means of attainment of ‘THE GOOD’. Moore takes the primacy of query number one over query number two to be established irrevocably by this argument. ‘Cruelty is evil’ as a moral judgment is, therefore, not based upon the judgment ‘Pain is evil’, but on the contrary, in so far as pain may be said to be morally evil it is so as a potential ingredient of ‘cruelty’. The spectator will have become executor, or rather spectator-cum-executor. The ultimate ground of the ‘harming of a sentient being’ seems then to lie not in the amount or nature of the pain inflicted but in the degradation of one sentient being into a means of procuring pleasure or profit for another sentient being.
