ABSTRACT
The chapter focuses on Green’s ethical account of the human condition. While Green builds his philosophical system on a metaphysical theory of knowledge and human consciousness, his moral psychology further expounds the ethical significance of the consciousness theory and its ontological implication. Section one depicts Green’s view on the modes and development of human consciousness. As consciousness separates objects from ourselves, its different modes, such as desire, intellect, will, and practical reason, aim to reconcile the separation. Yet, at the moment we achieve that reconciliation, we negate the features defining us human. In other words, in Green’s account we cannot achieve our ultimate goods qua human beings. Section two then discusses Green’s idea of the good by reference to the condition of human beings. As the ultimate good of human life, the perfect reconciliation, is unachievable, our innate drive will still keep pushing us to find a way to achieve the ideal. Based on this view of the good and the human condition, Green then criticises hedonism and utilitarianism and he thinks that the two ethical doctrines helped to propaganda atomistic individualism. Yet, if there is an universal ultimate good of human beings as our telos, it seems that the end of our free actions is predetermined and the value of individual freedom is in doubt. In section three, I thus discuss criticism of Green’s objective account of the telos of human beings. In section four, I then argue that Green’s account of the telos of human life is formal and abstract as the contents of human ends are various and can only be defined by individuals freely and jointly as their common goods. So, an alternative way which Green indicates for human beings to realise their worth is to devote themselves to the community and help to maintain and accomplish the common goods.
