At the present time Tribunals, appointed under an Act of Parliament, are engaged all over England in dealing with claims to exemption from military service based on the ground of “conscientious objection” to taking part directly or indirectly in warlike activities. Now it is no part of the professional business of moral philosophers to tell people what they ought or ought not to do or to exhort them to do their duty. Moral philosophers, as such, have no special information, not available to the general public, about what is right and what is wrong; nor have they any call to undertake those hortatory functions which are so adequately performed by clergymen, politicians, leader-writers, and wireless loudspeakers. But it is the function of a moral philosopher to reflect on the moral concepts and beliefs which he or others have; to try to analyse them and draw distinctions and clear up confusions in connection with them; and to see how they are inter-related and whether they can be arranged in a coherent system. Now there can be no doubt that the popular notions of “conscience” and “conscientious action” are extremely vague and confused. So I think that, by devoting this paper to an attempt to elucidate them, I may succeed in being topical without being impertinent.

In the pages that are to follow I shall try to discuss the validity and the sufficiency of a celebrated moral principle of Kant's “So act as to treat humanity, whether in thine own person or in that of any other, always as an end, never merely as a means.” In doing so, I shall say quite a lot about Kant, because his statement of the principle has had great influence, because he gave his genius to its elaboration, because he illustrated and defended it in ways that deserve a close examination. On the other hand, my principal purpose is not to supply a piece of Kantian exegesis interspersed with sundry criticisms. In the main I want to discuss the principle, as people say, “on its merits.” In so far as I discuss Kant himself, I am doing so with the object of eliciting these merits.

In the Platonic dialogue that bears his name Protagoras,1 in a myth (320c–324d) and in a logos (324d–328b) positively affirms the absolute character of universal moral values, such as force themselves upon all men; this makes one think that the famous man-measure dictum was subservient to the ends that the sophist had in view as a teacher of areté. Indeed, his condemnation in that dialogue of the sophists who, like Hippias, included in their teaching mathematical and naturalistic studies (318d-e), must be connected with the criticism of mathematics reported by an Aristotelian text.2 These studies, that is to say purely theoretic disciplines, were considered by Protagoras not only useless for the spiritual formation of men and citizens, but also void of any certitude and objectivity whatever.3 We feel therefore allowed to suggest that also the man-measure principle had to perform an office of the same kind: to show that natural philosophy (which then comprehended all theoretical knowledge) could not yield an objective knowledge of φ?σις which formed its object, because such knowledge is denied to man. Mistrust of the general conceptions of the cosmology of physiologists was widely spread at that time, and the authors of some medical treatises of the Hippocratean corpus used it to justify the construction of a discipline founded on the study of empirical materials interpreted rationally and not with the general hypotheses void of certainty

When travellers are overcome by cold, it is said, they lie down quite happily and die. They put up no fight for life. If they struggled, they would keep warm; but they no longer want to struggle. The cold in themselves takes away the will to fight against the cold around them.

IN an earlier article I urged that the State presupposes an agreement to be governed on the part of its members. One common objection to this view was discussed at some length. It remains to deal with three further objections. (2) It will perhaps be urged that a particular individual, or a small minority, would not be able to withdraw from the State if they wished to do so. If anyone decided that he did not wish to have anything to do with the State, whether it be the State in general, or some particular State, he could not give effect to his decision. Compulsion, as exercised against such persons, cannot be said to rest in any sense on their own consent. To put the same point in another way, “The claim that government rests on consent would never be listened to by a magistrate.” 1