C. D. Broad (1887-    ), Fellow of Trinity College, Cambridge, and Knightbridge Professor of Moral Philosophy in the University of Cambridge, has been for the past thirty years one of the most important and influential of contemporary philosophers. The breadth of his philosophic interests will be indicated by the titles of his best known books: Scientific Thought (1923), The Mind and Its Place In Nature (1925), and Five Types of Ethical Theory (1930). More recently a number of his papers have been collected and reprinted in Ethics and the History of Philosophy (1952) and Religion, Philosophy and Psychical Research (1953). His ethical views, to which this short article is confined, are cofined, are contained in Five Types of Ethical Theory, in his two recent volumes, and in a number of papers appearing in professional journals.

Broad maintains that it is not the business of the moral philosopher to tell people what they ought to do, for he has no special information of this sort to offer. Rather, it is the philosopher's unique task to reflect on moral concepts and beliefs, to analyze and clarify them, to seek out the various relations between them, and to see what evidence, if any, there is for them. In short, his task is critical, not speculative or didactic.

Broad has devoted a good part of his time to a careful and detailed examination of the philosophical views of others. In Five Types of Ethical Theory, for instance, he marshals, dissects, and comments on the views of Spinoza, Butler, Hume, Kant and Sidgwick. He has also been much concerned with the problems raised by men like G. E. Moore and Sir David Ross, his contemporaries, and with the controversies stirred up by the protagonists of "naturalism," "non-naturalism" and "emotivism." Unfortunately, as valuable as Broad's analyses of theories and problems are, they do not lend themselves to a brief summary, for they are too many and too diverse. We can touch on them only insofar as they throw light on Broad's own views.

A summary of Broad's views will be misleading if it suggests that he has expounded, elaborated, and defended an ethical theory. He has not. On the contrary, as suggested above, he has concerned himself mainly with the analysis and evaluation of the views of others. Sometimes he gives the impression that he can make a more valuable contribution to ethical theory by clarifying current issues than by arguing for yet another theory, and at other times he is clearly of the opinion that the complexity of the problems forestalls any definite choice between proposed solutions. But, for whatever reasons, he presents his own views very infrequently and then only briefly, and usually as a prologue or appendage to the main business at hand. For instance, in Five Types of Ethical Theory, the first two hundred and eighty pages are devoted to a searching examination of five important ethical theories while only the last five pages are given over to a statement of his own position. Despite this characteristic of his work, the several brief statements he does make and the tenor of thirty years writing reveal a general pattern. In The Mind and Its Place in Nature and Five Types of Ethical Theory he asserts very briefly a position which is stated less firmly but elaborated in greater detail in later papers. It will become obvious as we proceed that his views have been greatly influenced by the thought of men like Moore and Ross.

Broad starts by noting that there are two quite different classes of moral concept -- that of "good" and related concepts like "valuable" and "desirable" and that of "right" and related concepts like "fitting," "duty," and "obligation." Consequently the task he sets himself is that of investigating the nature of each of these sorts of concept and the relations between them. He says that good and right are characteristics (relations or properties), and thereby commits himself to the view that moral utterances are propositions, a view he affirms more vigorously in later writings when he rejectl emotivism. Having said that good and right are characteristics he goes on, as Moore had, to consider whether they are "natural" or "non-natural." In an effort to clarify this distinction, he suggests that a "natural" characteristic is either a) one that we become aware of by inspecting our sense-data or introspecting our experiences, or b) one thai is definable in terms of the sort of characteristic just mentioned together with the concepts of substance and cause. Using this criterion, he finds that righ and good are non-natural characteristics, and supplements this finding by arguing that no naturalistic analysis of these concepts elaborated so far is at all plausible and that it is "very likely, though not absolutely certain that Ethical Naturalism is false. . . ." He thinks it is obvious that right and good are not pure relations and therefore that they are properties of some kind, but he is not as sure as Moore is that they are simple and unanalyzable. He is "almost certain" that "right" cannot be defined in terms of "good," hence suggesting that right may be a simple non-natural property, but he thinks it is possible that "x is good" means "x is such that it would be fitting object of desire to any mind which had an adequate idea of its non-ethical characteristics," thus suggesting that good may be a relational property.

Since an a priori notion is, by definition, the notion of a characteristic that is not manifested in sensation or introspection, and since a non-natural characteristic, by definition, is not manifested in sensation or introspection, it follows that the concepts of non-natural characteristics like good and right are a priori concepts. He supposes, as a corollary to this conclusion, that non-natural properties are apprehended by some cognitive act. He also says that the apprehension of these properties is frequently accompanied by uniquely moral emotions like moral approval or disapproval, remorse and indignation, and suggests that we might not have become aware of the moral properties in the first instance if these moral emotions had not been roused in particular situations.

An act is never just right, it is right because it possesses some property that makes it right. For instance, an act is right if it is an act of showing gratitude to a benefactor, of keeping a promise, of telling the truth, or of avoiding the infliction of pain. Because an act cannot be right if it does not possess such a property and because it must be right or have a tendency to be right if it does possess such a property, these are said to be "right-making" or "right-inclining" properties. Similarly, a thing will not be good unless it is characterized by a "good-making" or "good-inclining" property like that of being pleasant. Since there is a necessary connection of the sort just described between right or good on the one hand and right- or good-making properties on the other, general moral statements such as "It is wrong to deliberately mislead others," "It is wrong to kill other people," and "Pleasure is good" are necessarily true. Since these statements are not analytic, there are synthetic a priori statements in ethics. The truth of judgments about particular situations, however, is not so evident. Since there is a multiplicity of both good- and right-making characteristics, it is frequently the case that a number of morally relevant factors are found in a given situation. For instance, an action might be right insofar as it involves returning a kindness to a benefactor but wrong insofar as it involves telling a lie. In situations of this sort it is necessary to weigh all the relevant right-making factors and come to a conclusion about the "net-fittingness" of an action to the situation. Because this can be difficult (there are no general rules for doing this), we are frequently far less certain about the judgment than we are about the various principles that apply to the situation in which it was made. There is yet another sort of error inherent in the making of judgments, the sort that arises when the judge is not aware of or cannot ascertain all the morally relevant matters of fact. If it turns out that the judgment was mistaken, then it was "materially wrong," but it may still be "formally right" provided that the error stemmed wholly from unavoidable ignorance or misinformation.

Broad concludes that the multiplicity of good- and right-making properties defeats both the attempt to systematize value judgments by explaining all values in terms of some one ultimate sort of value and the attempt to systematize moral judgments by justifying them all in terms of some one ultimate moral principle or rule. There are a number of self-evident, independent value statements and many self-evident independent moral principles. Consequently he rejects both the value theory and the moral theory of the Utilitarian. At the same time, he emphasizes that he does not go to the other extreme, as he believes some Intuitionists do, to deny that the goodness or evil an act produces is irrelevant to the question of right and wrong. The characteristic of producing good, he insists, is one of many right-making characteristics.

It is hard to determine how much of this general theory Broad was prepared to accept at any given time and to what extent it represents his present views. As I mentioned at the outset, the main tenets were affirmed very briefly in some of his earlier writings and the implications of some of them were examined in greater detail in later writings. But in the very places where he does elaborate on them he seems least inclined to commit himself to them. For instance, in an article entitled "Moore's Ethical Doctrines" (contained in The Philosophy of G. E. Moore, ed. Paul A. Schlipp, New York, 1943), he weakens his earlier position by saying that it is not at all certain that "good" is the name of a property. He goes on to state as a conditional conclusion that if good is a property it is a non-natural property and the ideal of good is an a priori concept. According to the position he took in Five Types of Ethical Theory, he should be committed to these views but in this article he says simply that anyone who thinks good is a property will be so committed. Again, he had said earlier that there is a necessary connection between good and the good-making property and that there are, consequently, synthetic a priori statements, but here he says only that if the connection is a necessary one then there are synthetic a priori statements, and if there are synthetic a priori statements then the! widely held doctrine that all a priori statements are analytic must be mistaken. But having pointed out that the doctrine that there is a necessary connection between good and good-making properties is not compatible with the doctrine that all a priori statements are analytic, he does not try to choose between them. In an article written several years later ("Moral sense Theories in Ethics," Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, 45, 1944-45) he says he feels the strength of both of these apparently incompatible positions but is not sure enough of either to reject the other. In the view of statements like these it is difficult to say exactly how much of the original theory Broad is still prepared to accept.

In trying to determine what Broad s present views are there is another difficulty of a different but perhaps related sort. Some of his later articles reveal a more sympathetic attitude towards naturalism than the earlier ones do, thus suggesting that his views may have changed considerably. In "Moral sense Theories in Ethics," for instance, he says there are three sorts of moral theory worth discussing: Interjectionism or Emotivism, the Objective theory according to which right and good are non-naturalistic characteristics belonging to the act and apprehended by us (the view he was earlier disposed to accept), and a subjectivistic form of naturalism which I shall describe in a moment. He dismisses emotivism without discussion. The Objective theory states that right is a property we become aware of and this implies, according to Broad, that seeing that an act is right is analogous to seeing that an object is yeliow; that is, when we see that an act is right we must be having a peculiar sensation or something like a sensation. Broad rejects the theory on the ground that this is not so, and goes on to defend a variety of subjectivism. According to subjectivism, he says, a moral judgment is a judgment concerned with some peculiar experience that human beings have when they realize that an act has a right-making property. This experience will be either some sort of sensation or some sort of emotion. Since he has already denied the first alternative, he is left with the second. After mentioning various right-making properties he concludes "In respect of each of these aspects of the act and its consequences I have a tendency to feel towards the act a certain kind of moral emotion of a certain degree of intensity. . . . It seems to me that I call the act "right" or "wrong" in accordance with my final moral-emotional reaction to it, after viewing it under all these various aspects, and after trying to allow for any permanent or temporary emotional peculiarities in myself which may make my emotional reaction eccentric or unbalanced." Although this conclusion is stated in the first person it is difficult to determine whether it is Broad's own considered view, for he is not unequivocal and he discusses it nowhere else. But if it is, it marks a radical change from his earlier views. This interest in naturalism is also reflected in his recent sympathetic exposition of the moral views of the late Axel Hägerström.

The most probable conclusion is that Broad has always preferred to maintain the aloofness of the critic, and that despite tendencies to be attracted to one or another of the theories with which he has been most concerned, he has never given wholehearted allegiance to any. This would explain the brevity and infrequency of his firm statements, the tentative nature of others, and the differences between them. But insofar as there has been a dominant pattern in his thought it has been that sketched in the body of this article.