Note 25 — Chapter III

The ethical character of acts depends on the worth of the agent and the object. Is it right to kill or to enslave a fellowman? We do not hesitate to kill an animal, or to harness horses to vehicles, or to use them as beasts of burden. Why not kill men, or use them as beasts of burden in like manner?—Only because they possess a worth which gives them a different standing.

Is it on grounds of sympathy that I should observe the so-called moral rules? But if I am not sympathetic by nature, why should I be subject to censure in case I refrain from displaying a tenderness which I do not feel? Why should I sympathize with the pleasures and pains of fellow human beings any more than with the pleasures and pains of inferior sentient creatures, unless men have worth? And worth, as will appear in the subsequent chapters, signifies indispensableness in a perfect whole. No detached thing has worth. No part of an incomplete system has worth. Worth belongs to those to whom it is attributed in so far as they are conceived of as not to be spared, as representing a distinctive indispensable preciousness, a mode of being without which perfection would be less than perfect.

So that morality depends on the attribution of worth to men, and worth depends on the formation in the mind of an ideal plan of the whole—or instead of a complete plan let me say more precisely a rule of relations whereby the plan is itself progressively developed.