Page:Ethics (Moore 1912).djvu/33

words, that to say that a man acted rightly does not necessarily imply that, if he had done anything else instead, he would have acted wrongly. And this is certainly in accordance with common usage. We all do constantly imply that sometimes when a man was right in doing what he did, yet he might have been equally right, if he had acted differently: that there may be several different alternatives open to him, none of which can definitely be said to be wrong. This is why our theory refuses to commit itself to the view that an action is right only where it produces more pleasure than any of the other possible alternatives. For, if this were so, then it would follow that no two alternatives could ever be equally right: some one of them would always have to be the right one, and all the rest wrong. But it is precisely in this respect that it holds that the conceptions of “ought” and of “duty” differ from the conception of what is “right.” When we say that a man “ought” to do one particular action, or that it is his “duty” to do it, we do imply that it would be wrong for him to do anything else. And hence our