“My dear sirs, what we want to know from you as ethical teachers, is not how people use a word; it is not even what kind of actions they approve, which the use of this word ‘good’ may certainly imply: what we want to know is simply what is good…” wrote G.E. Moore. We in the church are people who are called to create values and give the values of the kingdom to our people. But many of us fail in creating values and enriching lives; instead, we create money. We often indulge in crooked thinking and use cunning rationality even in matters of the church. We are no more morally right thinkers. We are considering the entire literature of value measurements. The term ‘value’ is one of the great words, and, like other such words its meaning is multiple and complex. Why be reasonable? Can this be answered without assuming the value of being reasonable and thereby begging the question? Am I morally obligated to be reasonable? Emmanuel Kant sought truth in his first critique, which is the philosophical background of modern science. But in the second critique he sought goodness, because he was trying to seek morality. It is here that he considers values. The logic of science is surely different from the logic of ethics. It is not enough to construct sciences; it also has to be used in order to criticize the still ruling value philosophy. G.E. Moore makes his mind clear: “We should not get very far with our science, if we were bound to hold that everything which was yellow meant exactly the same thing as ‘yellow.’ We should find we had to hold that an orange was exactly the same thing as a stool, a piece of paper, a lemon, anything you like. We could prove any number of absurdities; but should we be nearer to the truth? Why then should it be different with good?” There is no meaning in saying that pleasure is good unless good is something different from pleasure. There is a difference between the world of fact and the world of value. For example, Sigmund Freud said, “Religion has not stood the test of science.” Religion and science each have their separate logic, and the logic of one must not be applied to the other in analysis. To be religious is one thing, to analyse being religious is another. Bertrand Russell never applied his logic to ethics. Newton never doubted that there could be a science of morality that is as certain as mathematics. If there is any ethical theory toward which we can claim a convergence of able minds from Plato and Aristotle down, we will find it in the science of ethics.

Moral sentences, which simply express moral judgments, do not say anything. They are pure expressions of feeling and as such do not come under the category of truth and falsehood. They are unverifiable for the same reason as a cry of pain or a word of command is unverifiable, because they do not express genuine propositions. To fulfil and satisfy what nature prompts is not only good; it is what goodness means. In thus defining goodness, we can define duty as well. Duty is the voice of our own nature, the imperative of our own reason. Nothing is good but consciousness, and consciousness in the joint form of the satisfaction and fulfilment of impulse. Goodness consists in the fullness of life, in the fulfilment of human nature. In the light of this, the “facts” of moral life are values. Value involves obligation, but clearly perceives that this is simply an obligation resting upon persons and not on a special kind of existence or even a claim upon existence.

The artist usually starts with the intuition of certain values which a picture or a poem must have and only then encounters the actual characters – forms, images, rhythms – in which they are incorporated. When Raphael was asked what it was that he was copying in his pictures, he responded: ‘unacerta idea che mi vien in mente.’ (some idea that occurs to me). The sentence de gustibusnondisputandum is a crass error. It supposes that in the realm of ‘tastes,’ that is, of valuation, there exist no evident objectivities to which our disputes can be referred to as ultimate recourse. The truth is the opposite: every ‘taste’ of ours tastes is a value and every value is an object independent of our moods. At present, no language of value exists in the sense in which mathematics or to number is the language of science. Rather, a variety of value languages exists. Pascal wrote, “Our whole dignity consists in thought, let us endeavour to think well: this is the principle of ethics.”