## 1. Green's Life, Works, and Influence



Green was born in Birkin, Yorkshire, April 7, 1836. His mother died
when he was very young, and he was educated by his father, Valentine
Green, until he attended Rugby School in 1850. Green entered Balliol
College, Oxford University, in 1855, where he was taught by Benjamin
Jowett and Charles Parker. Under Jowett's mentorship, Green was
introduced to both classical Greek and eighteenth and nineteenth
century German philosophy and earned a First in Greats.



Green remained at Oxford after receiving his degree. He was appointed
as a Lecturer in Ancient and Modern History at Balliol in 1860 and was
elected Whyte's Professor of Moral Philosophy at Oxford in 1877,
a position he held until his death in 1882. Green was among those
responsible for reforming the philosophical curriculum to include
modern as well as ancient sources. His influence on undergraduates was
considerable--inspiring many students by his intellectual, moral,
and spiritual seriousness.



Green became active in Liberal Party politics in the mid-1860s. In
1876 he was elected to the Oxford town council; he was the first don
to serve as a representative of the citizens rather than the
University of Oxford. His principal policy reforms concerned land
reform, labor regulation, education, and temperance. He supported the
Irish Land Act of 1881, which sought to secure property rights of
peasant farmers in Ireland. In education, he argued that primary
education should be compulsory and state-financed. He served as an
assistant commissioner on the Taunton Commission on Secondary
Education in 1865-66, arguing for significant reforms in
education to equalize opportunity for higher education. He was a
member of the Oxford School board and played a part in the foundation
of the Oxford School for Boys. He was an important factor in the
university extension movement, he sought to open university education
to women, and he advocated the use of scholarships and other subsidies
to make a university education available to the working classes.



Green was married in 1871 to Charlotte Symonds. The Greens had no
children. Never a man of robust health, Green fell ill with sepsis in
1882 and died on March 15, just a few days before his forty-sixth
 birthday.[1]



Green published a fairly small number of articles, reviews, and
pamphlets during his lifetime. He wrote the influential critical
commentary on Hume's *Treatise of Human Nature*, which
was part of *The Philosophical Works of David Hume*, that he
and T.H. Grose edited and published in 1874. In addition, he wrote a
three-part article "Can There Be a Natural Science of
Man?" published in *Mind* in 1882, the year he died.
These two works reflect metaphysical and epistemological themes that
were incorporated into Book I of Green's *Prolegomena to
Ethics*, published posthumously in 1883. In addition,
Green's "Lecture on Liberal Legislation and the Freedom of
Contract" was published in 1881 (*Works* III).
Green's other main philosophical works were published
posthumously. This includes Green's most important work, the
*Prolegomena to Ethics*. The *Prolegomena* was
substantially completed prior to Green's death, except for
20-30 pages which he had hoped to add. At Green's
instructions, A.C. Bradley oversaw the *Prolegomena*'s
publication in
 1883.[2]
 Other important posthumous publications include his essay "On
the Different Senses of 'Freedom' as Applied to Will and
to the Moral Progress of Man," his Lectures on the Philosophy of
Kant, and his *Lectures on the Principles of Political
Obligation* (all in *Works* II).



Green's metaphysical, ethical, and political views were
influential, especially in Britain (Nettleship 1888; Richter 1964).
Because Green's most important work was published posthumously,
his direct influence on others results largely from his teaching,
public lectures, and political activities. Though Green sometimes
despaired of his ability to present idealist principles in a clear and
rigorous fashion, he nonetheless inspired many students and peers by
his intellectual, moral, and spiritual seriousness (*Works* V
444-48,
 485).[3]
 His metaphysical and ethical views were sympathetically received and
developed in Britain by Bernard Bosanquet, A.C. Bradley, F.H. Bradley,
Edward Caird, R.B. Haldane, J.S. Mackenzie, J.H. Muirhead, R.L.
Nettleship, Hastings Rashdall, D.G. Ritchie, Arnold Toynbee, and
William Wallace.



Green's political influence was also significant. Beyond the
specific economic, political, and educational reforms for which Green
advocated, he had an important impact on the direction of the Liberal
Party in Britain. His egalitarian concern with human perfection,
especially his insistence that laws and institutions serve the common
good, provided an intellectual foundation for the development of a new
form of liberalism that required the state not simply to forbear from
interfering in the liberties and opportunities of its citizens but
also to provide various positive conditions and resources on which
citizens may draw in pursuing better lives. Despite significant
differences among them, a number of influential figures in the New
Liberalism can claim to be heirs of Green's political
philosophy, including Bosanquet, Ritchie, and L.T. Hobhouse.


## 2. Idealist Metaphysics and Epistemology



The most systematic presentation of Green's idealist metaphysics
and epistemology occurs in the first book of the *Prolegomena*.
Green introduces his metaphysical and epistemological inquiries in
response to a naturalistic approach to ethical theory that he thinks
is prominent in British moral philosophy. He associates ethical
naturalism with hedonism and focuses on the utilitarian tradition,
especially John Stuart Mill and Henry Sidgwick (*PE* SS2).
Green associates naturalism with a kind of empiricism that attempts to
construct knowledge on the basis of the senses, uncorrupted by the
understanding. But Green thinks that there can be no empirical
knowledge without operations of the understanding and concludes that a
purely naturalistic or empirical science of morals is impossible
(*PE* SS8; cf. *Works* II 83-85).



Green has four main aims in the first book of the
*Prolegomena*. (1) He wants to reject the empiricist view that
knowledge can be analyzed into two separable components--the
deliverances of the senses and the operations of the
understanding--in which what is given by nature is real and the
contributions of the understanding are not (*PE*
SSSS9-10, 20, 70). By contrast, Green argues, even the
simplest experience involves operations of the understanding and
relations to other elements of a self-conscious mind. (2) The attack
on empiricism is supposed to support the idealist claim that nature is
the product of the understanding (*PE* SS20). Green's
attack on empiricism is clearly indebted to Kant's claims in the
*Critique of Pure Reason*, especially Kant's account of
the synthetic unity of apperception in the Transcendental Analytic.
But, in defending idealism, Green argues that Kant did not carry his
idealist principles to their logical conclusion (*PE*
SS41); he rejects the Kantian dualism of appearances and
things-in-themselves (*PE* SSSS11, 30-41). (3) In
order for the idealist to distinguish between appearance and reality,
it is necessary to posit an "eternal" and
"unalterable" system of relations in a self-conscious
corporate agent that includes the finite systems of relations
contained in the self-conscious minds of individual persons
(*PE* SSSS13, 26, 69). (4) Though much of the first
book of the *Prolegomena* is concerned with the role of
self-consciousness in apparently discrete episodes of experience,
Green is also concerned with the role of self-consciousness in
knowledge. Knowledge requires more than acting on appearances; it
involves assenting to true appearances for good reasons. This requires
the ability to distance oneself from appearances and to assess the
evidence for appearances, especially their congruence with other
elements of consciousness. This sort of epistemic responsibility
requires self-consciousness.


### 2.1 Empiricism and Skepticism



Green is concerned with a form of empiricism that he finds in
commonsense, as well as philosophical, thought (*PE* SS20).
Though Green believes that Locke's *Essay* was largely
responsible for making empiricism philosophically influential, he
thinks that only Hume adheres to empiricist principles consistently
(*Works* I 1-5, 132) and that, as a result, the full
metaphysical and epistemological difficulties with empiricism become
clear only in Hume's work, especially the *Treatise*. The
empiricist program on which Green focuses sees all knowledge as
resting on the deliverances of the senses. On this view, knowledge is
built up from a foundation of simple discrete sensory experiences. In
this sort of experience, the mind is supposed to play a purely passive
role. The mind can then play an active role by performing various
operations on these simple experiences, such as combining simple
experiences to form complex ideas, comparing simple experiences for
similarity and dissimilarity, and abstracting the common elements out
of distinct ideas. In this tradition, reality is associated with
simple ideas delivered to the senses and contrasted with the
workmanship of the understanding and relations, which are in some
sense conventional or mind-dependent.



Green thinks that this empiricist program suffers rot at the
foundations; he thinks that simple sensory experience that is not
relational and in which the mind plays a purely passive role is
impossible. All experience presupposes certain formal conceptions that
the subject of experience employs--those of subject and object,
substance and quality, cause and effect, spatiality, and temporality
(*Works* I 12-13, 16-17, 40-41,
43-50).



Some sensory judgments are clearly relational, as when we perceive one
event A to be the cause of another B. To say that A is the cause of B
is clearly to relate one event to another. Similarly, to say that A is
a brittle thing is to say that A does or would stand in relations of a
certain sort to other things with which it might come into contact.
This shows that such relational judgments are products of the
understanding and not proper sensory judgments. Pure sensory judgments
would be simple and would not reflect the operation of the
understanding. Perhaps they include only reports of current
experience, such as "This thing appears red". But Green
believes that even these judgments are implicitly
relational--"imply sequence and degree"--and
require comparison of one element of experience with another
(*PE* SS46). To judge that something is a thing or
substance in which properties inhere presumably requires assigning it
some diachronic stability, however limited, and this requires seeing
it as persisting through some changes--as a part of some series
of events and not others. And to judge something red is to predicate a
property of an object, but properties or universals are, for the
empiricist, ideas formed by abstraction from our ideas of simple
experiences.



Green thinks that this conclusion about the relational character of
experience has important implications for skepticism. If the
empiricists are right that reality is given in experience untainted by
the understanding, then recognition of the relational character of
experience would imply skepticism (*PE* SSSS20, 25,
30).



Green himself accepts the skeptical conclusion insofar as he denies
the possibility of empirical knowledge of objects independently of how
they appear to us. There can be no knowledge of perceiver-independent
reality. But there can be knowledge of perceiver-dependent reality.
Green's idealism implies that this is the only defensible
conception of reality that allows us to avoid the skeptical
conclusion. He avoids the skeptical conclusion by denying empiricist
assumptions about what is real.



However, we can avoid skepticism without endorsing idealism if we
abandon the claim that relations are the workmanship of the
understanding, rather than given in experience. In particular,
Green's case for idealism is undermined if, as Moore and Russell
will later claim, relations can be given in experience and are not the
product of the understanding (see Hylton 1990: 110-112).



Green argues that the relational character of experience implies that
experience depends upon the activities of a self-consciousness agent
(*PE* SS70). Rejecting Hume's conception of the self
as illusory or no more than a bundle of sensations (*Treatise*
I.iv.6), Green argues that cognition requires a self that is
independent of and prior to experience (*PE* SS16, 32).
Green thinks that experience of the world presupposes the operations
of a self-conscious agent. Could the world itself be the product of a
self-conscious mind?


### 2.2 Idealism



Green recognizes that there are obstacles to this idealist conclusion
that account for the plausibility of empiricist and Kantian dualisms
between the world of appearances and things as they are independently
of appearance. We seem to need nature, as distinct from appearances,
in order to account for the source or causes of our appearances and to
account for fallibility--the possibility of error--which
seems to be a precondition of objectivity (*PE* SSSS13,
69). By contrast, the idealist, who denies a reality independent of
appearances, seems unable to explain the source of appearances and the
possibility of fallibility. This, Green thinks, is what leads Kant,
who rightly insists on the relational character of experience
(*PE* SS33), to distinguish between phenomena--things
as they do or can appear to us--and noumena--things as they
are in themselves, independently of how they appear to us (*PE*
SSSS11, 21-2, 30, 34).



But, like Kant's idealist critic J.G. Fichte, Green thinks that
this Kantian dualism is an unstable resting point between empirical
realism and idealism. He believes that the consistent application of
Kantian principles should lead to the rejection of
things-in-themselves (*PE*
 SS41).[4]
 Kant's dualism is both unacceptable and unnecessary. It is
unacceptable, because it leaves cognitive success a mystery.



> 
> 
> It leaves us without an answer to the question, how the order of
> relations, which the mind sets up, comes to reproduce those relations
> of the material world which are assumed to be of a wholly different
> origin and nature. (*PE* SS34)
> 
> 
> 



Indeed, Green thinks that the notion of things-in-themselves is empty,
because we can have no conception of things of themselves.



Green also thinks the Kantian dualism is unnecessary. The idealist can
explain error. We can never have access to things-in-themselves. But
we can have access to other appearances that, in various ways, might
represent a particular appearance as anomalous. Here, we check one
appearance by appeal to others (*PE* SSSS12-13,
64). On this view, we can distinguish between individual appearances
or clusters of experiences and reality but not between reality and the
entire system of appearances entertained by a particular mind
(*PE* SS13). We avoid answering the question how our
conceptions of the world come to match a world that is independent of
them by identifying reality and objectivity with the way it is
conceived holistically by a self-conscious mind (*PE*
SSSS10, 13, 36-37, 63).



Green says that reality and the system of appearances are equally
dependent on each other (*PE* SS36) and warns against the
misunderstanding of idealism that results from thinking that it
reduces facts to ideas (*PE* SS37). In the discussion of
the possibility of bare sensations, he does not deny that they would
be facts but insists that they would be facts that would not exist for
consciousness (*PE* SSSS48-9). This suggests, not
the metaphysical claim that facts are mind-dependent, but the
*epistemic* claim that only structured experience can be the
basis of knowledge. However, this epistemological claim is much less
radical than the metaphysical claim. Nor is it clear how it is
inconsistent with Kantian dualism; it appears to reaffirm Kant's
claim that we can only have knowledge of appearances and not to deny
that there are things-in themselves. Perhaps Green's claim is
only that we are unable to say anything about things-in-themselves,
even to say of them that they exist, without bringing them in relation
to a conscious subject (*PE* SS40).



But it's not even clear that Green can distinguish himself from
Kant in this way. For Green treats the subject of consciousness as
noumenon, outside of space and time (*PE* SSSS51, 52,
65). The subject of consciousness is a precondition of experience but
is completely distinct from any element of experience (*PE*
SS32). Because the self is not given in experience, it is, Green
thinks, outside of space and time (*PE* SSSS52, 65).
This dualism between elements of conscious experience that are in
space and time and the selves or epistemic agents who are
self-conscious and are outside of space and time resembles
Kant's own dualism between appearances and
things-in-themselves.



One might question Green's dualism and anti-naturalism.
Particular episodes of conscious experience presuppose a subject of
consciousness that is prior to and independent of those episodes of
consciousness. However, this does not imply that the self is prior to
and independent of all experience. Perhaps the self is a set or series
of experiences. Green may seem to rule out this possibility, because
he distinguishes between a succession of conscious states and
consciousness of a succession of such states and claims that
self-consciousness requires the latter, and not just the former
(*PE* SSSS52, 55, 62-65). But if conscious states
can take other conscious states as their objects, it is not clear why
the self could not be a suitably diachronically ordered and
interrelated set of conscious experiences. In any case, the need for a
self that is the bearer of discrete self-conscious experiences does
not preclude the self from being an object of consciousness, thought,
or knowledge. Indeed, Green's entire theoretical and practical
philosophy turns crucially on the possibility of self-consciousness
and its causal role in thought and action. As we will see, important
aspects of Green's views about moral responsibility presuppose
that the self is not outside space and time but rather plays a
fundamental causal role in responsible action.


### 2.3 Absolute Idealism



So far, Green's idealism would seem to involve a plurality of
local idealisms. Reality (or knowable reality) is the product of
finite self-conscious minds, with the result that there would be as
many realities (knowable realities) as there are finite
consciousnesses. Green finds such a conception of objectivity
insufficiently robust; objectivity requires a single inclusive and
eternal self-consciousness (*PE* SSSS26, 67, 69;
*Works* II 85).



> 
> 
> We must hold then that there is a consciousness for which the
> relations of fact, that form the object of our gradually attained
> knowledge, already and eternally exist; and that the growing knowledge
> of the individual is a progress towards this consciousness.
> (*PE* SS69)
> 
> 
> 



This corporate consciousness makes Green's version of idealism a
version of absolute idealism. The consciousnesses of individuals stand
to this single corporate consciousness much as stages or parts of a
person's life stand to the person.



Green's main argument for this form of absolute idealism seems
to be his concern with the possibility of error (*PE*
SS26). Just as we must make room for the possibility of local
error in an individual's conscious experience, so too we have to
allow for the possibility of systematic error within an
individual's conscious experience. But just as the idealist
explains the possibility of local individual error against the
background of larger patterns in the individual's experience, so
too she must explain the possibility of systematic individual error
against the background of some larger pattern of experience. In order
to find a larger pattern of experience, we must go outside individual
consciousness. But the experiences of other individuals cannot, as
such, form part of a common and larger set of experiences. If the
content and truth conditions of an individual's thoughts are
dependent on the relations between those thoughts and other elements
of his consciousness, then individuals, as such, would have
incommensurable experiences and thoughts. We can block this
relativistic conclusion if there is a single trans-historical
corporate mind of which particular finite minds are proper parts. For
then there will be a common determinant of the content and truth
conditions of the experiences and thoughts of different finite agents.
Green's view seems to be that knowledge and, hence, inquiry
presuppose absolute idealism (*PE* SS26).



Many idealist metaphysical views are responses to skeptical worries
that our realist conclusions about objective reality outstrip the
nature of our evidence. The idealist responds by denying that reality
is objective in a way that could exceed our evidence. Green's
idealism fits this pattern. By denying that our beliefs about the
world concern things in themselves, independently of the way that they
do or can seem to us, Green denies the skeptic's gap between our
evidence and reality.



There are various questions one might raise about this sort of
idealism. First, one might think that the idealist response concedes
too much to the skeptic. Perhaps we can and should accept a gap
between our evidence and the claims for which they are evidence,
resisting the skeptic's demand that evidence guarantee the truth
of the propositions it supports. We can concede that our justified
beliefs about the world are fallible. Second, we might note that
absolute idealism cannot guarantee truth either, because it outstrips
the knowledge available to individual conscious minds. The existence
of a corporate consciousness is something outside the conscious grasp
of any of us individually. This is especially true, given that Green
thinks that the corporate consciousness lies outside of space and
time. Third, Green can be read as offering a transcendental argument
that empirical knowledge is possible only on the assumption that
absolute idealism is true. Even if that argument were otherwise
successful, it would establish absolute idealism only if empirical
knowledge is possible. But if absolute idealism is the price of
empirical knowledge, then one might wonder if we do indeed have
empirical knowledge.


### 2.4 Self-Consciousness and Epistemic Responsibility



Much of the first book of the *Prolegomena* is concerned with
the role of self-consciousness in apparently discrete episodes of
experience in individual minds. But Green is also concerned with the
role of self-consciousness in knowledge. For the most part,
non-rational animals accept the way things appear to them--their
doxastic impulses. If they reason, they select instrumental means to
the satisfaction of their desires, but they do not reason about
whether things are as they appear. They lack the capacity to distance
themselves from their appearances, to assess the credentials of their
doxastic impulses, and to assent to appearances for good reasons.
Brutes may often have true appearances, but they are not
*epistemically responsible* with respect to their appearances.
On the assumption that knowledge requires something like epistemic
responsibility, and not just true belief, Green argues that knowledge
requires self-consciousness, inasmuch as epistemic responsibility
presupposes self-consciousness. For epistemic responsibility requires
a cognizer to be able to pose the question of whether she should
assent to an appearance and to assess the reasons for assent by
relating this appearance to other elements of her consciousness.
Indeed, any extended piece of reasoning requires consciousness of
different appearances as parts of a single system. For instance, I
recognize and trust the results of previous deliberations as premises
in my present deliberations. This requires a self that is conscious of
and synthesizes a set of appearances. On this view, knowledge
presupposes epistemic responsibility which presupposes
self-consciousness (*PE* SSSS84, 120, 125). This link
between knowledge and self-consciousness via epistemic responsibility
is arguably the most important metaphysical claim for understanding
Green's ethical argument in the rest of the
*Prolegomena*.


## 3. Idealist Ethics



The remaining three books of the *Prolegomena* concern issues
in moral psychology and ethical theory. Green criticizes forms of
ethical naturalism that attempt to ground morality in a science of
desire and pleasure. In particular, he targets those in the
utilitarian tradition who defend hedonism. He rejects the hedonist
conception of motivation, arguing that moral agents have capacities
for practical reason that allow them to distinguish between the
intensity and authority of their desires, to deliberate about their
desires, and to regulate their action in accordance with their
deliberations. Agents needn't act on their strongest desires;
they can and should act on the basis of a judgment about what it is
best for them to do. This, Green claims, is to act on a conception of
one's own overall good. Here, Green aligns himself with the
Greek eudaimonist tradition, which he interprets in terms of
self-realization. Because Green derives the demand for
self-realization from an understanding of agency itself, he regards
its demands as categorical, rather than hypothetical, imperatives.
Self-realization for Green requires self-consciousness, which requires
proper cognizance of others. In this way, he agrees with those Greeks,
such as Aristotle, who claim that the proper conception of the
agent's own good requires a concern with the good of others,
especially the common good. However, Green thinks that the Greeks had
too narrow a conception of the common good. It is only with
Christianity and enlightenment philosophical views, especially Kantian
and utilitarian traditions in ethics, Green thinks, that we have
recognition of the universal scope of the common good. This leads
Green to claim that full self-realization can take place only when
each rational agent regards all other rational agents as ends in
themselves on whom his own happiness depends. In such a state, there
can be no conflict or competition among the interests of different
rational agents. Green links self-realization and freedom; freedom is
best understood in terms of self-determination and self-realization.
Because Green thinks that self-realization aims at the common good, he
thinks that freedom also aims at the common good. Green concludes that
moral progress consists in the gradual realization of this sort of
freedom, which requires the progressive realization of the common
good.


### 3.1 Self-Consciousness and Practical Responsibility



In Book II Green picks up the theme from Book I about the role of
self-consciousness in epistemic responsibility and explicitly makes
the parallel argument about the role of self-consciousness in
practical and moral personality. Responsibility neither is threatened
by determinism nor requires indeterminism; it requires
self-consciousness (*PE* SSSS87, 90, 106,
109-110). Moral responsibility requires capacities for practical
deliberation, and practical deliberation requires self-consciousness.
Non-responsible agents, such as brutes and small children, appear to
act on their strongest desires or, if they deliberate, to deliberate
only about the instrumental means to the satisfaction of their desires
(*PE* SSSS86, 92, 96, 122, 125). By contrast,
responsible agents must be able to distinguish between the
*intensity* and *authority* of their desires, to
deliberate about the appropriateness of their desires and aims, and to
regulate their actions in accord with these deliberations (*PE*
SSSS85-86, 92, 96, 103, 107, 220). Responsibility
requires *moral personality*. Here, Green shows the influence
of Butler, Reid, and Kant (see, e.g., Irwin 1984).



Green considers the apparent threat to responsibility resulting from
the claim that agents necessarily act on their strongest desires
(*PE* SSSS103-106, 139-42). He thinks that
the threat is specious, because it rests on an ambiguity. Some desires
are stronger because more intense, but desires can also be stronger
when they are endorsed after deliberation. The action of non-rational
animals is just the vector sum of the intensity of their desires; they
do act on their strongest desires, in this first sense. But
responsible agents--who have moral personality and can
distinguish between the strength and authority of desire and act on
these judgments--need not act on their strongest desire in this
first sense. Instead, they can be moved by the strongest desire after
deliberation. It's only by failing to distinguish these two
different kinds of strength, Green thinks, that one could see a threat
to responsibility here.



Green makes clear that the sort of moral personality that is required
by responsibility is a *capacity* to recognize and be guided by
reasons. This is clear from his defense of Kant's conception of
freedom against criticisms. As we have seen, Green does not think that
freedom and responsibility require Kant's doctrine of
transcendental freedom. But Green is sympathetic with Kant's
claims about positive freedom and autonomy in the *Groundwork*.
There, Kant identifies positive freedom or autonomy with a will
determined by practical reason and the moral law (4: 447). Sidgwick
criticizes this conception of freedom in his essay "The Kantian
Conception of Free-Will," reprinted in the Appendix to *The
Methods of Ethics*, for being unable to show how someone might be
free and responsible for making the wrong choices, as well as the
right ones (*Methods* 511-16). The possibility of freely
chosen wrongdoing shows that Kant's conception of positive
freedom, as conformity with practical reason, cannot be freedom of the
kind required by moral responsibility. In his lectures on Kant's
ethics, Green recognizes the same problem for Kantian freedom that
Sidgwick does (*Works* II
 107).[5]
 But Green thinks that this is a case where the essentials of the
Kantian view can be defended, even if this requires amending Kant.
Kant's considered view, Green thinks, contrasts two kinds of
positive freedom--(a) the *capacity* to conform to
practical reason and (b) the *exercise* of this capacity.
Freedom as responsibility requires (a), not (b) (*Works* II
136). On this capacitarian reading of moral personality and
responsibility, the person who has the capacity to conform to
practical reason and the moral law but fails to exercise it is just as
responsible as the person who has the capacity and does exercise it
(*Works* II 107-08, 119,
 136).[6]



Green thinks that the process of forming and acting on a conception of
what it is best for me on the whole to do is for me to form and act
from a conception of my own overall good (*PE*
SSSS91-92, 96, 128).



> 
> 
> A man, we will suppose, is acted on at once by an impulse to revenge
> an affront, by a bodily want, by a call of duty, and by fear of
> certain results incidental to his avenging the affront or obeying the
> call of duty. We will suppose further that each passion ...
> suggests a different line of action. So long as he is undecided how to
> act, all are, in a way, external to him. He presents them to himself
> as influences by which he is consciously affected but which are not
> he, and with none of which he yet identifies himself .... So long
> as this state of things continues, no moral effect ensues. It ensues
> when the man's relation to these influences is altered by his
> identifying himself with one of them, by his taking the object of one
> of the tendencies as for the time his good. This is to *will,*
> and is in itself moral action .... (*PE* SS146)
> 
> 
> 



To identify reflectively with a desire is to *will* it and to
act from *motive* and *character*, rather than mere
desire (*PE* SS153).



However, we might wonder why Green assumes that in acting on some
conception of an overall good I am thereby acting on a conception of
*my own* good.



> 
> 
> It is superfluous to add, good to *himself*, for anything
> conceived of as good in such a way that the agent acts for the sake of
> it, must be conceived as *his own* good, though he may conceive
> it as his own good only on account of his interest in others, and in
> spite of any suffering on his own part incidental to its attainment.
> (*PE* SS92)
> 
> 
> 



This may seem to confuse the *ownership* of the conception of
the good (whose conception it is) with its *content* (whether
it is a conception of my good or simply of what is good). I may act on
my conception of the good, but that does not make it a conception of
my own good.



However, Green may think that the transition from ownership to content
is legitimate. He may think that when one adopts an end as good and
structures one's plans, emotions, and desires around it that one
thereby makes that end one's own and makes it part of
one's personal good such that the value of the end and
one's success in achieving it determine in part the quality of
one's life. If I choose to become a parent, then the
constitutive aims of being a good parent, including the success of my
children, become part of my good such that the well-being of my
children directly affects my own happiness or personal good.


### 3.2 Self-Realization and Normative Perfectionism



Green develops his ideas about the personal good in Book III of the
*Prolegomena*. There he criticizes hedonism and develops his
own perfectionist claims. Hedonism can be a psychological doctrine or
an evaluative doctrine about the personal good. Green's
discussion of hedonism focuses on the utilitarian tradition,
especially the views of Mill and Sidgwick. Green thinks that Mill
combines psychological and evaluative hedonism, though that is
disputable (Brink 2013: chs. 2-3). Sidgwick clearly
distinguishes the two forms of hedonism, rejecting psychological
hedonism and defending evaluative hedonism. Since Sidgwick explicitly
accepts evaluative hedonism while rejecting psychological hedonism,
Green must argue differently against Sidgwick.



Green agrees with Butler that psychological egoism (hedonism) is
implausible but thinks that people mistakenly accept it because they
mistake the pleasure that can be expected to attend the satisfaction
of desires for the object of desire. Because the pleasure is
consequential on the satisfaction of desire, the object of desire
cannot be that pleasure. This point is relevant, Green thinks, to
Mill's alleged evaluative hedonism (*PE*
SSSS162-69). Green notes that in Mill's higher
pleasures doctrine and in the proof that Mill seems to assign
intrinsic value to objective pleasures, that is, to activities and
pursuits that exercise our higher capacities. Green thinks that these
claims about the superior value of such activities are
anti-hedonistic, but he thinks that Mill fails to see this only
because he focuses on the (subjective) pleasure that is expected from
engaging in such activities. But this confuses, Green thinks, what we
value and a by-product of what we value.



Green focuses on Mill's explanation of the preferences of
competent judges for modes of existence that employ their higher
faculties. Higher pleasures are those things (e.g., activities) that a
competent judge would prefer, even if they produced less pleasure in
her than the lower pleasures would (Mill *Utilitarianism* II 5
in *Works* X 211). But *why* should competent judges
prefer activities that they often find less pleasurable unless they
believe that these activities are more valuable? Mill explains the
fact that competent judges prefer activities that exercise their
rational capacities by appeal to their sense of *dignity*
(*Utilitarianism* II 5 in *Works* X 212). Green thinks
that the dignity passage undermines hedonism (*PE*
SS164-66, 171). In claiming that it is the dignity of a life
in which the higher capacities are exercised and the competent
judge's sense of her own dignity that explains her preference
for those activities, Mill implies that her preferences reflect
judgments about the value that these activities have independently of
their being the object of desire or the source of pleasure. We take
pleasure in these activities because we recognize their value; they
are not valuable, because they are pleasurable.



Green not only criticizes the evaluative hedonism he finds in Mill; he
also rejects evaluative hedonism outright. One argument he makes is
that evaluative hedonism is actually inconsistent with psychological
hedonism. Evaluative hedonism says that our ultimate aim ought to be
to maximize net pleasure or to seek the largest sum of pleasures,
whereas psychological hedonism claims that pleasurable experience is
the ultimate object of desire. But a sum of pleasures is not itself a
pleasure, and so, according to psychological hedonism, we could not
act on the requirements of evaluative hedonism (*PE*
SS221). This may be a problem for someone who combines both
evaluative and psychological hedonisms. However, this is not a problem
for an evaluative hedonist such as Sidgwick who eschews psychological
hedonism (*PE* SSSS222, 334, 351). Green must offer
some other argument against the person who thinks a self-conscious
agent would identify his personal good with pleasure. Green's
real disagreement with Sidgwick concerns whether the only things
reflectively desirable for an agent are her own states of
consciousness. Green recognizes "ideal goods" for an agent
that involve her own activities and her relations to other members of
her community (*PE* SSSS159-61, 357; cf.
*Methods* 113-15).



Green argues not only against hedonism but also for self-realization.
He suggests that it is the very capacities that make moral
responsibility possible in the first place that determine the proper
end of deliberation (*PE* SS176). Responsible action
involves self-consciousness and is expressive of the self. The self is
not to be identified with any desire or any series or set of desires;
moral personality consists in the ability to subject appetites and
desires to a process of deliberative endorsement and to form new
desires as the result of such deliberations. So the self essentially
includes deliberative capacities, and if responsible action expresses
the self, it must exercise these deliberative capacities. This
explains why Green thinks that the proper aim of deliberation is a
life of activities that embody rational or deliberative control of
thought and action (*PE* SSSS175, 180, 199, 234,
238-39, 247, 283).



One can ask about any conception of the good why one should care about
the good, so conceived. Why should the good, so conceived, be
normative? Green's defense of self-realization makes the content
of the good consist in the exercise of the very same capacities that
make one a rational agent, subject to reasons for action, in the first
place. This promises to explain why a rational agent should care about
the good conceived in terms of self-realization.



This justification of self-realization also explains why Green treats
the imperative of self-realization as a categorical imperative. Like
Kant, Green seeks an account of the agent's duties that is
grounded in her agency and does not depend upon contingent and
variable inclinations. The goal of self-realization, Green thinks,
meets this demand.



> 
> 
> At the same time, because it [self-realization] is the fulfilment of
> himself, of that which he has in him to be, it will excite an interest
> in him like no other interest, different in kind from any of his
> desires and aversions except such as are derived from it. It will be
> an interest as in an object conceived to be of unconditional value;
> one of which the value does not depend on any desire that the
> individual may at any time feel for it or for anything else, or on any
> pleasure that ... he may experience....[T]he desire for the
> object will be founded on a conception of its desirableness as a
> fulfilment of the capabilities of which a man is conscious in being
> conscious of himself. ... [Self-realization] will express itself
> in [the] imposition ... of rules requiring something to be done
> irrespectively of any inclination to do it, irrespectively of any
> desired end to which it is a means, *other than this end, which is
> desired because conceived as absolutely desirable.* (*PE*
> SS193)
> 
> 
> 



Because the demands of self-realization depend only on those very
deliberative capacities that make one a responsible agent, they are
categorical imperatives.



Green recognizes that his conception of the good in terms of
self-realization and perfection is abstract and perhaps vague in
comparison with the apparent definiteness of the hedonist's
conception of the good (*PE* SS193). Nonetheless, his
conception of the good in terms of self-realization or the exercise of
deliberative capacities is not empty.


### 3.3 Self-Realization and the Common Good



In particular, Green links self-realization and a common good. He
believes that full self-realization can take place only in a community
of ends (*PE* SSSS183-84, 190-91, 199, 232)
in which each person cares about others for their own sakes
(*PE* SSSS199-200) and aims at a common good
(*PE* SS202, 236). But why? At one point, Green suggests
that this concern for others, at least for those within one's
immediate circle, is given or natural.



> 
> 
> Now the self of which a man thus forecasts the fulfilment, is not an
> abstract or empty self. It is a self already affected in the most
> primitive forms of human life by manifold interests, among which are
> interests in other persons. These are not merely interests dependent
> on other persons for the means to their gratification, but interests
> in the good of those other persons, interests which cannot be
> satisfied without the consciousness that those other persons are
> satisfied. The man cannot contemplate himself as in a better state, or
> on the way to the best, without contemplating others, not merely as a
> means to that better state, but as sharing it with him. (*PE*
> SS199)
> 
> 
> 



Green might simply be invoking this familiar concern that one has for
one's intimate associates. If I do care about the welfare of my
associates, and these desires survive deliberative endorsement, then,
according to Green, I make their welfare part of my own personal good
(*PE* SSSS91-92). But this may make an
agent's interest in others dependent on her contingent desires.
To explain how the demands of the common good are categorical
imperatives, we need to explain how pursuit of a common good is an
ingredient in self-realization.



Green claims that a rational agent's interest in others is
rooted in her search for a "permanent" good (*PE*
SSSS223, 229-32, 234). Moral personality requires
impulse control and the abilities to distinguish myself from my
appetites and to frame the question what it would be best for
me--a temporally extended agent--on the whole to do. This
will involve endorsing some goals as good and as worth making
short-term sacrifices or investments for. This is to value goals and
projects in which I am involved that have some degree of permanence.
Green seems to think that the right sort of association with others
extends this permanence in a natural way--indeed, that it
provides a kind of counter-balance to mortality or surrogate for
immortality.



> 
> 
> That determination of an animal organism by a self-conscious
> principle, which makes a man and is presupposed by the interest in
> permanent good, carries with it a certain appropriation by the man to
> himself of the beings with whom he is connected by natural ties, so
> that they become to him as himself and in providing for himself he
> provides for them. Projecting himself into the future as a permanent
> subject of possible well-being or ill-being--and he must so
> project himself in seeking for a permanent good--he associates
> his kindred with himself. It is this association that neutralises the
> effect which the anticipation of death must otherwise have on the
> demand for a permanent good. (*PE* SS231)
> 
> 
> 



Self-realization involves a kind of quest for intrapersonal
permanence. In the intrapersonal case, I preserve myself when the
actions and intentional states of a future self depend in the right
way on the actions and intentional states of my present and past
selves. But interpersonal association involves deliberative
connections between associates, in which the intentional states and
actions of each depend on those of the other. This might explain why
Green thinks self-realization aims at interpersonal permanence as
well. I more fully realize my capacities in association with others,
and this association gives me reason to treat the good of my
associates as part of my own good.



In linking moral virtue with pursuit of a common good, Green accepts
Aristotle's claims about the importance of the fine
(*kalon*) and the common good to an agent's own
*eudaimonia* or happiness (Irwin 1992, 2009:
SSSS1242-1244). Though Green sees the Aristotelian roots
of his own perfectionism, he does not accept Aristotle's account
of the *scope* of the common good. Whereas Aristotle's
politics recognize significant restrictions on the scope of the common
good excluding slaves and women (*Politics* II 4-7,
12-13), Green thinks its scope should be universal (*PE*
SSSS205-17, 249, 253, 271, 285).



> 
> 
> The idea of a society of free and law-abiding persons, each his own
> master yet each his brother's keeper, was first definitely
> formed among the Greeks, and its formation was the condition of all
> subsequent progress in the direction described; but with them ...
> it was limited in its application to select groups of men surrounded
> by populations of aliens and slaves. In its universality, as capable
> of application to the whole human race, an attempt has first been made
> to act upon it in modern Christendom. (*PE* SS271)
> 
> 
> 



Green's own conception of the common good is universal; full
self-realization and the securing of a really permanent good occurs
only when each person respects the claims made by other members of a
maximally inclusive community of ends (*PE* SSSS214,
216, 244, 332). In this respect, Green's belief that eudaimonism
can and should support cosmopolitan concern for others is perhaps
closer to the Stoic than the Aristotelian conception of the common
good (see Brink 2018).



Green associates this cosmopolitan conception of the common good with
Enlightenment ethical conceptions, in particular, Kantianism and
utilitarianism. He regards the philosophical and political influence
of utilitarian and Kantian conceptions of impartiality as progressive
influences (*PE* SSSS213-14). According to the
utilitarian conception, everyone should count for one and no one for
more than one (*PE* SS213). According to the Humanity
formula of Kant's Categorical Imperative, one must treat
humanity, whether in your own person or in others, always as an end in
itself and never merely as a means (*PE* SS214). Though
Green thinks both utilitarian and Kantian conceptions of impartiality
are right to insist on the wide scope of the common good, Green
accepts the distributed concern with each moral person that he
associates with Kant's Humanity formula of the Categorical
Imperative (*PE* SSSS215, 217).



Green thinks that we each have reason to promote this sort of
cosmopolitan conception of the common good. But he goes further,
claiming that the common good involves no conflict between the good of
the agent and the good of others (*PE* SS244).



Because Green thinks that self-realization aims at the common good, a
noncompetitive conception of the common good is a substantive and
controversial commitment. We may wonder if there are any genuinely
noncompetitive goods, such that one person can't enjoy them
unless all others do. And even if there are genuinely noncompetitive
goods, we might doubt that the personal good would be exhausted by
such a common good. If we think of the personal good as that which an
individual has reason to want in itself for her own sake, it seems
plausible that the personal good and the good of others will overlap
but not coincide perfectly.


### 3.4 Self-Realization and Freedom



Freedom is not a concept that looms large in Green's
perfectionism in the *Prolegomena*. However, Green focuses on
freedom in the posthumously published essay "On the Different
Senses of 'Freedom' as Applied to Will and the Moral
Progress of Man" (*Works* II), where he defends a
tripartite conception of freedom.


1. Juridical Freedom
2. Moral Freedom
3. Real or Perfect Freedom



*Juridical freedom* is the absence of compulsion or restraint
by others. This is freedom as non-interference prized by Locke and
other liberals. *Moral freedom* is the sort of freedom required
for responsibility, which is manifested in both praiseworthy and
blameworthy conduct. Moral freedom, Green believes, requires the
capacity for reasons-responsiveness. This is the kind of freedom he
proposes as a response to the problem Sidgwick identifies for Kant.
*Real or perfect freedom* exists insofar as an agent exercises
her moral freedom properly, pursuing her own personal good and its
constitutive commitment to the common good. This sort of freedom just
is self-realization or the perfection of one's agency.



Though each form of freedom is valuable, both juridical and moral
freedom are subordinate to real and perfect freedom (*Works* II
308-09). Real freedom is the regulative ideal of agency and
cannot be achieved without juridical and moral freedom, but neither
are sufficient to produce real freedom (*Works* II 324). Green
ends up endorsing a version of the Hegelian view that freedom is a
matter of degree, and moral progress can be understood as the
progressively more perfect realization of real freedom (*Works*
II
 324-30).[7]



In "Two Concepts of Liberty" Isaiah Berlin famously
distinguishes between *negative* and *positive* liberty
and criticizes various conceptions of positive freedom, including
Green's (1958: 132-33, 141-54). Negative liberty,
for Berlin, is focused exclusively on the absence of *external*
compulsion by other individuals or the state. By contrast, positive
freedom involves self-determination in which the rational part of
one's soul is controlling. The rational self is the true self,
and the true self is realized in the perfection of one's
rational nature (1958: 131-34, 141-53). Berlin thinks that
positive freedom is pernicious, because true freedom is negative
freedom and because positive freedoms smuggle other alleged moral
goods in under the guise of freedom, leading us to ignore the costs to
freedom that pursuit of these goods involves.



But Berlin's criticisms misunderstand Green's claims about
freedom. For Green, negative liberty as noninterference is embodied in
juridical freedom, and juridical freedom is an important and
legitimate part of freedom. But juridical freedom does not exhaust
freedom for Green, as it does for Berlin. He puts the point this way
in "Liberal Legislation"



> 
> 
> Thus, though of course there can be no freedom among men who act not
> willingly but under compulsion, yet on the other hand the mere removal
> of compulsion , the mere enabling a man to do as he likes, is in
> itself no contribution to true freedom. (*Works* III 371)
> 
> 
> 



Green also recognizes moral freedom and real or perfect freedom. Moral
freedom is the capacity for reasons-responsive conduct, and real or
perfect freedom is the proper exercise of this capacity, resulting in
self-realization and its commitment to the common good. These forms of
freedom involve positive freedom.



Green believes that juridical freedom, moral freedom, and real or
perfect freedom all involve aspects of self-determination
("Freedom," *Works* II 315-16). Both
juridical freedom and moral freedom are essential to responsibility.
Responsibility depends on an agent's normative capacities and
her opportunity to exercise them free from undue interference with
others. We can see this because significant impairment of either the
agent's capacities or her opportunities is excusing. Whereas
juridical freedom depends on the agent's opportunities, moral
freedom depends on her capacities. If so, then self-determination as
responsibility requires both juridical and moral freedoms.



If self-determination involves determination by my rational self, then
it requires self-realization and real freedom. Here, we should
remember Green's Kantian claim that rational nature provides not
only the ground of duty but also its content. Moral personality and
freedom involve a will that has reasons-responsive capacities. But
then self-determination should be expressed in activities that reflect
and realize these rational capacities (*PE* SSSS175,
180, 199, 234, 238-39, 247, 283). Full or complete
self-determination requires not just the capacity to be guided by
reasons but this aretaic sense of self-determination. On Green's
view, this kind of self-determination and self-realization involve a
constitutive commitment to a cosmopolitan concern for the common
good.


## 4. Idealist Politics



Green's political philosophy is expressed in his posthumously
published *Lectures on the Principles of Political Obligation*
and his 1881 essay "Liberal Legislation and Freedom of
Contract". His perfectionist ethics influence his politics. He
provides the philosophical foundations for a new progressive form of
liberalism that transcends the laissez-faire liberalism characteristic
of some strands in nineteenth century British liberalism (Nicholson
1990). The state has a duty to promote the common good, and individual
rights are constrained by the common good. This gives the state not
just negative duties to refrain from interfering with the freedoms of
its citizens but also positive duties to provide resources and
opportunities for individual self-realization.


### 4.1 Rights and the Common Good



Green's *Lectures on the Principles of Political
Obligation* discuss a number of issues in political philosophy and
jurisprudence, including the adequacy of social contract
justifications of the nature and limits of state authority, the nature
of rights, the right to private property, and the justification of
punishment. Most relevant to understanding Green's distinctive
perfectionist conception of liberalism is his conception of
rights.



Green's focus on political obligation concerns the nature and
limits of the state's *enforceable* demands on its
citizens (*LPPO* SSSS1, 12). Social contract theory
seeks to anchor political obligation in agreement, whether actual or
hypothetical. Green discusses the social contract theories of Spinoza,
Hobbes, Locke, and Rousseau. Though critical of social contract theory
in general, he is especially critical of Hobbes and expresses sympathy
with important elements in Locke and Rousseau.



Green's criticisms of social contract theory reflect his
conception of rights. According to Green, rights are claims that
individuals possess to those powers that are socially recognizable as
contributing to a common good (*LPPO* SSSS25-26,
113-115, 138, 143). In particular, Green thinks that my rights
against others to certain normative powers are conditional on my
recognition that others possess rights to these same powers against me
(*LPPO* SS138). Green rejects the idea of natural rights as
rights prior to society but accepts the idea of natural rights as
prior to and independent of the positive rights established by
political association (*LPPO* SSSS9, 16, 30).



This conception of rights leads Green to be skeptical of attempts to
explain how rights might emerge from a pre-social state of nature.
Hobbes is Green's primary target here, because Hobbes views the
state of nature as an anti-social condition involving the war of all
against all (*Leviathan* XIII 8-9) and claims that
individual rights, or at least individual rights to anything other
than non-interference, are possible only when individuals agree to
leave the state of nature and transfer powers to a sovereign
(*Leviathan* XIII 10, 13; XIV 1; XV 3). Green is skeptical in
two ways. First, he doesn't see how agreement could establish
political obligation if there are no moral duties in the state of
nature (*LPPO* SS46). If the sovereign is necessary to make
promises binding, then we can't explain how the sovereign could
himself arise out of binding pre-political compact. Second,
Green's conception of rights leads him to deny the Hobbesian
claim that rights and duties depend on the existence of the sovereign.
Rights depend on the common good, and there are facts about the common
good prior to political association and positive right.



Green's criticisms of Hobbes apply less clearly to Locke and
Rousseau. Locke's state of nature, though pre-political, is not
anti-social, and Locke recognizes duties and rights in the state of
nature (*Treatises* II.ii.6; II.i.14; II.iii.16-21;
II.vi.57). For Locke, the transition from the state of nature to civil
government is to facilitate the more reliable and efficient protection
of natural rights, the protection of property, and the promotion of
the public good, all of which are moral demands within the state of
nature (*Treatises* II.vii.85; cf. *LPPO*
SSSS55-58).



Green has even more in common with Rousseau. Rousseau sees the problem
of political obligation as one of reconciling political association
and its constraints with individual autonomy. The state of nature is a
pre-political state but one in which individuals are socially
interdependent. The problem is to



> 
> 
> Find a form of association which defends and protects with all common
> force the person and goods of each associate, and by means of which
> each one, while uniting with all, nevertheless obeys only himself and
> remains as free as before. (*Social Contract* I.vi.4)
> 
> 
> 



The solution to this problem is for individuals to submit to
constraints embodied in forms of association and institutions that are
regulated by the general will (*SC* I.vi.9; II.i.1). The
general will is distinct from the will of all (*SC* I.vi.7;
II.iii2) and concerns the common good--those basic interests of
moral persons that must be respected and protected for all
(*SC* II.iii.1-2; II.iv.5; II.xi.1-2). Green agrees
with Rousseau that the general will, understood as the common good, is
a source of rights and that these rights are conditional on a kind of
mutual recognition among members of
 society.[8]



Green disagrees with those strands in social contract theory that see
consent to live in political society as the source of rights. He
thinks that rights are grounded in the common good and mutual
recognition and so predate any social contract. In assessing
Green's criticisms of social contract theory, one must assess
Green's own conception of rights. Are rights grounded in the
common good, and do rights require social recognition in some way?



It seems we do need to ground rights in some way. Grounding them in
the common good seems promising, though we won't know what
rights this conception supports without knowing more about the content
of the common good. Insofar as the common good is one in which people
partake equally insofar as they are moral persons, this conception
seems likely to support a conception of equal rights to those
conditions necessary for developing and exercising moral powers of
persons as agents. These claims about the content of the common good
are reflected in Green's brand of perfectionist liberalism.



Must such rights be socially recognized? Even if social recognition
allows Green to distinguish natural and legal right, we might wonder
if he can distinguish between natural rights and duties and rights and
duties recognized by positive morality (see, e.g., Ross 1930:
50-52). The social recognition thesis may seem to preclude
making sense of minority rights or unrecognized rights. Green
addresses this issue and makes two replies, which clarify the social
recognition thesis (*LPPO* SSSS137-147). First,
he does not claim that particular rights need to be the object of
social recognition. It is rather that rights must be contributory to a
common good that is the object of mutual recognition. My claim to
respect and rights are conditioned on my recognition that others have
the same claim to respect and rights, because we are equally moral
persons (*LPPO* SSSS138; cf. Hinton 2001). Still, this
claim might suggest that individuals lack rights if others do not
recognize them as equal moral persons, and this might seem to imply a
form of moral conventionalism or parochialism, which would be at odds
with Green's own cosmopolitanism. For this reason, it is
important that Green insists that the sort of social recognition that
rights require is *potential*, rather than actual,
recognition.



> 
> 
> The condition of its [a right's] being so claimable is that its
> exercise should be contributory to some social good which the public
> conscience is capable of appreciating, not necessarily one which in
> the existing prevalence of private interest can obtain due
> acknowledgement, but still one of which men in their actions and
> language show themselves to be aware. (*LPPO* SS143)
> 
> 
> 



In this way, Green recognizes that slaves have natural rights to
freedom that are violated, even in societies in which slavery is
socially condoned (*LPPO* SS140). Provided that others are
capable of recognizing someone's common humanity, their failure
to do so is no obstacle to the recognition of the rights of
others.


### 4.2 Progressive Liberalism



Like Mill, Green is committed to liberal essentials--a largely
secular state, democratic political institutions in which the
franchise is widespread, private property rights, market economies,
equal opportunity, and a variety of personal and civic liberties. Also
like Mill, Green is a perfectionist liberal, who thinks that the
justification of liberal essentials is grounded in a conception of the
common good that understands the good of each in terms of
self-realization.



Green's perfectionist liberalism was influential in the
formation of a New Liberalism in late 19th century Britain
(e.g., Richter 1964; Nicholson 1990; Brink 2003: SSXXIV). The Old
Liberalism was concerned with negative liberty and sought to undo
state restrictions on liberties and opportunities and was expressed in
the repeal of the Corn Laws, opposition to religious persecution, and
several electoral reforms that extended the scope of the franchise to
include the rural and urban poor. By contrast, the New Liberalism
thought that the defense of liberty and opportunity had to be
supplemented by social and economic reforms in labor, health, and
education to address the effects of social and economic inequality
(e.g., Freeden 1978; Nicholson 1990: ch. 5; Simhony and Weinstein
2001). Green was viewed by many as an important intellectual source
for the New Liberals. He supported


1. regulation of labor contracts to limit workplace hours and factory
conditions (*Works* II 515; III 365-69, 373),
2. measures to provide greater opportunities for agricultural workers
to own land (*Works* II 515, 532-34; III
377-82),
3. public health and safety regulations (*Works* II 515; III
373-74),
4. education reforms, improving access to elementary, secondary, and
higher education, regardless of socioeconomic status (*Works*
II 515; III 369, 387-476; V 285-86, 326-28),
and
5. the improvement of educational and economic opportunities for
women (*PE* SS267; *Works* V 326-28).



Green's liberalism is a perfectionist liberalism in which the
state aims to promote the self-realization of its citizens, and this
gives the state a number of positive duties in relation to its
citizens. But the importance of autonomy to self-realization means
that the state's positive role is restricted to
*enabling* its citizens to perfect themselves.



> 
> 
> [I]t is the business of the state, not indeed directly to promote
> moral goodness, for that, from the very nature of moral goodness, it
> cannot do, but to maintain the conditions without which a free
> exercise of the human faculties is impossible. ("Liberal
> Legislation," *Works* III 374)
> 
> 
> 



Green's claim here bears comparison with Kant's insistence
in the *Metaphysics of Morals* on a self/other asymmetry in
which we must aim at our own perfection but at the happiness, rather
than the perfection, of others. In explaining this asymmetry, Kant
writes:



> 
> 
> So too, it is a contradiction for me to make another's
> *perfection* my end and consider myself under an obligation to
> promote this. For the *perfection* of another human being, as a
> person, consists just in this: that he *himself* is able to set
> his end in accordance with his own conception of duty; and it is
> self-contradictory to require that I do (make it my duty to do)
> something that only the other himself can do. (6: 386)
> 
> 
> 



Green makes sense of Kant's admonitions against aiming at the
perfection of another by interpreting them as constraints on
*how* we aim at the perfection of others (Brink 2019:
12-15). Given the role of one's own agency in one's
perfection, I can't perfect others any more than I can win
competitive races for them. But just as I can help another to win a
race by training with her, discussing strategy, and sharing
nutritional tips, so too I can help others perfect themselves by
helping them develop their normative competence and deliberating with
them, identifying options, discussing the comparative merits of these
options, and providing them with opportunities to exercise their
normative powers. I can help others perfect themselves, just not in
ways that bypass their agency. In this way, the state can and should
promote the self-realization of its citizens by enabling, rather than
coercing, them.



Though the Old Liberals see themselves as the advocates of freedom,
Green thinks that the New Liberals have a claim to beings liberals in
the fullest sense, because only a mix of negative and positive reforms
can enable the perfection and self-realization of its citizens and,
hence, true freedom.


## 5. Idealist Religion and History



Green had profoundly moralized conceptions of religion and history.
Both conceptions were influenced by his idealist metaphysics and
ethics.



Green was a deeply religious person, but his conception of
Christianity was unorthodox and animated by moral and humanistic
principles. He was raised in the Evangelical faith by his father, an
Evangelical minister. At Balliol, his religious sensibility was shaped
in part by Jowett, who sought to present fundamental Christian
principles in a contemporary and rational idiom, free of superstition,
ritual, and dogma. Jowett's example shaped Green's
developing conception of a form of Christianity that admits of
rational philosophical reconstruction, that denies the literal
significance to miracles or other supernatural events described in the
Bible, and that finds Christianity's best expression in social
and political service in pursuit of a common
 good.[9]



Green's own conception of God is ambivalent. On the one hand, he
identifies the eternal self-consciousness of absolute idealism with
God. Green thinks that self-conscious minds are conditions of
conscious experience and not themselves part of conscious experience,
with the result that they are outside of space and time. What is true
of individual minds is true of the corporate mind that Green thinks
makes objectivity possible. This would make God a transcendent
reality. On the other hand, Green has strong reason to regard God as
immanent in the world. Self-consciousness expresses itself in the
will, which is the cause of action. If so, self-consciousness cannot
be outside of space and time. Moreover, Green saw God as immanent in
individuals and in history. The higher principle of practical reason
within each person that regulates his desires and makes him a moral
agent is a divine principle, the common good is the proper object of
the divine principle in humanity, and its progressive realization in
human laws and institutions is how God manifests himself to the world
(*Works* III 223-27). One cannot separate Green's
unorthodox form of Christianity from his idealist philosophy and his
ethical demand that individuals subordinate their lower selves to the
pursuit of a higher, common good.



As we have seen, Green treats perfection, freedom, and the common good
as regulative ideals at which we aim, which humanity better
approximates over time. This is illustrated in the gradual expansion
of the scope of the common good to include persons previously excluded
from full moral personality, such as slaves, women, and workers
(*PE* Book III, esp. SSSS205-206, 271, 285). It
is also illustrated in our progressively more adequate conception of
the conditions of self-realization and the demands on government to
promote the perfection of its citizens. Like Hegel, Green has a
progressive view of history, which he sees as the progressively more
adequate realization of the demands of perfection, the common good,
and true freedom (*PE* SSSS172-76;
"Freedom," *Works* II 330; *LPPO*
SS6).


## 6. Idealist Metaphysics and Ethics



Now that we have surveyed Green's metaphysics and ethics,
it's worth asking how they are related. One question is whether
Green's ethics is dependent on his metaphysics and, if so, in
what ways. Another question is about the priority, if any, between
individual and collective levels of self-consciousness and value.



Is Green's perfectionist ethical theory dependent on his
idealist metaphysics? If so, his perfectionism is hostage to his
idealism, and doubts about his metaphysics may threaten his
perfectionism. The *Prolegomena to Ethics* is Green's
most systematic work, and its structure might suggest that his
perfectionist ethics of self-realization developed in Books II-IV rest
on the idealist metaphysics defended in Book I. Certainly, many
interpreters have accepted this kind of interdependence of
Green's metaphysics and ethics (e.g., Nicholson 2006, Armour
2006, and Mander 2006). However, several of Green's writings in
practical philosophy--notably, the essay "Liberal
Legislation" and his *Lectures on the Principles of Political
Obligation*--are not preceded by elaborate metaphysical
discussions or arguments for absolute idealism. Moreover, even if we
look at the *Prolegomena*, much of the argument against
hedonism and in favor of perfectionism and the common good are
intelligible and assessable without recourse to doctrines of absolute
idealism. It's true that self-consciousness plays a crucial role
in both epistemic and practical agency. If idealism meant nothing more
than the importance of self-consciousness to knowledge and moral
personality, that might provide a kind of unity to Green's
metaphysics and ethics. It would represent the crucial idealist
metaphysical claim as a comparatively modest and plausible one. But
those claims about the importance of self-consciousness do not require
any specifically idealist metaphysical claims that reality is limited
to what is or can be an object of consciousness. Indeed, we have seen
that there is a tension between Green's moral psychology and his
idealist metaphysics. Green thinks that responsibility consists in
capacities for self-conscious reflection and assessment of one's
desires and options and that self-realization or perfection consists
in the proper exercise of these reasons-responsive capacities.
Green's perfectionist ethics require that self-conscious minds
play this causal role in the will and action, and that is inconsistent
with the assumption in Green's idealist metaphysics that
self-conscious minds lie outside of space and time (Irwin 2009:
SS1235).



Another question about Green's metaphysics and ethics is the
relation between individual and collective levels of analysis.
Consider the priority of individual and corporate consciousness in
Green's metaphysics. It is clear that the individual is prior in
order of discovery. We begin by trying to understand an
individual's conscious experience and knowledge. This leads
Green to embrace local idealism, understood as the claim that reality
or knowable reality cannot concern things as they are in themselves,
independently of how they do or can appear to individual thinkers.
Indeed, discussion of an individual's experience and knowledge
occupies the bulk of Book I of the *Prolegomena.* Green then
invokes the supposition that there is a single corporate consciousness
of which individual consciousnesses are proper parts to avoid an
incommensurable plurality of individual-specific realities and to
explain the possibility of objectivity. On one reading, individual
idealism remains primary, not just in the order of discovery but also
in the order of explanation and justification. Green thinks inquiry
supports individual idealism, and absolute idealism is a kind of
philosophical speculation about how one might try to ground
objectivity for individual consciousness. On another reading, Green
might think that though individual idealism is prior in the order of
discovery to absolute idealism, reflection about the possibility of
objectivity shows that absolute idealism is prior in order of
explanation or justification. On this view, corporate or eternal
consciousness is the only substance and individual consciousness are
accidents of this substance.



There are also interesting issues about the individual and collective
levels of analysis in Green's ethics. On the one hand, there is
a tendency to read the British idealists as anti-individualists, which
might seem to apply to Green (e.g., Berlin 1958, Quinton 1971). After
all, there is the reading of his ethics on which it depends not just
on his idealism but also on his absolute idealism. Moreover,
Green's claims about the importance of individuals seeking a
permanent good that transcends their individual limitations and about
the regulation of each person's good by a noncompetitive common
good might seem to support this anti-individualist reading.



On the other hand, there are a number of reasons to resist this
anti-individualist reading of Green. First, as we have seen, it may
not be necessary or desirable to see Green's perfectionist
ethics as resting on his idealist metaphysics, much less his absolute
idealism. Second, Green's claims about the importance of a
permanent good and the common good may be defensible from
individualist premises. Book II of the *Prolegomena* begins
with a focus on individual practical agency and the personal good,
much as Book I begins with a focus on individual epistemic agency and
knowledge. Green argues that individuals have reason to see their own
interests extended by participation in larger projects in community
with others, and this, he claims, gives them reason to seek a common
good.



We can identify two different ways of linking the personal good and
the common good. One way is from the *outside-in*, arguing that
the common good is explanatorily prior to the personal good and that
the good of individuals is just whatever is contributory to the good
of some collective, whether that be God, humanity, or some more local
community. Another way is from the *inside-out*, arguing that
the personal good is more complete when it includes the right sort of
association with others and includes the pursuit of a common good.
Framed this way, there's a strong case to be made for the
inside-out reading of Green's ethics. As we've seen, the
structure of the argument in Books II-III of the
*Prolegomena* has this inside-out character. This
interpretation is reinforced by claims Green makes in his
"Freedom" essay. Recall that Green identifies true freedom
with determination by practical reason and perfect self-realization.
He distinguishes between Christian (Pauline) and Kantian conceptions
of freedom, on the one hand, and a Hegelian conception, on the other
hand (*Works* II 312-15). The principal difference seems
to be in whom freedom is realized. Green thinks that the Christian and
Kantian see the individual as the locus of freedom, whereas Hegel
treats the state as the locus of freedom. In this debate, Green sides
with the Christian and Kantian.



> 
> 
> On the other hand, it would seem that we cannot significantly speak of
> freedom except with reference to individual persons; that only in them
> can freedom be realised; that therefore the realisation of freedom in
> the state can only mean the attainment of freedom by individuals
> through influences which the state (in the wide sense spoken of)
> supplies--"freedom" here, as before, meaning not mere
> self-determination which renders us responsible, but determination by
> reasons, "autonomy of the will".... (*Works*
> II 314)
> 
> 
> 



Here, Green makes explicit that he understands the link between the
personal good, freedom, and the common good from the inside-out.



This fits with a common observation about the traditions and
individuals who influenced Green. Perhaps the strongest influences are
the Greeks, especially Aristotle, Kant, and Hegel. It is not uncommon
for readers to emphasize the Hegelian dimensions of Green. But despite
Green's sympathy with some Hegelian commitments--idealism,
a progressive view of history, and the importance of freedom--his
version of these commitments and the ways he defends them show fairly
little direct influence by
 Hegel.[10]
 Moreover, many of the most important elements of Green's
perfectionism--especially the ethics of self-realization, its
grounding in rational agency, and its concern with the common
good--are traceable to the influence of Aristotle and Kant. It is
perhaps not unreasonable to follow Sidgwick who regards Green
principally as a Kantian (*Lectures* 3; Irwin 2009: SS1234)
or, even better, Green's student D.G. Ritchie who suggests that
it is perhaps best to say that Green "... corrected Kant by
Aristotle and Aristotle by Kant" (1891: 139-140).


## 7. Concluding Remarks



Green was perhaps the most important figure within the tradition of
British idealism. But the significance of his idealism extends beyond
that tradition. His defenses of idealist metaphysics and epistemology
and absolute idealism make interesting contributions to an idealist
tradition that includes Berkeley, Kant, Fichte, Hegel, and Bradley,
among others. His idealist approach to ethics embraces a perfectionist
theory of self-realization committed to rich conceptions of freedom
and the common good that aims to synthesize the best elements in Greek
eudaimonism and Kantian rationalism. Though perfectionism is an
underappreciated tradition, Green makes enduring contributions to that
tradition. Green's perfectionism leads him to develop a
progressive conception of liberalism that was influential in British
politics in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries and that
bears comparison with contemporary conceptions of liberalism.