 Before going on to discuss Russell’s meta-ethic in more detail, it is worth pausing for a moment to consider his ideal. For although Russell claimed to make his “practical moral judgments” on a “roughly hedonistic basis” (RoE: 165–6/Papers 11: 311), he was far from being an out-and out hedonist. He was, as we have seen, a utilitarian of sorts, who believed that the right thing to do is the action that, on the available evidence, seems likely to produce the best balance of good over evil consequences. Since we cannot perform the requisite calculations in every case, we need codes of conduct, though these should be taken with a pinch of salt and reassessed from time to time in the light of new information. This is sensible and humane, but perhaps a little pedestrian. However Russell’s conception of the good—the end to be promoted—is a bit more interesting. To begin with, although he valued human happiness, he did not see this in crudely hedonistic terms. However pleasurable the life of a pig may be, Russell would not have preferred the life of a pig to that of a human being. Russell also valued passion and a life which allowed for spontaneous (but “creative”) impulses. These views distinguish him from the classical utilitarians who he otherwise admired. However, the really distinctive features of Russell’s ethic were derived from Spinoza (1632–1677), who remained a philosophical hero even though Russell rejected most of his metaphysics as set out (rather confusingly) in his Ethics of 1677. There was something about Spinoza’s attitude to life that Russell regarded as profoundly right. Kenneth Blackwell calls this “the ethic of impersonal self-enlargement” (Blackwell 1985: 17). According to this ideal, the best life is lived in awareness of the Other. This includes other selves (since Russell considered a purely selfish life unfulfilling, and a life without history—which involves knowledge of other selves—drab) but also the wholly other—the non-human universe of large impersonal forces, the wind, the sea, the mountains and the stars and even (if they exist) the entities of mathematics. He felt that the self is enlarged by the contemplation of the not-self and that the person whose concerns are limited to their own states of mind has confined themself within a spiritual prison. By the same token, a philosophy that reduces reality to an emanation either of the self or of the collective reduces the self by denying it access to the Other. All this may sound unduly elevated, but in practice what this means is that the good person takes an interest in other people (including people who may not be connected with them) and in the world at large. Russell sometimes talks about contemplation in this connection, but this should not be understood as a purely passive process. The contemplative person does not just sit and stare (though Russell was not averse to this kind of contemplation) but actively seeks to know the Other through science, history and other forms of enquiry. Thus Russell’s distaste for idealism and for anti-realist and instrumentalist philosophies of science is connected with his ideal of impersonal self-enlargement. Of course Russell does not attempt to derive an Is (such as the claim that idealism or pragmatism is false) from an Ought (such as the claim that we ought to enlarge the Self through contemplation of the Other, something that would be difficult if either of these philosophies were correct). But he does suggest that there is something morally suspect, as well as wrong-headed, about attempts to reduce the vast forces of nature to human experience or to useful predictive devices enabling human beings to achieve their puny ends. For Russell the good life is a life that looks outward, which is one reason for his dislike of philosophies that diminish what is outside ourselves into something not worth looking at. (See RoE: 223–235 and, more generally, The Conquest of Happiness, 1930.)