GUIDE TO THE PHILOSOPHY 1938 - 1947.pdf - Rare Books at ...

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ETHICS
wrongness, but that of the society to which he belongs;
or, it may be of the primitive society from which the
society to which he belongs has developed. Thing? which
were found to be expedient by our ancestors were called
good by them because they were expedient Thus a tradition
arose that certain things were good merely because over
a considerable period people had agreed to call them so.
This tradition became in course of time so ingrained in
the consciousness of the race that presently it began to
appear as an inherited instinct This inherited instinct
we call conscience. Thus* when conscience functions
telling us that action X is pght or action Y wrong,
character X good or character Y bad, what it really
means is that X-like actions and characters were found to
be to the advantage, Y-like actions and characters to the
disadvantagef of the societies from which our own has
developed. On this view, then, X and Y do not possess
any objective ethical characteristics of their own. Hence,
in judging them to be right and wrong, we are judging
only that certain persons or classes of persons entertain
or once entertained certain feelings of approval and
disapproval in regard
to them. 1
A Fourfold Division. Let us now apply this distinction
between subjective and objective theories to our
first grouping of ethical theories into intuitionist and utili-
tarian. The subjective-objective distinction is clearly
applicable to theories belonging to both groups. Intuitionist
theories which affirm that actions are right and
things are good apart from their consequences may mean
that they are right and good in themselves, independently
of what any person or body of persons thinks, or has
once thought .about them, or that they are right and
good only because people think or have thought them
to be o. In the first case, actions will be approved because
they are seen to be moral; in the second, to say of them
that they are moral will mean merely that they are
1 See Chapter X, pp. 373-376 for * development