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

ETHICS
170
ofmy statement, "I have the toothache", would be largely
unintelligibly for there would be no bell, so to speak, in
your consciousness upon which my words would strike
and awaken answering echoes of sympathetic experience.
For our statements to one another are only intelligible to
the extent that they are based upon a fund of experience
common to the person making the statement and to the
person to whom die statement is made, and in this case
which I am now imagining, the case in which the pain of
the toothache which I am experiencing refers to something
which is outside the range ofyour experience, the statement
"I have the toothache" would be unintelligible to you. It
would be unintelligible, not because you failed to understand
the meaning of the words I was using, but because you had
never had an experience and consequently, therefore, had
no memory of an experience, which would enable you to
realize imaginatively what kind of sensations I was having.
That There Cannot be a Science of Ethics. Now
moral judgments would, it is said by the ethical positivists,
be similarly meaningless, were it not that the person to
whom they are addressed had himself participated in
moral experience. In fact, however, all human beings,
just because they are human, do possess a moral sense
and do, therefore, have moral experience. They are all,
to take a particular case, sensible of the difference between
the statements "I ought
to do this" .and "I would like
to do this 9
', or "it would be expedient for me to do this".
If they were not sensible of this difference, they would not
be fully human, just as a man lacking a rational intelligence
would not he fully human.
Therefore, it is argued, moral judgments do mean some*
thing to us, because they are based upon experiences which
are common to all mankind. These experiences are, how- -
ever, unique; there is, that is to say, no feeling which is
in any way comparable to our feeling of "oughtness",
just as there is no feeling which is in any way comparable
to our feeling of toothache. And, because they are unique,