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176
* ETHICS
be trained and educated, and the developed moral judgment
of the civilized man is, it would be conceded, more
trustworthy in its deliverances than the primitive moral
insight of the savage. But however civilized the person,
however developed his conscience, its deliverances will, it
is said, still take the form of immediate, absolute, and
unique judgments of right and wrong, the adjectives
immediate, absolute and uilique being used in the special
senses described in the last chapter. 1
Popular Support for Objective Intuitionism. Conscience
functions in the popular view, which is also the
Christian view, rather life a sixth sense, a sense which is
set over the realm of morals, as the sense of hearing is
set over the realm of sound, and the sense of smell over
that of odours; and just as, to revert to an illustration
already used, a man's nose tells him which smells are
pleasant and which unpleasant, so his conscience, or moral
sense, tells him which actions are right, which wrong.
And just as against the deliverances of the nose there is
no appeal, just as for them there is no rational justification
for we cannot say why a smell that we pronounce to
be bad, is bad so there is neither appeal against, nor,
in the last resort, rational justification for, the deliverances
of conscience
Those who take this view are accustomed to point to
die fact that children and uneducated persons frequently
and unhesitatingly pass moral judgments. Now it is, they
say, absurd to suppose that the peasant woman who
reproves the licence of the town, and the maid who
condemns the promiscuity of her mistress, do so because
they have reflected upon the probable social effects of
sexual laxity, should it become widespread; that they
have judged these effects to be undesirable and, having
done so, proceed to censure such individual cases of laxity
as come under their notice as being liable to set an example
which, if widely followed, would tend to produce the effects
* See Chapter V, pp. 167, 168.