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178
ETHICS
difficulties to which it is exposed, great claims upon our
consideration. I will now try to give some account of this
doctrine.
The ^tiglith Intuitionists, In the seventeenth and
eighteenth centuries a number of English writers advanced
ethical theories which) assuming the validity of the moral
consciousness, sought to do justice to its deliverances.
Bishop Butler (1692-1752), Shaftesbury (1671-1713)9
Cumberland (1632-1719), Cudworth (1617-1688), Clarke,
(1675-1729)9 Wollaston (1659-1724), Hutcheson (1694-
1747), all embraced, in one form or another, Objective-
Intuitionism. Of these writers, Bishop Butler is consider*
ably the most important. I propose, therefore, after a
brief preliminary treatment of some of the writers just
mentioned, to give some account of Butler's philosophy,
and to follow this with an outline ofthe moral theory ofKant
which, in spite of its difficulty, is perhaps the most cele-
brated theory in the history of moral philosophy. The
English objective-intuitionists mentioned above differ
from one another chiefly in their views of the nature of
the facility by means of which moral differences are
recognized and moral judgments passed. The general
importance of this question and in particular its bearing
upon the problem of free-will, I shall try to show in
later chapters. 1 For the moment I am concerned only
with that form of Objective-Intuitionism which postulating
a unique faculty, not specifically identified with reason,
will, emotion or any other faculty, and usually known as
"the moral sense", regards it as the sole and undisputed
source of our moral judgments.
Writers of die Moral Sense School The term "moral
sense" was actually first used by the ethical writer
Hutcheson (1694-1747) in his SysUm of Moral Philosophy.
How, he asked, do we come to have our notions ofmorality, and answered, in effect, very much as we come to have
1 See Chapter VII, pp. 267-271; and Chapter VIII, pp. 287-289
and