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

a86 BTHICS
tends to increase public happiness is also a good. Cumberland
often writes in such a way as to suggest that for him
a good act is simply an act which promotes public happiness;
for example, he says "we derive the laws of nature
from Ac results of human conduct, regarding that to be
commanded of God, which conduces to the happiness of
man 1
'. This is very close to the doctrine of the utilitarians,
who held that the lightness of an act was to be measured
by the degree to which its consequences were or were not
conducive to happiness. Of all the intuitionists, indeed,
Cumberland came nearest to building a bridge between the
view which holds that a right act is one of which the moral
sense approves because it is right, and the view that insists
that it is one which promotes the best consequences.
Inconsistencies of the BngKrfi Iniukbniits. The fore-
going survey ofsome of the views of the English intuitionists
will, it is hoped, have served the purpose of revealing the
difficulties which the general theory of Intuitionism, to
which in various ways they all subscribe, has to meet.
Of some of these difficulties they were themselves con-
scious, and it was this consciousness which led them to
introduce into the doctrine of Intuitionism modifications
which were inconsistent with the general theory.
Examples of such modifications are Shaftesbury's
attribution to the moral sense of reflective and selective
functions which would normally be said to be exercised
by reason, and his admission that virtue is not only a good
in itself, but a means to a further good, namely, happiness.
Both these modifications take us some way along the road
which leads from Intuitionism to Utilitarianism* Before,
however, I proceed to a statement of the utilitarian
theories of morals in which these modifications of intui-
tionist doctrine receive their full logical development, it
will be convenient to complete the statement of what may
be called the case against Intuitionism. The criticisms which
follow do not appear in precisely the form in which they
arc given in the works of any ethical writer. They are all,