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

NATURE OF THE MORAL FACULTY 287
nevertheless, such as the utilitarians might have brought,
and many are such as they did in fact bring, against
theories which base ethics upon the deliverances ofan alleged
moral sense.
II. CRITICISM OF INTUITIONIST
AND MORAL SENSE THEORIES
(i) That it is Impossible to Separate an Action from its
Consequences. I have already tried to show that, unless
our sense of duty and our moral judgments are conceived
to be at least in part rational, it is extremely difficult to
establish their claim to freedom; if, on the other hand, they
contain any admixture of reason, they cannot but take into
account the consequences of actions. The fact that they
do and must do so was one which the utilitarians frequently
emphasized. You cannot, they said in effect, judge a
person's character if it does not express itself in actions,
while, the actions in which it expresses itself cannot, if
considered apart from their consequences, be regarded
as either moral or non-moral. Actions divorced from their
consequences are, in fact, ethically negligible. What
ground, for example, could there be for objecting to drunkenness,
if it did not make a man arrogant in manner, halt-
ing in gait, thick in speech, sodden in mind, and disgusting
in habit? If the traditional drunkard did not beat his wife,
his wife would not mind his drinking. What, again, is the
objection to cruelty unless it produces suffering in its
object? For the notion of cruelty includes the suffering of
its object.
The more closely the matter is examined, the more
difficult does it become to see how a distinction can be
drawn between an act and its consequences. Where, in
fact, does the act end and the consequences begin? An act
is a happening in the natural world; regarded from the
point of view of the physical
sciences it consists in the
alteration of the position in space of one or more pieces
of matter. That this is so with regard to actions which are