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

NATURE OF THE MORAL FACULTY 299
be likely to produce unhappiness at the time of the passing
of the judgment of moral approval upon them, affords a
strong presumption for rejecting a theory which insists
that the passing of a judgment of approval by the moral
sense is in itself a sufficient criterion of the morality of
an action. One further objection remains to be noted. It
often happens that when the moral sense of a particular
person has approved of an action and declared it to be
right, the moral sense of the same person or persons
presently disapproves of the consequences of the action
on the ground that they are bad. Now the fact of one
of an
judgment being passed about the consequences
action while a contrary judgment is passed about the
action itself, taken iir conjunction with the difficulty
to divorce an action from its conse-
attending the attempt
quences, forces us to the conclusion that the same wholes,
wholes, that is to say, which include both actions and
consequences, are being at the same time made the objects
of judgments of approval and of disapproval by the moral
sense, and are, therefore, at the same time both right and
wrong, good and bad. This conclusion must surely be
false. The fact that it is logically entailed by the position
under consideration suggests that the mere passing of a
judgment by the moral sense, whether upon an action or
its consequences, is not in itself sufficient to establish the
lightness or wrongness
of the action.
(5) That some Moral Judgments are Trivial and
Frivolous.
I have spoken so far of those judgments of the moral
sense which may be impugned on the ground that they are
self-contradictory or are deleterious to happiness. Other
judgments are open to criticism on the ground that they
are arbitrary, trivial or ludicrous. Thus our Victorian
. pianos
ancestors insisted on swathing the legs of their grand
on the ground that, being legs, they were necessarily
indecent The monks on Mount Athos carried the
early Christian prejudice against the female sex to such