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*
ETHICS
ourselves, while the judgments passed by reason are public
and report what is external to ourselves. It follows that,
if moral judgments are fundamentally judgments of
feeling, they will tell us only about the feelings of those
who make them. In so far as the person who makes the
judgment does possess the feeling, all moral judgments
are equally valid. They are equally valid, that is to say,
in the sense that they tell us that the particular feelings
which the judgment reports are being entertained. In
so far, however, as they purport to do more than that,
in so far as they claim to tell us that an action X really
is wrong in itself, because the judger feels that it is wrong,
they possess no authority. Furthermore, inasmuch as the
contemplation of the action in question may produce
an entirely different feeling in some other person, a feeling
namely that X is right, the judgment that X is right will
be equally valid as an account of the feelings evoked in
this second person by the contemplation of action X,
although it will not, any more than the first judgment, tell
us anything about the real quality of X. If, therefore, the
statement that X is wrong, or the statement that X is
right, means simply that some person entertains a particular
feeling towards X, and means no more than that, it is
clearly possible, since different persons may at the same
time entertain feelings of a contrary character with regard
to X, far X to be both right and wrong at the same time.
This conclusion is explicitly accepted by those who
take a 1
subjectivist view of morality. My present concern
is to establish the point that, if the moral sense is feeling
or akin to feeling, morality cannot ever be more than
purely subjective.
Recapitulation, I began this chapter by considering
the nature of the moral sense and summarizing the views
of various ethical writers on the subject. This summary
developed into a criticism of the doctrine of Objective
Intuitionism. The criticism was (i) that if the moral sense
*Sce Chapter X, pp. 351, 352.