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

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* ETHICS
Conditions Governing the Acceptance of Ultimate Moral
Principles. Sidgwick maintains that these intuitional
judgments, which are unthinkingly passed by commonsense,
point to the influence of certain ultimate moral
principles upon men's minds. He is prepared to agree
that there may be such principles and that they ought
to be trusted for what court of appeal, he asks, can there
be in ethics save, in the last resort, the popular conscious-
ness? provided that they satisfy certain conditions.
These conditions are that they must be clear; that they
must be consistent among themselves; that there must
be an unmistakable consensus of opinion among most
normal people in their favour; and that they must not
only seem to be self-evidently true, but continue to seem
to be so on examination and reflection.
Judged by the standard of these conditions, most
commonsense intuitions about morals are, he finds, open
to criticism on two counts* In the first place, the ordinary
commonsensc man confuses his impulses of approval and
disapproval with genuine moral intuitions. Thus the
mother says to her child, "Don't be naughty", when all
she means is "Don't be inconvenient to me personally";
the clergymen
of countries at war maintain that the
enemy is hateful, and justly hateful, to God, when all that
they mean is, that the enemy is dangerous to the clergymen,
their relations, their property, their flocks, and their coun-
tries; elderly ladies consider that sex is shameful, when all
that they mean is that it has passed them by. In short, most
of the so-called moral judgments which most people pass
1
are, on any view of ethics, subjective. They are not, that
is to say, judgments to the effect that a particular action
has a certain quality; they merely report the fact that a
certain person, the judger, is experiencing certain emotions
of approval and disapproval.
In the second place, many so-called intuitions about
conduct are, Sidgwick holds, merely the reflection of the
1 See
Chapter V, p. 159, for an account of the tense in which this
word is used.