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

OBJECTIVE UTILITARIANISM
fashions of the age, of the conventions of the class, or of
the needs of the society to 'which die judger happens to
belong. That witches arc wicked and should be burned;
that capitalists are wicked and should be dispossessed;
that Germans are wicked and should be killed, are examples
of such judgments passed respectively by the average
citizen of the Middle Ages, by the average working-class
Communist in 1937, and by the average Englishman in
the years 1914-1918. These judgments would not, in
Sidgwick's view, entail genuine moral intuitions about the
nature of witches, capitalists and Germans. They belong
rather to the category of what the twentieth century calls
rationalizations-rationalizations, that is to say, of superstitious
fear, class hatred and national expediency. As we
shall see in the next chapter, 1 it is quite possible to hold
that all ethical judgments are of this type.
Are there, on Sidgwick's view, any intuitions which
satisfy the conditions that he has laid down? Are there,
that is to say, any genuine moral principles whose truth
is intuitively perceived? He mentions a number of which
two are important. The first is the principle that, whatever
good may be, the good of no one individual is of any
greater or any less importance, than the equal good of
another. The second is the principle that it is a man's
duty to aim at good generally, and not at any particular
part of it, for example, at that part of it which is his own
happiness. From these two principles Sidgwick deduces
what he calls the Principle of Rational Benevolence,
namely, that it is no less a man's duty to try to produce
states of mind in other individuals than it is to
good
produce them in himself, except in so far as he may have
less power over other people's states of mind than he has
over his own, or may feel less certain in their case than he
is in his own what is good for them. These principles are
implicit in the- writings of the utilitarians, and it is not
difficult to detect the influence which, in the form of
unconscious assumptions, they exert upon their theories.
1 Sec Chapter X, pp. 373-382.