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

CHAPTER X: SUBJECTIVIST
THEORIES OF ETHICS
Introductory* General Characteristics of Subjectivist
Theories. All the views which we have considered
hitherto agree in holding that actions, characters, and
situations possess ethical characteristics in their own right.
They are good or bad, right or wrong, independently of
what any person or body of persons thinks or feels about
them. These ethical characteristics are, for the objective
intuitionist, intrinsic features of the actions, characters, or
situations which they characterise, and they are revealed
to the conscioTisness of the good man by the intuition of
a faculty known as the moral sense. To the utilitarian,
ethical qualities belong to actions only in so far as they
produce certain effects, although the effects themselves
are regarded as possessing ethical characteristics in their
own right. All the views hitherto considered agree, there-
fore, in holding that when we make an ethical judgment
about a situation, we are judging about the characteristics
which that situation apparently possesses independently
of our judgment characteristics which our judgment, if it
is correct, reports and by which our feelings, when we
morally approve or disapprove ofwhat wejudge, are evoked.
Subjectivist theories deny this. Subjectivist theories deny
that is to say, that characters, actions and situations possess
ethical characteristics in their own right, and assert that,
in so far as they can be said to possess ethical characteristics
at all, they do so only in the sense in which these characteristics
are attributed to them by our judgments, or are
conferred upon them by our feelings. If there were no
judgments and no feelings, then, subjectivists agree, there
would be no ethical characteristics. "There is nothing