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

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v ETHICS
(ii) THE ARGUMENT FROM ORIGINS AND THE
ASSOCIATION OF IDEAS. Another familiar method
of meeting the difficulties of Subjectivism is to argue
from origins and the Association of Ideas* What is the
land of objection that the subjectivist has to meet? Most
of us do undoubtedly honour a virtuous man apart
from his usefulness to ourselves, and apart also from the
way in which at any given moment he may happen to
behave; we do feel that we ought to do our duty inde-
pendently of the results of so doing; we do indubitably
have experiences, when, for example, we acknowledge
the pull ofmoral obligation, which are perceptibly different
from the experiences involved in calculations of expediency.
How, then, are we to account for these admitted facts of
experience, of apparently distinctive experience, on a
subjectivist basis? The usual line of argument is that which
is based upon the Association of Ideas. Very briefly, the
argument
is as follows. It is admitted that there exist
to-day what are called ethical sentiments, but they have
developed from non-ethical sentiments in the past. Our
ancestors performed a certain class of action, X, because
they produced pleasant consequences to themselves, or
contributed to die well-being of the community. They
honoured a certain kind of character, Y, because courage,
for example, or loyalty were useful to the tribe. In other
words, they performed X and honoured Y, because X-like
actions and Y-like characters were expedient or useful
in the sense that they tended to produce pleasant sen-
sations in most people. When, over a considerable period,
people had performed X-like actions and honoured Y-like
characters for these reasons, the disposition to perform X
and to honour Y became stamped into the consciousness
of members of the community, and presently began to
appear as an inherited instinct. We now, therefore, have
an inherited disposition to perform X-like actions and
honour Y-like characters; we fed, that is to say, an
obligation to do our duty for its own sake and an intuition of
the intrinsic value of certain character traits, only because