Recent Tendencies in Ethics by William Ritchie Sorley
page 9 of 88 (10%)
page 9 of 88 (10%)
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weighing these conflicting utilities against one another, and marking
out the region within which one or the other preponderates[1]." He holds that there are such limits to veracity. He even thinks--though here he is not quite correct--that such limits have been acknowledged by all moralists[2]. He would have been correct if he had said that they had been acknowledged by moralists of all schools: the admission of these limits is not peculiar to Utilitarians. But he vigorously defends the validity of the general rule, and maintains that, in considering any possible exception, we have to take account not merely of the present utility of the falsehood, but of its effect upon the sanctity of the general principle in the minds of men. The Utilitarian doctrine is expressly used by him to confirm the ordinary general laws of the moral consciousness. Nay, these rules--such as the duties of being temperate and just and benevolent--were, according to Mill, themselves the result of experiences of utility on the part of our predecessors, and from them handed down to us by the tradition of the race. No doubt in this Mill is applying a theoretical view too easily to a question of history. It is one thing to maintain, as he does, that utility is the correct test of morality; it is another thing altogether to say that our ordinary moral rules are the records or expressions of earlier judgments of utility. The former statement is made as a controversial statement which is admitted to be so far doubtful that most men need to be convinced of it. The latter statement could only be true if nobody had ever doubted the former--if everybody in past ages had accepted utility as the standard of morality. But, for our present purpose, his attitude to this question is of interest only as bringing out the point that the different schools of ethical thought during last century had a large basis of common agreement, and that this basis of common agreement was their acknowledgment of the validity of the moral rules recognised by the |
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