Moral Philosophy by S. J. Joseph Rickaby
page 136 of 356 (38%)
page 136 of 356 (38%)
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thing is _offensive_ to those we love and revere. Then it is _bad for
us_. Then it is _shameful, shabby, unfair, unkind, selfish, hateful to God_. All these points of the idea of wrong are grasped by the intellect, beginning with sensory presentations of what is seen and felt and heard said. Again with the idea of _ought_. This idea is sometimes said to defy analysis. But we have gone about (c. vi.) to analyse it into two elements, _nature requiring, nature's King commanding_. The idea of _wrong_ we analysed into a breach of this natural requirement, and this Divine command or law. Primary moral ideas, then, yield to intellectual analysis. They are of this style: _to be done, as I wish to be rational and please God: not to be done, unless I wish to spoil myself and disobey my Maker_. But primary moral ideas, compared together, make primary moral judgments. Primary moral judgments, therefore, arise in the intellect, by the same process as other beliefs arise there in matters of necessary truth. 8. Thus, applying the principle known as _Occham's razor_, that "entities are not to be multiplied without reason," we refuse to acknowledge any Moral Sense, distinct from Intellect. We know of no peculiar faculty, specially made to receive "ideas, pleasures and pains in the moral order." (Mackintosh, _Ethics_, p. 206.) Most of all, we emphatically protest against any blind power being accredited as the organ of morality. We cannot accept for our theory of morals, that everything is right which warms the breast with a glow of enthusiasm, and all those actions wrong, at which emotional people are prone to cry out, _dreadful, shocking_. We cannot accept emotions for arbitrators, where it most concerns reasonable beings to have what the Apostle calls "enlightened eyes of the heart" (Ephes. i. 18), that we may "know to refuse the evil and to choose the good." (Isaias vii. 15.) A judge may have his emotions, but his charge to the jury must be |
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