History of European Morals From Augustus to Charlemagne (Vol. 1 of 2)Lecky, William Edward Hartpole
Philosophy
History of European Morals From Augustus to Charlemagne (Vol. 1 of 2)
Lecky, William Edward Hartpole
Ethics; Europe -- Moral conditions
pleasure attending the gratification of this taste, according to
Shaftesbury and Henry More, is the motive to virtue. The doctrine of a
moral sense or faculty was the basis of the ethics of Reid. Hume
maintained that the peculiar quality of virtue is its utility, but that
our affections are purely disinterested, and that we arrive at our
knowledge of what is virtuous by a moral sense implanted in our nature,
which leads us instinctively to approve of all acts that are beneficial to
others. Expanding a pregnant hint which had been thrown out by Butler, he
laid the foundation for a union of the schools of Clarke and Shaftesbury,
by urging that our moral decisions are not simple, but complex, containing
both a judgment of the reason, and an emotion of the heart. This fact has
been elucidated still further by later writers, who have observed that
these two elements apply in varying degrees to different kinds of virtue.
According to Lord Kames, our intellectual perception of right and wrong
applies most strictly to virtues like justice or veracity, which are of
what is called “perfect obligation,” or, in other words, are of such a
nature, that their violation is a distinct crime, while the emotion of
attraction or affection is shown most strongly towards virtues of
imperfect obligation, like benevolence or charity. Like Hutcheson and
Shaftesbury, Lord Kames notices the analogies between our moral and
æsthetical judgments.
These last analogies open out a region of thought widely different from
that we have been traversing. The close connection between the good and
the beautiful has been always felt, so much so, that both were in Greek
expressed by the same word, and in the philosophy of Plato, moral beauty
was regarded as the archetype of which all visible beauty is only the
shadow or the image. We all feel that there is a strict propriety in the
term moral beauty. We feel that there are different forms of beauty which
have a natural correspondence to different moral qualities, and much of
the charm of poetry and eloquence rests upon this harmony. We feel that we
have a direct, immediate, intuitive perception that some objects, such as
the sky above us, are beautiful, that this perception of beauty is totally
different, and could not possibly be derived, from a perception of their
utility, and that it bears a very striking resemblance to the
instantaneous and unreasoning admiration elicited by a generous or heroic
action. We perceive too, if we examine with care the operations of our own
mind, that an æsthetical judgment includes an intuition or intellectual
perception, and an emotion of attraction or admiration, very similar to
those which compose a moral judgment. The very idea of beauty again
implies that it should be admired, as the idea of happiness implies that
it should be desired, and the idea of duty that it should be performed.
There is also a striking correspondence between the degree and kind of
uniformity we can in each case discover.
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