For these reasons it seems to me extremely difficult to believe that
when we judge things to be wrong, each of us is merely making a
judgment about _his own_ psychology. But if not about our own, then
about whose? I have already said that the view that, if the judgment
is merely a psychological one at all, it is a judgment about our
own psychology, is in some ways more plausible than any other view.
And I think we can now see that any other view is _not_ plausible.
The alternatives are that I should be making a judgment about the
psychology of all mankind, or about that of some particular section
of it. And that the first alternative is not true, is, I think,
evident from the fact that, when I judge an action to be wrong, I
may emphatically _not_ believe that it is true of all mankind that
they would regard it with feelings of moral disapproval. I may know
perfectly well that some would not. Most philosophers, therefore, have
not ventured to say that this is the judgment I am making; they say,
for instance, that I am making a judgment about the feelings of the
particular society to which I belong--about, for instance, the feelings
of an impartial spectator in that society. But, if this view be taken,
it is open to the same objections as the view that I am merely making a
judgment about my own feelings. If we could say that every man, when he
judges a thing to be wrong, was making a statement about the feelings
of all mankind, then when A says "This is wrong" and B says "No, it
isn't," they would really be differing in opinion, since A would be
saying that all mankind feel in a certain way towards the action, and
B would be saying that they don't. But if A is referring merely to his
society and B to his, and their societies are different, then obviously
they are not differing in opinion at all: it may perfectly well be true
both that an impartial spectator in A's society does have a certain
sort of feeling towards actions of the sort in question, and that an
impartial spectator in B's does not. This view, therefore, implies that
it is impossible for two men belonging to different societies ever to
differ in opinion on a moral question. And this is a view which I find
it almost as hard to accept as the view that _no_ two men ever differ
in opinion on one.
For these reasons I think there are serious objections to the view
that the idea of moral obligation is merely a psychological idea.
But now let us briefly consider the idea of "good," in Aristotle's
sense, or intrinsic value.
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