(even thinking it praiseworthy to deceive without any further end
than that of practicing deception), he can do no more than point to
the social prosperity furthered by entire trust between man and man,
and the social disorganization that follows universal untruthfulness,
consequences that are necessarily conducive to agreeable feelings and
disagreeable feelings respectively.
The unavoidable conclusion is, then, that the intuitionist does not,
and cannot, ignore the ultimate derivations of right and wrong from
pleasure and pain. However much he may be guided, and rightly guided,
by the decisions of conscience respecting the characters of acts, he
has come to have confidence in these decisions because he perceives,
vaguely but positively, that conformity to them furthers the welfare
of himself and others, and that disregard of them entails in the long
run suffering on all. Require him to name any moral-sense judgment by
which he knows as right some kind of act that will bring a surplus of
pain, taking into account the totals in this life and in any assumed
other life, and you find him unable to name one: a fact proving that
underneath all these intuitions respecting the goodness or badness
of acts there lies the fundamental assumption that acts are good or
bad according as their aggregate effects increase men's happiness or
increase their misery.
§ 14. It is curious to see how the devil-worship of the savage,
surviving in various disguises among the civilized, and leaving as
one of its products that asceticism which in many forms and degrees
still prevails widely, is to be found influencing in marked ways men
who have apparently emancipated themselves, not only from primitive
superstitions but from more developed superstitions. Views of life and
conduct which originated with those who propitiated deified ancestors
by self-tortures enter even still into the ethical theories of many
persons who have years since cast away the theology of the past, and
suppose themselves to be no longer influenced by it.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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