moral judgments.
The view above described may be called, in a sense,
‘ultra-intuitional,’ since, in its most extreme form, it recognises
simple immediate intuitions alone and discards as superfluous all modes
of reasoning to moral conclusions: and we may find in it one phase or
variety of the Intuitional method,--if we may extend the term ‘method’
to include a procedure that is completed in a single judgment.
§ 3. But though probably all moral agents have experience of such
particular intuitions, and though they constitute a great part of the
moral phenomena of most minds, comparatively few are so thoroughly
satisfied with them, as not to feel a need of some further moral
knowledge even from a strictly practical point of view. For these
particular intuitions do not, to reflective persons, present themselves
as quite indubitable and irrefragable: nor do they always find when
they have put an ethical question to themselves with all sincerity,
that they are conscious of clear immediate insight in respect of
it. Again, when a man compares the utterances of his conscience at
different times, he often finds it difficult to make them altogether
consistent: the same conduct will wear a different moral aspect at one
time from that which it wore at another, although our knowledge of
its circumstances and conditions is not materially changed. Further,
we become aware that the moral perceptions of different minds, to
all appearance equally competent to judge, frequently conflict: one
condemns what another approves. In this way serious doubts are aroused
as to the validity of each man’s particular moral judgments: and we are
led to endeavour to set these doubts at rest by appealing to general
rules, more firmly established on a basis of common consent.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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