Just as little can the ethical idea, as the discrimination of right and
wrong, be referred to the "sensibility," as the pleasure or dislike
with which we regard what is found useful and conducive to enjoyment
or the reverse. For, though a certain pleasure is connected with the
ethically right, this specific feeling follows, and is dependent on
no other perception than of the right. It is a satisfaction which
the ethically good thus awakens. But the knowledge which experience
gives of what is useful and conducive to enjoyment is generically
different from the moral idea and its sense of obligation. Utility and
the ethical discrimination are not the same conception. They belong
to two diverse realms of thought and knowledge. Whatever relations
may be traced between them, they cannot be identified or held as
convertible percepts. The autonomous imperative of the ethical idea
often positively prohibits the very things men judge to be profitable
and pleasurable. It is a remarkable fact that the testimonies from
literature and life to the phenomenon of moral distinctions everywhere
maintain the difference between the idea of right and that of the
pleasurable or profitable. What is right is one thing; what is
agreeable is another thing. The two conceptions are not identical, but
are often placed in immediate and irreducible antithesis. Those who do
right, choosing it and heroically loyal to it despite the appeals of
ambition, the temptations of avarice, the enticements of ease, and the
favor or the wrath of the wicked, are approved and honored. To such the
gates of the divine favor and recompense are pictured as ever standing
open.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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