CHAPTER I

THE EMOTIONAL ORIGIN OF MORAL JUDGMENTS

THAT the moral concepts are ultimately based on emotions either of indignation or approval, is a fact which a certain school of thinkers have in vain attempted to deny. The terms which embody these concepts must originally have been used-indeed they still constantly are so usedas direct expressions of such emotions with reference to the phenomena which evoked them. Men pronounced certain acts to be good or bad on account of the emotions thos acts aroused in their minds, just as they called sunshind warm and ice cold on account of certain sensations which they experienced, and as they named a thing pleasant of painful because they felt pleasure or pain. But to attri bute a quality to a thing is never the same as merely to state the existence of a particular sensation or feeling in the mind which perceives it. Such an attribution mus mean that the thing, under certain circumstances, makes certain impression on the mind. By calling an warm or pleasant, a person asserts that it is apt to produ in him a sensation of heat or a feeling of pleasure. Sim larly, to name an act good or bad, ultimately impli that it is apt to give rise to an emotion of approval disapproval in him who pronounces the judgment. Whil not affirming the actual existence of any specific emotio in the mind of the person judging or of anybody els the predicate of a moral judgment attributes to th subject a tendency to arouse an emotion. The mor

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concepts, then, are essentially generalisations of tendencies in certain phenomena to call forth moral emotions.

However, as is frequently the case with general terms, these concepts are mentioned without any distinct idea of their contents. The relation in which many of them stand to the moral emotions is complicated; the use of them is often vague; and ethical theorisers, instead of subjecting them to a careful analysis, have done their best to increase the confusion by adapting the meaning of the terms to fit their theories. Very commonly, in the definition of the goodness or badness of acts, reference is made, not to their tendencies to evoke emotions of approval or indignation, but to the causes of these tendencies, that is, to those qualities in the acts which call forth moral emotions. Thus, because good acts generally produce pleasure and bad acts pain, goodness and badness have been identified with the tendencies of acts to produce pleasure or pain. The following statement of Sir James Stephen is a clearly expressed instance of this confusion, so common among utilitarians :"Speaking generally, the acts which are called right do promote, or are supposed to promote general happiness, and the acts which are called wrong do diminish, or are supposed to diminish it. I say, therefore, that this is what the words 'right' and 'wrong' mean, just as the I words 'up' and 'down' mean that which points from or towards the earth's centre of gravity, though they are I used by millions who have not the least notion of the fact that such is their meaning, and though they were used for centuries and millenniums before any one was or even could be aware of it." So, too, Bentham maintained that words like "ought," "right," and "wrong," have no meaning unless interpreted in accordance with the principle of I utility; and James Mill was of opinion that "the very morality" of the act lies, not in the sentiments raised in the breast of him who perceives or contemplates it, but in "the consequences of the act, good or evil, and their being

1 Stephen, Liberty, Equality, Fraternity, p. 338.

2 Bentham, Principles of Morals and Legislation, p. 4.

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within the intention of the agent." He adds that a rational assertor of the principle of utility approves of an action "because it is good," and calls it good "because it conduces to happiness." This, however, is to invert the sequence of the facts, since, properly speaking, an act is called good because it is approved of, and is approved of by an utilitarian in so far as it conduces to happiness.

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Such confusion of terms cannot affect the real meaning of the moral concepts. It is true that he who holds that "actions are right in proportion as they tend to promote happiness, wrong as they tend to produce the reverse of happiness," may, by a merely intellectual process, pass judgment on the moral character of ticular acts; but, if he is an utilitarian from conviction, his first principle, at least, has an emotional origin. case is similar with many of the moral judgments ordinarily passed by men. They are applications of some accepted general rule: conformity or non-conformity to the rule decides the rightness or wrongness of the act judged of. But whether the rule be the result of a person's independent deductions, or be based upon authority, human or divine, the fact that his moral consciousness recognises it as valid implies that it has an emotional sanction in his own mind.

Whilst the import of the predicate of a moral judgment may thus in every case be traced back to an emotion in him who pronounces the judgment, it is generally assumed to possess the character of universality or "objec tivity" as well. The statement that an act is good o bad does not merely refer to an individual emotion; a will be shown subsequently, it always has reference to a emotion of a more public character. Very often it ever implies some vague assumption that the act must b recognised as good or bad by everybody who possesses sufficient knowledge of the case and of all attendan circumstances, and who has a "sufficiently developed 2 Ibid. p. 368.

1 James Mill, Fragment on Mackintosh, pp. 5, 376.

Stuart Mill, Utilitarianism, p. 9 sq

moral consciousness. We are not willing to admit that our moral convictions are a mere matter of taste, and we are inclined to regard convictions differing from our own as errors. This characteristic of our moral judgments has been adduced as an argument against the emotionalist theory of moral origins, and has led to the belief that the moral concepts represent qualities which are discerned by reason.

Cudworth, Clarke, Price, and Reid are names which recall to our mind a theory according to which the morality of actions is perceived by the intellect, just as are number, diversity, causation, proportion. "Morality is eternal and immutable," says Richard Price. "Right and wrong, it appears, denote what actions are. Now whatever any thing is, that it is, not by will, or degree, or power, but by nature and necessity. Whatever a triangle or circle is, that it is unchangeably and eternally.. The same is to be said of right and wrong, of moral good and evil, as far as they express real characters of actions. They must immutably and necessarily belong to those actions of which they are truly affirmed."1 And as having a real existence outside the mind, they can only be discerned by the understanding. It is true that this discernment is accompanied with an emotion :-" Some impressions of pleasure or pain, satisfaction or disgust, generally attend our perceptions of virtue and vice. But these are merely their effects and concomitants, and not the perceptions themselves, which ought no more to be confounded with them, than a particular truth (like that for which Pythagoras offered a hecatomb) ought to be confounded with the pleasure that may attend the discovery of it." 2

According to another doctrine, the moral predicates, though not regarded as expressions of "theoretical' truth, nevertheless derive all their import from reason— from "practical" or "moral" reason, as it is variously

1 Price, Review of the Principal Questions in Morals, pp. 63, 74 sq.
2 Ibid. p. 63.

called. Thus Professor Sidgwick holds that the fundamental notions represented by the word "ought" or "right," which moral judgments contain expressly or by implication, are essentially different from all notions representing facts of physical or psychical experience, and he refers such judgments to the "reason," understood as a faculty of cognition. By this he implies "that what ought to be is a possible object of knowledge, i.e., that what I judge ought to be, must, unless I am in error, be similarly judged by all rational beings who judge truly of the matter.' The moral judgments contain moral truths, and, "cannot legitimately be interpreted as judgments respecting the present or future existence of human feelings or any facts of the sensible world."1

Yet our tendency to objectivise the moral judgments is no sufficient ground for referring them to the province of reason. If, in this respect, there is a difference between these judgments and others that are rooted in the subjective sphere of experience, it is, largely, a difference in degree rather than in kind. The aesthetic judgments, which indisputably have an emotional origin, also lay claim to a certain amount of "objectivity." By saying of a piece of music that it is beautiful, we do not merely mean that it gives ourselves æsthetic enjoyment, but we make a latent assumption that it must have a similar effect upon everybody who is sufficiently musical to appreciate it. This objectivity ascribed to judgments which have a merely subjective origin springs in the first place from the similarity of the mental constitution of men, and, generally speaking, the tendency to regard them as objective is greater in proportion as the impressions vary less in each particular case. If "there is no disputing of tastes,” that is because taste is so extremely variable; and yet even in this instance we recognise a certain "objective" standard by speaking of a "bad" and a "good" taste. On the other hand, if the appearance of objectivity in the moral judgments is so illusive as to 1 Sidgwick, Methods of Ethics, pp. 25, 33 sq.