Recent Tendencies in Ethics eBook

William Ritchie Sorley
This eBook from the Gutenberg Project consists of approximately 89 pages of information about Recent Tendencies in Ethics.

Recent Tendencies in Ethics eBook

William Ritchie Sorley
This eBook from the Gutenberg Project consists of approximately 89 pages of information about Recent Tendencies in Ethics.

[Footnote 1:  It seems to have been through J.S.  Mill’s influence that the term obtained currency.  It was used by him as the name of a “little society to be composed of young men agreeing in fundamental principles” which he formed in the winter of 1822-23.  He “did not invent the word, but found in one of Galt’s novels, the ’Annals of the Parish.’” “With a boy’s fondness for a name and a banner I seized on the word, and for some years called myself and others by it as a sectarian appellation” (’Autobiography,’ pp. 79, 80; cf.  ‘Utilitarianism,’ p. 9 n.) A couple of sentences from Galt may be quoted:  “As there was at the time a bruit and a sound about universal benevolence, philanthropy, utility, and all the other disguises with which an infidel philosophy appropriated to itself the charity, brotherly love, and well-doing inculcated by our holy religion, I set myself to task upon these heads....  With well-doing, however, I went more roundly to work.  I told my people that I thought they had more sense than to secede from Christianity to become Utilitarians, for that it would be a confession of ignorance of the faith they deserted, seeing that it was the main duty inculcated by our religion to do all in morals and manners to which the new-fangled doctrine of utility pretended.”  Mill is wrong in supposing that his use of the term “was the first time that any one had taken the title of Utilitarian”; and Galt, who represents his annalist as writing of the year 1794, is historically justified.  Writing in 1781 Bentham uses the word ‘utilitarian,’ and again in 1802 he definitely asserts that it is the only name of his creed (’Works,’ x. 92, 392).  M. Halevy (’L’evolution de la doctrine utilitaire,’ p. 300) draws attention to the presence of the word in Jane Austen’s ‘Sense and Sensibility,’ published in 1811.]

The Intuitionists maintained—­to put the matter briefly—­that the moral consciousness of man could not be entirely accounted for by experiences of the kind laid stress on by the Utilitarians.  They maintained that moral ideas were in their origin spiritual, although they might be called into definite consciousness by the experience of the facts to which they could be applied.  Experience might call them forth into the light of day; but it was held that they belonged, in nature and origin, to the constitution of man’s mind.  On this ground, therefore, the school was properly called Intuitional:  they held that moral ideas were received by direct vision or intuition, as it were, not by a process of induction from particular facts.

And, in the second place, with regard to the criterion of morality, that also (they held) was not dependent on the consequences in the way of happiness and misery which the Utilitarians emphasised.  On the contrary, moral ideas themselves had an independent validity; they had a worth and authority for conduct which could not be accounted for by any consequences in which action resulted:  belonging as they did to the essence of the human spirit, they also had authority over the conduct of man’s life.

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Recent Tendencies in Ethics from Project Gutenberg. Public domain.