Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Preface
- Chapter 1 Fellow-feeling and ethical theory: the British sentimentalists
- Chapter 2 Ethical sentimentalism revisited
- Chapter 3 Shaftesbury's ethical system
- Chapter 4 Hutcheson's moral sense
- Chapter 5 What do we perceive by moral sense?
- Chapter 6 C. D. Broad's defense of moral sense theories in ethics
- Chapter 7 What is innate in moral sense?
- Bibliography
- Index
Chapter 7 - What is innate in moral sense?
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 22 September 2009
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Preface
- Chapter 1 Fellow-feeling and ethical theory: the British sentimentalists
- Chapter 2 Ethical sentimentalism revisited
- Chapter 3 Shaftesbury's ethical system
- Chapter 4 Hutcheson's moral sense
- Chapter 5 What do we perceive by moral sense?
- Chapter 6 C. D. Broad's defense of moral sense theories in ethics
- Chapter 7 What is innate in moral sense?
- Bibliography
- Index
Summary
MORAL SENSE THEORY: HUTCHESON, BROAD AND BEYOND
So – there is a type of moral theory, moral sense theory, which begins from the credible (and quite Hutchesonian) assertion that, as Broad said, “there is a peculiar kind of experience which human beings are liable to have when they contemplate certain acts.” This kind of experience (on the variety of moral sense theory we chose for good reasons to follow) is distinctly emotional in nature. But instead of explaining these moral feelings as merely “effects and concomitants,” as Price said, of more fundamental purely rational judgments of rightness and wrongness, moral sense theory holds (roughly) that having such emotions or sentiments just is what taking certain acts to be right or wrong, good or bad, consists of. It further claims, correspondingly (and again quite roughly) that an action's being good or bad, right or wrong, is not a matter of its possessing objective moral properties picked out (named) by those terms; rather a good action is good because it possesses other non-moral properties, which, human psychology being what it is, typically evoke (cause) certain moral pro-emotions in (all normal) human beings. The Theory grounds what objectivity moral judgments have in the shared and compelling nature of these positive and negative emotional dispositions and experiences concerning certain types of acts, and neither in any putative rational requirement of impartiality or consistency in assessing actions nor supposed “moral facts” about them.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Fellow-Feeling and the Moral Life , pp. 201 - 238Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2008