The Theory of Morality [antikvár]

PrefaceWhen most people 1 encounter discuss a moral question, the considerations they advance conform to a set of related patterns, even though those patterns are sometimes at odds with the philosophical doctrines they profess. Neither phenomenon is surprising. Both in Europe, and in the societies whose cultures descend from Europe, moral traditions are still being transmitted in association with religious ones; and the major religions of those societies, Judaism and the various branches of Christianity, agree in the main about morality. Moreover, much of the literature of those societies has been occupied with predicaments that are intelligible only in terms of their common moral tradition. And yet, on the other hand, philosophy and the social sciences in those societies have for the past century been dominated by movements which repudiate that moral tradition.Undergraduates soon discover that most of the systems of philosophical ethics they study are hard to reconcile with the grounds on which they have been brought up to make moral judgements. In my own undergraduate days, only one system was advanced as being a theoretical account of received morality: namely, the new intuitionism of Broad and Ross. But it seemed unacceptable. Under the influence of logical positivism, 1 found it epistemologically hard to swallow. A little later, W. D. Falk led me to doubt whether it did not exclude every intelligible motive for acting morally. And, at the same time, Marxism was undermining my confidence in traditional