A Study of Ethical Principles |
|
Author:
| Seth, James |
ISBN: | 978-0-217-42959-7 |
Publication Date: | Feb 2012 |
Publisher: | General Books LLC
|
Book Format: | Paperback |
List Price: | AUD $26.20 |
Book Description:
|
Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: absolute moral scepticism means death, or cessation from activity. Life, like thought, is the constant refutation of scepticism. As the continued effort to think is the refutation of intellectual scepticism, the continued effort to live is the refutation of moral scepticism. We live by faith. The effort to...
More DescriptionPurchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: absolute moral scepticism means death, or cessation from activity. Life, like thought, is the constant refutation of scepticism. As the continued effort to think is the refutation of intellectual scepticism, the continued effort to live is the refutation of moral scepticism. We live by faith. The effort to live, the perseverare in esse suo, implies, in a rational or reflective being, the conviction that life is worth living, that there are objects in life, that there is some supreme Object or sovereign Good for man. Such a faith may be a blind illusion, as Pessimism declares; but it is none the less actual and inevitable. The ordinary man, it is true, does not realise that he has this faith, except in so far as he reflects upon his life. His plan of life is largely implicit; he estimates the goods of life by reference to a silently guiding idea of the Good. To press the Socratic question, Good for what ? and thus to substitute for a blind unthinking faith the insight of reason, is to pass from ordinary thought to philosophy. Now when the philosophical question is pressed, there is at once revealed a seemingly chaotic variety of Goods, which refuse to be reduced to any common denominator. One man's meat is another man's poison. If the metaphysician is tempted to ask despairingly, in view of the conflict of intellectual opinion, What is Truth ? the ethical philosopher is no less tempted, in face of a similar conflict of moral opinion, to ask, What is Good ? What seems good to me is my good, what seems good to you is yours; there is no moral criterion. Here, at any rate, we seem to be reduced to absolute subjectivity. Yet the philosopher cannot, any more than the ordinary man, escape from faith in an absolute Good. Like the ordinary man, he may have his difficulties ...