Moral judgments Are Not Based On Comparisons Or Relations
Table of Contents
Thus, it is impossible that the distinction between moral good and evil be made to reasan since that distinction influences our actions, which reason alone is incapable of.
Reason and judgment may be the intermediate cause of an action by prompting or by directing a passion.
But this judgment does not have virtue or vice.
The judgments caused by our judgments can less bestow vice and virtue on the actions which cause them.
We weigh the following considerations to:
- be more particular, and
- show that those eternal immutable fitnesses and unfitnesses of things cannot be defended by sound philosophy.
If the thought and understanding were alone capable of fixing the boundaries of right and wrong, vice and virtue must:
- lie in some relations of objects, or
- be a matter of fact discovered by our reasoning.
This consequence is evident.
The operations of human understanding divide themselves into 2:
- The comparing of ideas
- The inferring of matter of fact
If virtue were discovered by the understanding, it must be an object of one of these operations.
The understanding has no third operation which can discover it.
Some philosophers have very industriously suggested that morality is susceptible of demonstration.
Though no one has ever been able to advance a single step in those demonstrations.
Yet it is taken for granted, that the science of morality may be brought to an equal certainty with geometry or algebra.
Based on this, vice and virtue must consist in some relations, since no matter of fact is capable of being demonstrated.
Let us:
- examine this hypothesis,
- try to fix those moral qualities which have been so long the objects of our fruitless researches, and
- point out distinctly the relations which constitute morality or obligation.
So that we may know:
- wherein they consist, and
- how we must judge of them.
A relation is the association of ideas.
If you assert that vice and virtue consist in relations susceptible of certainty and demonstration, you must confine yourself to those four relations which alone allow them.
You will run into absurdities which you will never be able to extricate yourself from.
Because you make the very essence of morality lie in the relations.
But the only relations are those that are applicable to an irrational and inanimate object.
It follows, that even such objects can have merit or demerit.
All the following relations belong to matter just as they belong to our actions, passions, and volitions:
- resemblance, contrariety, degrees in quality, and proportions in quantity and number
Therefore, morality does not lie in any of these relations.
The moral sense does not lie in the discovery of these relations.13
Footnote 13:
Our way of thinking on this subject is commonly confused.
Those who assert that morality is demonstrable, do not say:
- that morality lies in the relations, and
- that the relations are distinguishable by reason.
They only say that reason can discover such an action in such relations to be virtuous, and such another to be vicious.
They thought it sufficient to bring ‘relation’ into the proposition, without troubling themselves whether it fulfilled the purpose or not.
But demonstrative reason only discovers relations.
According to this hypothesis, reason also discovers vice and virtue.
- These moral qualities, therefore, must be relations.
When we blame any action, the whole complicated object of action and situation must form relations which form the essence of vice.
Otherwise, this hypothesis is not understandable.
For what does reason discover when it calls any action as vicious?
Does it discover a relation or a matter of fact?
These questions are decisive and must not be eluded.