Excerpt from Common-Sense Ethics
There is no class of judgments to which we appeal with more absolute confidence in the ultimate unanimity of different minds than moral judgments. If men have been found to defend the Holy Inquisition, the Roman gladiatorial shows, negro slavery, or frightfulness in war, it is not because they differ from their fellows in their judgments concerning what constitutes right and wrong, but because they can make appeal to a sentiment in human nature which is not the subject of dispute but the arbiter. When we try, however, to give definite form and substance to this sentiment itself, - and this is the aim of the philosophical science of Ethics, - we find serious difficulty. It was manifested in wide divergency in the ancient ethical theories, and it is a problem dividing different schools of thought in philosophy to-day. Moreover, it is a problem to which no one is really indifferent, for it involves the problem of problems, - the nature and meaning of life.
This book is a study, an earnest, fresh and living study of the ethical problem by a young philosopher who has reflected deeply on the metaphysical theories of the ancient and modem periods and has tried seriously to bring them into accord and to discover in them some guidance, particularly in regard to the political and social evolution which the present generation is witnessing. He describes his own view as that of common-sense Ethics. But by common sense it is clear that he does not intend to class himself with unphilosophical opinion, either in reasoned or contemptuous opposition to philosophical theory.
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