Recent Tendencies in Ethics
Sorley, William Ritchie, 1855-1935
English
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RECENT TENDENCIES IN ETHICS
Three Lectures to Clergy Given at Cambridge
BY
W. R. SORLEY, M.A. HON. LL.D. EDIN.
Knightbridge Professor of Moral Philosophy
MCMIV
PREFACE
These lectures were given to a summer meeting of clergy, held at
Cambridge in the month of July last. Some passages have been added as
they were written out for the press, and the crudities of the spoken
word have, I hope, been pruned away; but, in other respects, the
original plan of the lectures has been retained. They are now
published in the hope that they may prove of interest to those who
heard them, and to others who may desire an account, in short compass
and in popular form, of some leading features of the ethical thought
of the present day.
It is inevitable for such an account to be controversial: otherwise it
could not give a true picture of contemporary opinion. Intellectual
and social causes have conspired to accentuate traditional differences
in ethics, and to make the questions in dispute penetrate to the very
heart of morality. It has been my aim to trace the new influences
which are at work, and to estimate the value of the ethical doctrines
to which they have seemed to lead. The estimate has taken the form of
a criticism, but the criticism is in the interests of construction.
W.R. SORLEY.
CAMBRIDGE, 7th March, 1904.
CONTENTS.
I. CHARACTERISTICS
II. ETHICS AND EVOLUTION
III. ETHICS AND IDEALISM
INDEX
I.
CHARACTERISTICS.
A survey of ethical thought, especially English ethical thought,
during the last century would have to lay stress upon one
characteristic feature. It was limited in range,--limited, one may
say, by its regard for the importance of the facts with which it
had to deal. The thought of the period was certainly not without
controversy; it was indeed controversial almost to a fault. But
the controversies of the time centred almost exclusively round two
questions: the question of the origin of moral ideas, and the question
of the criterion of moral value. These questions were of course
traditional in the schools of philosophy; and for more than a century
English moralists were mainly occupied with inherited topics of
debate. They gave precision to the questions under discussion; and
their controversies defined the traditional opposition of ethical
opinion, and separated moralists into two hostile schools known as
Utilitarian and Intuitionist.
As regards the former question--that of the origin of moral ideas--the
Utilitarian School held that they could be traced to experience; and
by 'experience' they meant in the last resort sense-perceptions
and the feelings of pleasure and of pain which accompany or follow
sense-perception. All the facts of our moral consciousness,
therefore,--the knowledge of right and wrong, the judgments of
conscience, the recognition of duty and responsibility, the feelings
of reverence, remorse, and moral indignation,--all these could be
traced, they thought, to an origin in experience, to an origin which
in the last resort was sensuous, that is, due to the perceptions of
the senses and the feelings of pleasure and pain which accompany or
follow them.
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