Recent Tendencies in Ethics

Recent Tendencies in Ethics -
Three Lectures to Clergy Given
at Cambridge

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William Ritchie Sorley
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Title: Recent Tendencies in Ethics
Author: William Ritchie Sorley
Release Date: June 2, 2004 [eBook #12492]
Language: English
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TENDENCIES IN ETHICS***
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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.
With regard to the criterion or standard of morality,--the second
question to which I have to call attention,--they held that the distinction
between right and wrong depended upon the consequences of an action
in the way of pleasure and pain. That action was right which on the
whole and in the long run would bring pleasure or happiness to those
whom it affected: that action was wrong which on the whole and in the
long run would bring pain rather than pleasure to those whom it
affected.
From their view as to the origin of moral ideas, the school might more
properly be called the Empirical School. It is from their views on the
question of the standard of value, or the criterion of morality, that it
claimed, and that it received, the name Utilitarian[1]. On both these
points the Utilitarian School was opposed by an energetic but less
compact body of writers, known as Intuitionists.
[Footnote 1: It seems to have been through J.S. Mill's influence that