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What Would Happen if Everybody Acted like Me?

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  25 February 2009

A. C. Ewing
Affiliation:
University of Cambridge

Extract

In this paper I shall use terms such as “intrinsically good” which may be deemed old fashioned by many readers and which certainly to my own mind presuppose an objective non-naturalistic theory of ethics. I still hold such a theory and I have not mastered the new jargon by which a sort of higher synthesis between that and other theories is supposed to have been effected, but I do not think that such a view as mine of ethics in general is necessarily presupposed if one is to understand or even agree with the contentions of my article. These relate to a specific problem as to certain ethical actions, which will arise on any view that admits the possibility of giving any sort of legitimate reasons for ethical judgments, as we all do in practice. After all a naturalist can easily translate “intrinsically good” into his own terms, say, valued for its own sake by most people who experience it, and there will still be a question as to what is intrinsically and what is merely instrumentally good and other questions as to what is the logical nature of certain arguments in ethics.

Type
Articles
Copyright
Copyright © The Royal Institute of Philosophy 1953

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References

page 22 note 1 I should not, in doing this, be acting inconsistently, though I should be acting wrongly, if my set policy were to secure as much material advantage as I could for myself regardless of other considerations, but then I should not be acting qua universalistic utilitarian, and it is universalistic utilitarianism that I am discussing here, not egoism.

page 24 note 1 I.e. the view that the right action is the action most conducive to good, good being not limited to pleasure or happiness but supposed to include other values such as virtue and knowledge.

page 29 note 1 International Journal of Ethics, 1915–16.