Page:An introduction to ethics.djvu/147

 will have for him, as soon as he has realised the futility of his own independent judgments, the force of absolute law. But suppose one day mother makes a moral judgment, and father (also a being having authority) makes another, inconsistent with mother's, the child begins to suspect the soundness of mother's moral judgments. In a dim way he recognises that if, with regard to the same action, mother says he is naughty and father says he is good, both these moral judgments cannot be true. If such conflicts occur with any frequency, mother's moral judgments become degraded from the enactments of absolute law to (what they really are) the expressions of private opinion.

But the moral standard (we may say on behalf of the child) cannot be private opinion, because it would then follow that there is no such thing as right and wrong and good and bad. If the only standard of moral judgment were private opinion, then what I think right would be right for me, and no one could contradict me. If anyone did, I could retort, "That is only your opinion, and my opinion is as good as yours."

§ 3. The Standard as Social Convention. If the child should persistently try to exert his private opinion in opposition to the private opinions of his mother and father, he will find that father and mother will unite against him. On most points their opinions are in agreement, and in the normal home the child comes to realise that their attitude to him is in essentials the same, and that on the whole the moral judgments which they pass on him coincide. The standard of moral judgment is no longer simply