Page:Ethics (Moore 1912).djvu/103

 the theory we are considering certainly is not true. It cannot be true that every man always denotes by the word “right” merely a relation to his own feelings, since, if that were so, no two men would ever denote by this word the same predicate; and hence a man who said that an action was not right could never be denying that it had the very predicate, which another, who said that it was right, was asserting that it had.

It seems to me this argument proves conclusively that, whatever we do mean, when we say that an action is right, we certainly do not mean merely that we ourselves have a certain feeling towards it. But it is important to distinguish carefully between exactly what it does prove, and what it does not prove. It does not prove, at all, that it may not be the case, that, whenever any man judges an action to be right, he always, in fact, has a certain feeling towards it, and even that he makes the judgment only because he has that feeling. It only proves that, even if this be so, what he is judging is not merely that he has the feeling. And these two points are, I think, very liable to be