Page:Ethics (Moore 1912).djvu/127

 you think it was wrong”; and the person who makes this rejoinder will generally only mean by it, that the man does not know the action to be wrong, but only believes that it is so: that he is merely expressing his opinion, and has no absolute knowledge on the point. In other words, a man is often loosely said to mean by an assertion what, in fact, he is only expressing by it; and for this and other reasons the two views we are considering are liable to be confused with one another.

But obviously there is an immense difference between the two. If we only hold the tenable view that no man ever knows an action to be right or wrong, but can only think it to be so, then, so far from implying the untenable view that to assert an action to be right or wrong is the same thing as to assert that we think it to be so, we imply the direct opposite of this. For nobody would maintain that I cannot know that I think an action to be right or wrong; and if, therefore, I cannot know that it is right or wrong, it follows that there is an immense difference between the assertion that it is right or wrong, and the assertion that I