Page:Ethics (Moore 1912).djvu/149

Rh required would be very large. It does seem, therefore, as if laws, in the legal sense, were essentially dependent on the human will; and this fact naturally suggests that moral laws also are dependent on the will of some being.

These are, I think, the two chief reasons which have led people to suppose that moral judgments are judgments about the will, rather than about the feelings, of some being or beings. And there are, of course, the same objections to supposing, in the case of moral laws, that the being or beings in question can be any man or set of men, as there are to the supposition that judgments about right and wrong can be merely judgments about men's feelings and opinions. In this way, therefore, there has naturally arisen the view we are now considering—the view that to say of an action that it ought to be done, or is right, or ought not to be done, is the same thing as to say that it belongs to a class of actions which has been commanded, or permitted, or forbidden by some non-human being. Different views have, of course, been taken as to who or what the non-human being is. One of the simplest is that it is God: that