Page:Mind (Old Series) Volume 12.djvu/51

 38 PKOF. H. SIDGWICK : says that I, among others, " by no means call in question the general principle that moral worth or defect is to be esti- mated by the inward affection or intention whence actions flow "; and implies that I have thereby " admitted the neces- sity " of " enumerating " and " classifying " motives or im- pulses to action, though I afterwards "run away from the work as unmanageable and superfluous". But it is plain that if I am right in regarding the choice of right outward effect as being, in the most important cases, the primary object of ordinary moral judgment, my primary business is to enumerate and classify, not the propensions or passions that prompt to choice, but the outward effects that ought to be chosen and intended. It is always the choice or intention, and not its actual result, that is approved or disapproved ; but the differences of choice or intention, on which the moral judgment turns, can only be conceived as differences in the objects chosen ; and can therefore, on my view, only be sought in that " field of external effects of action " which Dr. Martineau would relegate to a separate and subsequent investigation. Nor is the case practically altered by that condition of our approval of right choice to which I have (in my Methods of Ethics, bk. iii., ch. i., p. 3) called attention under the term " subjective rightness " ; viz., that the outward effects which we judge to be the right objects of choice must not be thought by the agent to be wrong. The condition is, in my view, an essential one ; if, in any case owing to what we regard as a mistake of conscience the agent makes what we hold to be the right choice of foreseen outward effects, himself con- ceiving it to be wrong, we certainly withhold our moral approbation. If we are asked whether in this unhappy situation a man ought to do what he mistakenly believes to be his duty, or what really is his duty if he could only think so, the question is found rather perplexing by common sense ; and so far as it can ever be a practical question it would, I think, be answered differently in different cases, according to the magnitude and importance of the error of conscience. But the difficulties of this question need not now be consi- dered ; for, obviously, they arise equally whether the mistake of conscience relates to choice of motives or to choice of out- ward effects ; and, however essential it may be that a moral agent should do what he believes to be right, this condition of the object of moral approbation does not require or admit of any systematic development. Thus the details with which ethics is concerned still remain to be sought elsewhere ; and, on my view, they are found by common sense primarily in