Page:Philosophical Review Volume 22.djvu/412

396 theology is unacceptable, and principles must be empirically established if they are to be accepted at all, and when 'moral intuitions,' 'imperatives' and 'instincts' have been found to hold by no means universally, and to be readily explainable in terms of social evolution whenever they are found, the outlook for an objective ethics at first seems desperate enough. Our greatest authority on moral evolution emphatically insists that ethical judgments are subjective, and a renowned sociologist has recently found social evolution on its moral side to be due to customs, or mores, that best develop independent of ethics and philosophy. On closer reading, however, we find that Sumner does not say that the mores are subjective, although no objective line of development for them is suggested by him. His hostility seems primarily to have been aroused by ethical dogmatists, and rather hastily extended without warrant to all forms of systematic ethics.

And when we read Westermarck a little more closely, we find that by calling moral judgments subjective in their origin he merely means to oppose his view to rationalistic writers who have sought to make ethics objective by reducing moral judgments to convenient rules which command intellectual assent. Cudworth, Clark, Price, and Reid are expressly condemned, while utilitarians like Bentham, Mill, and Sidgwick are also in error in supposing that morality can be reduced to intellectual formulations. As opposed to all such writers, Westermarck contends that the origin of moral judgments is to be found in emotions; and it is probably merely in this sense that he means to call them subjective. While he does not analyze the emotions to ascertain whether they contain a stable constituent that might furnish the foundation for an objective ethics, nothing that he says is antagonistic to such an attempt; and indeed many of his statements may be taken to favor it. He speaks of a "similarity" in the mental constitution of men, and "the comparatively uniform nature of the moral consciousness." "The moral rules of uncivilized races in a very large measure resemble those prevalent