Page:Mind (New Series) Volume 9.djvu/198

II REMARKS ON THE PREDICATES OF MORAL JUDGMENTS. BY EDWARD WESTERMAECK. THAT the various predicates of moral judgments are ultimately based on emotions of either indignation or approval seems to me to be a fact which ethical intellectualists have in vain attempted to deny. By this I mean that without such emotions there would have been no moral predicates at all. These predicates involve generalisations of emotional pheno- mena made by man in the course of time. They do not state the actual existence of a specific emotion in the mind of the person judging, or of somebody else ; they indicate a tendency to call forth a moral emotion, just as " pleasurable " denotes a tendency to give pleasure, and "frightful" a tendency to inspire fear. Like all general terms they are used without any distinct idea of their contents. But I think that an exhaustive analysis of them must ultimately trace them back to the emotions mentioned. In a genuine moral judgment the tendency of its subject to call forth indignation or approval necessarily refers to him who pro- nounces it. If I say that a certain mode of conduct is bad or good, and if I mean what I say, the predicate of my judgment implies that its subject is apt to evoke moral indignation or moral approval in myself. But besides this the moral predicate has a character of generality. It seems to apply some vague assumption that the object in question is apt to give rise to the same moral emotion in the mind of every one who possesses a sufficient knowledge of the case and of all the attendant details, who has a " sufficiently developed moral sense," or the like. Space does not permit me to attempt anything like a detailed analysis of the moral emotions. Such an analysis would require an examination not only into the predicates of moral judgments, but into their subjects. I must be contented with indicating that moral indignation is a hostile, and moral approval a friendly, attitude of mind towards its object ; that the objects which give rise to moral emotions