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English and American Philosophy Since 1800
English and American Philosophy Since 1800 Author:Arthur Kenyon Rogers Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: conscience, the pleasures of a good conscience thus tending to supersede the useful consequences from which this pleasure originally was borrowed. In this way... more » Mackintosh would reconcile the claims of utility and of intuitionalism, by separating the questions to which respectively they supply an answer. Ethics is concerned with two problems—the nature of the distinction between right and wrong, and the nature of the feelings with which right and wrong are contemplated. The foundation and ultimate criterion of moral rules are indeed to be found in utility, which thus provides a support to Butler's doctrine of the supremacy of conscience; but utility is not what the mind, formed by past experience and association, commonly holds before itself consciously as its immediate standard and its motive. Men are so constituted as instantaneously to approve certain actions without any reference to their consequences; though reason may nevertheless discover that a tendency to produce general happiness is the essential characteristic of these actions. Of Mackintosh's political philosophy, only a word needs to be added; on the whole it is of a sort to illustrate the ease with which good philosophical reasons can be found to defend the indefensible—take for example the justification of the anomalies of the English representative system. The main outcome is a theory of the state as a representation of interests or classes, which are to serve as a check on one another, and guard each its own order from oppression by the rest—a doctrine well adapted, when manipulated expertly by politicians, to hinder the removal of existing class privileges, while yet paying in a verbal currency the claims of every class alike. § 3. Other Intuitionalists. Calderwood. Martineau. Ferrier 1. As a philosophical...« less