But there are further elements of truth in the Moral Sense position to which we have not yet done justice.(Bk. 1 Ch. 6 § 4 ¶ 1)

In the first place we must emphasize what is already implied in the admission that experience is necessary to the ethical judgement. This admission implies that the ethical judgement is invariably based upon some fact of feeling; since experience, though it includes more than feeling, does always involve feeling. The ethical judgement pronounces that something has value, and we do not on reflection pronounce that anything can have value except some state of consciousness. I do not, indeed, believe that feeling represents the only element in, or aspect of, consciousness which has value; but feeling is always an element in every state of consciousness, and an inseparable element. And no judgement can be pronounced as to whether a state of consciousness is good without taking the feeling-aspect of it into account. Feeling is therefore always part of the ground on which an ethical judgement is based. This represents the true element in Hedonism. The mistake of Hedonism lies in trying to abstract the feeling side of consciousness from its other sides, and making the whole value of the consciousness to lie in that feeling-aspect, the cognitive and conative elements being deliberately put out of sight; while the value of feeling is supposed to reside in the mere abstract pleasantness in respect of which all pleasures are qualitatively alike, and not in the total content which is pleasant. We have already accepted the position that knowledge and goodness are intrinsically valuable elements of consciousness. Yet these things taken apart from feeling are as much abstractions as feeling when taken apart from knowledge and volition. And it is impossible to say what value we should assign to the latter, if they were capable of actually existing apart from the feeling by which they are necessarily and inevitably accompanied. I can, indeed, intelligibly say that knowledge and goodness, even when accompanied by bodily pain, are good; but, even when the pursuit of knowledge or the doing of a good action brings with it a measure of pain, some measure of pleasant feeling normally accompanies those intellectual or volitional states. When I say that the state is on the whole painful, I mean that its pleasantness simply as pleasantness is outweighed by pain of another kind, and yet I may think that it possesses more value than many states which on the whole are pleasant.(Bk. 1 Ch. 6 § 4 ¶ 2)

We may, indeed, attach value to knowledge even for a consciousness which does not find pleasure in its possession; but, if so, we must do so either for its uses or effects or propter spem, as a step to an enjoyment of which the man is capable but to which he has not yet attained. In a consciousness which was for ever incapable of feeling the smallest pleasure or interest in what it knew, it would be difficult to say that knowledge could be an end-in-itself. Indeed, the very idea of an end implies the existence of beings with tendencies, desires, or impulses for which some kind of satisfaction can be found in that end. This satisfaction is not the same thing as pleasure, but there can be no satisfaction without some (however low a degree) of pleasure. The good is an intellectual category, but it is a category which would be meaningless in a purely knowing consciousness. Hence it may be doubted whether we could rationally attach any value even to the good will in a consciousness which not only did not derive, but was intrinsically and for ever incapable of deriving, any pleasure or satisfaction from its goodness. We may, indeed, recognize that the good will has a value, and ought consequently to be cultivated, in those who, as a matter of present fact, do not care about goodness and derive no pleasure from it. But then we should say that they ought to care about it. In so far as it is possible for a man to do his duty without liking the dutiful action taken by itself (apart from the pains incidentally involved in it), we should say that that was because he is not good enough. The value of goodness does not mean merely its actual pleasurableness to the agent at this or that moment; but still I can as little conceive it psychologically possible for a man to say My whole will is completely devoted to and concentrated upon the good, but it gives me not the smallest pleasure or satisfaction to be good as I could attach any meaning to the statement I recognize indeed the exquisite beauty of that landscape, but, as far as my own pleasure goes, I would just as soon gaze at a blank wall; though I can quite intelligibly say This picture gives me more pleasure than that other which I acknowledge to be more beautiful. Beauty is more than pleasure, but it is unintelligible without it. Value is not a feeling, but it cannot be recognized as attributable to anything in consciousness which can excite no feeling of pleasure in its possessor. The fallacy of Hedonism lies in the attempt to estimate the value of the feeling element in abstraction from the other elements in consciousness. Knowing, feeling, willing are, for us at least, the three inseparable aspects of consciousness. It is upon consciousness taken as a whole that we pronounce our ultimate judgements of value; the nature of its knowledge and its will must necessarily colour and determine the value of the feeling by which in any consciousness they are accompanied.(Bk. 1 Ch. 6 § 4 ¶ 3)

Invariably, then, moral judgements imply facts of feeling as part of their ground--that is to say either feelings actually experienced or desires which imply feeling in the present as well as feeling in their subsequent satisfaction^[125]. Those feelings need not be the feelings of the person making the judgement, and in many cases there is nothing specifically moral about them. I judge that it is wrong for me or any one else to stick pins into a human being, simply because it hurts. If I did not know that it hurts, if I did not know what pain is, I could not judge it to be a bad thing, or the act of causing it wrong. Given that knowledge, I can pronounce the act wrong, quite apart from any sympathetic or other feeling which the act may excite in myself. But sometimes we can recognize a far less superficial truth in the Moral Sense position than this. The actual ground of my judgement may be simply an emotion; and, although an emotion to which I assign value must be to some extent pleasant, I may assign it a value which is not measured by its pleasantness. I may approve of an act not merely on account of the pleasure or pain which it causes, but also on account of the emotion which it excites, the emotion from which it proceeds, or the emotion by which it is accompanied. I may approve of maternal affection not merely on account of the benefit arising to the babe and to society, but for its own sake; and that emotion, though it is a source of pleasure, is assuredly one which also causes much pain. Yet the value which we ascribe to it is certainly not smallest in those cases in which the pain is greatest. Still more closely do we approach to a recognition of the specific emotion which the Moral Sense theory wishes to make the beginning and end of the ethical judgement when we take into consideration the feelings which the mere contemplation of some acts excites in a well-regulated mind, whether the mind be the agent's or that of some disinterested spectator^[126]--say for instance the disgust which is experienced at an isolated act of otherwise practically harmless drunkenness, or our feeling about acts of impurity. It is in cases of this sort that we can least of all ignore the fact that not merely ordinary feelings of pleasure but certain specific kinds of higher emotion do form part of the ground on which our moral judgements are based. They are part of what the moral judgement pronounces to have value. And they are judgements which could not really be pronounced by a consciousness which could not experience those emotions, which knew only on the one hand the data supplied by the senses and on the other hand the abstract axioms of the Practical Reason.(Bk. 1 Ch. 6 § 4 ¶ 4)

But this recognition of the absolute indispensability of certain specific emotions (in many cases) to our moral judgement does not in the least invalidate what has already been said as to the intellectual, rational, objective character of the judgement of value. The judgement that a certain emotion has value is a different thing from the mere emotion itself^[127]. Without the a priori and purely intellectual idea of value we could never pass from the judgement I feel such and such an emotion to it is right for me and others to do the act which excites in me this emotion; though the judgement could equally little be pronounced by a person incapable of experiencing the emotion, or at least of understanding and respecting its existence in others through the analogy of something more or less similar in his own experience. It is not the existence of the feeling but our judgement that that feeling is good that enables us to say that the act which excites it is right or wrong. It is not merely because it is a feeling excited by conduct that it can claim any pre-eminence over other feelings. If that were so, it would have no validity except for the persons naturally disposed to feel it. But our judgement that certain conduct is wrong does not disappear because as a matter of fact we may know that it excites no such feeling of disgust or repulsion in the person guilty of it. There are doubtless individuals who really do feel no disgust whatever at isolated or even habitual acts of drunkenness (though they are probably fewer than those who merely pretend to feel none): but we do not say that on that account drunkenness is right for such men. On the contrary we say that, if a man has not got such feelings, so much the worse for him: they are feelings which he ought to have. He falls short of the ideal of manhood if he has them not^[128]. There are other cases where natural feelings of disgust at particular kinds of conduct are pronounced on reflection to have no value whatever--e.g. the young medical student's sensations on first entering a dissecting room. We pronounce that such feelings should simply be got over as quickly as possible. The ultimate truth then which the Moral Sense school distorts is that in some cases a state of feeling is judged to have an absolute value, which, though more or less pleasant, is not measured merely by its pleasantness, and that such states of feeling form in and for themselves, entirely apart from any further consequences, an element in that ideal good which we recognize it as our duty to promote. I shall hereafter give other illustrations of this class of moral judgements^[129], but meanwhile I should observe three things about the feelings or emotional states of the kind which I mean:(Bk. 1 Ch. 6 § 4 ¶ 5)

1. Although we can give no reason why the feeling, say of human affection, should be better than a feeling of satisfaction in eating except that we judge it to be so, the feelings to which we give this kind of preference are not arbitrarily and capriciously selected. They are intimately connected with our whole conception of the proper relation of man to man--our whole conception of what human life and human society should be. The judgement cannot therefore be reduced to having any sort of isolated perception involving no exercise of the percipient's intellect, and no reference or relation to other judgements or ideas. It is impossible to dissociate our condemnation of illicit sexual intercourse from our conception of monogamy as the true type of sexual relation, our approval of which is based upon a great deal besides spontaneous emotions of approval or repugnance. The conception depends upon nothing less than our whole ideal of what constitutes a desirable state of human society and of the individual human soul. We judge that the state of feeling most conducive to the maintenance of the approved type possesses an intrinsic value. We cannot in the ordinary orthodox-utilitarian fashion prove irregular sexual relations to be wrong because they tend to prevent marriage and the growth of population; for it depends upon many circumstances whether they have that effect, and whether or not that effect is in itself to be regretted. Our condemnation of fornication, in spite of the diminution of pleasure which its prohibition undoubtedly involves, is not a deduction from a judgement about marriage resting on Utilitarian grounds, but simply one side or aspect of that ideal of life which prescribes both the monogamous marriage and the rule of purity before marriage. That ideal condemns sexual indulgence except where it can be made instrumental and subordinate to higher and more spiritual affections. When certain states of feeling appear to be selected for approval or condemnation by a kind of instinct which can give no further account of itself, these are, in so far as they persist after the fullest reflection, not merely isolated feelings of approval or disapprobation such as the deliverances of the Moral Sense are sometimes supposed to be, but feelings which are elements in a single, interconnected, articulated ideal of human life. And ideals are recognized as such by the intellect, however much (in some cases) the existence of certain feelings or emotions may be the condition of such a recognition. So again when I condemn drunkenness, my judgement implies a whole conception of human life--that man is a rational being, adapted for certain ends, responsible for his actions, possessed of a certain worth or dignity, having such and such relations to his fellows, capable of certain intellectual and moral activities, activities which are interfered with and impeded by drunkenness. This whole ideal of what man is and ought to be is implied in my judgement that it is intrinsically degrading and unworthy of a rational being voluntarily to place himself in a state in which he is not master of his own actions, however elaborate the precautions which he may take against doing harm to himself and others when in that condition. The feeling of repugnance to the act is inseparable from a whole complex of judgements about human life and its purposes which are very different from isolated emotions. So again with such an obviously unutilitarian precept as that which condemns cannibalism. Clearly if the victim is not killed on purpose to be eaten, cannibalism under certain circumstances might present itself as an eminently sanitary and economical arrangement. If we judge that man ought to endure considerable privation--some would perhaps say even extreme privation--rather than eat human flesh, it is because we feel that this external reverence to a human corpse is an expression of a reverence for humanity which possesses a higher value than the momentary relief from hunger. It is impossible to isolate our condemnation of cannibalism from our whole ideal of the proper relation of man to his fellow men. The psychologically very similar feeling against dissection which long stood in the way of surgical progress we decline to encourage because it is inconsistent with an enlightened ideal of human life as a whole.(Bk. 1 Ch. 6 § 4 ¶ 6)

2. And these considerations do involve the recognition of a principle which is constantly forgotten by Rationalists of the Kantian type. It is quite true that the question of what is moral for man depends upon his actual psychical constitution, including his sensitive, aesthetic, and emotional nature. If it is said that moral judgements are in a sense a priori, that must not be taken to mean that we could define rules of human conduct without an empirically derived knowledge of the actual constitution of human nature, and of human society. That it is right to promote the true good of all that lives and is conscious is, indeed, an a priori truth which Reason can recognize without any appeal to empirical knowledge except what is implied in the idea of conscious life: but what actually is for the good of man or any other creature cannot be ascertained without a knowledge of the nature and capacities of that creature. The prohibition of shooting would be irrational among beings who were like the air, invulnerable: the law of marriage and all that flows from it presupposes the sexual difference itself--not merely the physical difference, but all the emotional and moral differences--between man and woman. It would be absurd to attempt an answer to the question what would be the best type of sexual union if human beings were not so constituted that man's feelings towards woman are different from those with which he regards his own sex, if men and women were not naturally inclined towards permanent and exclusive unions^[130], if emotions of the highest and purest type were not found to be subtly and inseparably connected with such unions, and so on.(Bk. 1 Ch. 6 § 4 ¶ 7)

3. I may add that the passing of judgements of this kind often demands for its full justification an amount of experience which is quite beyond the reach of a single individual. The monogamous ideal of life is based upon the accumulated experience of the human race, not merely the experience of the numerical majority; it is doubtful, indeed, whether the independent verdict of the numerical majority, even in those countries which have not frankly abandoned the Christian ideal in this matter, would really endorse this judgement, but for the deference paid to the verdict of the best men which is based upon the results of all the experience within their reach, experience of themselves and others, experience of the good results of the observance and the bad results of the non-observance of the monogamous rule. But by experience of good and bad results I do not mean, of course, mere pleasure and pain. It is upon the whole spiritual condition which results from the non-control of these particular passions that the judgement of value is pronounced. And the dependence of these judgements upon an experience which cannot well be possessed by the young makes this department of morality peculiarly dependent in practice upon respect for moral authority^[131]. I shall return to this matter in a chapter which will be specially devoted to the place of Authority in Ethics. It is sufficient here to note that there are many departments of Morality in which it must be recognized that the judgements of the individual--at least of ordinary individuals, and of all individuals as regard a large part of their lives--are and must be largely influenced by Authority. No prejudice is done by this admission to the final and paramount authority of the moral consciousness: for this authority to which the appeal is made (when it is rightly made) is simply that of the moral consciousness in a higher stage of development, or of the moral consciousness working upon an experience which is wider and fuller than that of the isolated average individual.(Bk. 1 Ch. 6 § 4 ¶ 8)

Two very opposite schools of thought are apt to deny or ignore the truth that the content of our moral judgements is dependent upon the sensitive and emotional as well as the rational nature of man. It is often forgotten by the ordinary Utilitarian. He does not of course refuse to take into account the experience that such and such things bring pleasure, but he does sometimes fail to take into account tendencies to particular emotions, spontaneous tendencies to approve of certain kinds of conduct and to disapprove of others, which rest upon no logical ground, but must simply be taken as data upon which the Practical Reason has to work. The hedonistic assumption that all a man's desires are really desires for pleasure favours the delusion that desires can be created or extinguished or modified at will, if only you can show that good hedonistic results would be attained by doing so. On the other hand the rationalistic Moralist often forgets that the raw material, so to speak, upon which Practical Reason pronounces its judgements of value and which it works up into ideals must always be supplied by the actual experiences, emotions, desires, tendencies, and aspirations of human nature. The judgement that the tendency of human nature to find satisfaction in certain kinds of conduct has value is, indeed, an immediate judgement which cannot be derived from experience in the ordinary sense of the word; but we very often cannot say why we should have such a tendency, or deny that in beings differently constituted other kinds of conduct might tend to their highest attainable good^[132].(Bk. 1 Ch. 6 § 4 ¶ 9)

The question is raised, for instance, whether the received view of the mutual duties of parents and children, brothers and sisters, can be justified by a purely Utilitarian calculation. Can it be shown to be conducive to the greatest happiness of the greatest number? Waiving the difference between a hedonistic and a non-hedonistic conception of happiness, nothing is easier than to show the practical advantages of the arrangement, if you assume the actual tendency of the human mother to feel for her own offspring the most passionate of human affections, the actual tendency of all human beings to feel a stronger attachment to their own near kind than to strangers, and consequently to recognize a stronger claim upon their Benevolence. Given this tendency, the encouragement of it leads both to unselfishness in parents and to the proper bringing up of children. On the other hand, put out of sight the de facto emotional constitution of human nature, and nothing could be easier than to demonstrate the disadvantages arising from these narrow family attachments, and the infinite hedonistic and moral superiority of a society in which all older men should be regarded as fathers, all equals as brothers. So Plato argued, and he was only wrong because he supposed that Reason could pronounce moral judgements without any appeal to the actual emotional tendencies of human nature, or because he supposed that human nature was more modifiable than it is. The Moral Sense school are right in holding that our moral judgements are partly dependent upon the feelings and emotions with which we do naturally regard conduct of various kinds, and that these must be taken account of before we pronounce whether that conduct is to be regarded as right or wrong. It would be impossible to show that it is a more imperative duty to relieve suffering at our own door than suffering at a distance, if it were not an actual tendency of human nature to feel a readier and deeper sympathy with the suffering that one actually beholds: and so on^[133]. This last illustration may help to suggest the importance of the opposite side of ethical truth. While Reason must take account of those actual feelings and emotions which form part of our moral nature before pronouncing by what means most good will be realized, we cannot allow the actual strength of the feeling to be the sole test of moral approval or disapproval. Moral progress consists very largely in substituting deliberate thought-out judgements for casual and variable emotions: and the exercise of Reason in time reacts upon the emotions themselves. When we have come intellectually to recognize the claims of suffering which we do not see, we may come to feel for it a sympathy which is something very different from, and very much more powerful as a motive for action than, the bare intellectual recognition that the worth of a human being must be quite independent of geographical considerations or ethnological affinities. Even moral feeling must be guided and controlled by Reason; to a very large extent, indeed, the difference between higher and lower feeling consists precisely in the difference between mere feeling as it exists in merely non-moral natures and feeling in the form which it assumes when guided and controlled by human Reason. The judgement of value which Reason pronounces is not dictated by the feelings, but the actual feelings supply the materials which it uses in building up a consistent and harmonious ideal of human life. Reason cannot invent new feelings, but it can so regulate human conduct as to produce a maximum of those in which it recognizes most value, and that regulation of conduct tends in time to produce actual feeling in accordance with the ideal which Reason sets up.(Bk. 1 Ch. 6 § 4 ¶ 10)