some other form, from which the same consequence will follow—namely, the consequence that one and the same action is quite often both right and wrong. Many people have such a strong disposition to believe that when we judge an action to be right or wrong we must be merely making an assertion about the feelings of some man or set of men, that, even if they are convinced that we are not always merely making an assertion, each about his own feelings, they will still be disposed to think that we must be making one about somebody else’s. The difficulty is to find any man or set of men about whose feelings it can be plausibly held that we are making an assertion, if we are not merely making one about our own; but still there are two alternatives, which may seem, at first sight, to be just possible, namely (1) that each man, when he asserts an action to be right or wrong, is merely asserting that a certain feeling is generally felt towards actions of that class by most of the members of the society to which he belongs, or (2) merely that some man or other has a certain feeling towards them.
From either of these two views, it will, of
