Page:Ethics (Moore 1912).djvu/98

From Wikisource
Jump to navigation Jump to search
This page has been validated.

exceptions to the rule. I think, however, we must recognise that no feeling or pair of feelings, which could possibly be maintained to be the ones with which our judgments of right and wrong are concerned, does, in fact, form an exception. Whatever feeling you take, it seems hardly possible to doubt that instances have actually occurred, in which, while one man really had the feeling in question towards a given action, other men have not had it, and some of them have even had an opposite one, towards the same action. There may, perhaps, be some classes of actions in the case of which this has never occurred; but what seems certain is that there are some classes, with which it has occurred: and, if there are any at all, that is sufficient to establish our conclusion. For if this is so, and if, when a man asserts an action to be right or wrong, he is always merely asserting that he himself has some particular feeling towards it, then it absolutely follows that one and the same action has sometimes been both right and wrong—right at one time and wrong at another, or both simultaneously.