Moral purpose

“ If the moral insight be concerned with conflicting general aims, such as could express themselves in systems of conduct, then the moral insight involves the will to act, so far as may be, as if one included in one’s own being the life of all those whose conflicting aims one realizes. ”

“ Besides, independently of their intrinsic merits, whether intellectual or moral, the necessities of their daily life serve to impress them with respect for the great rules of morality, which in most cases were framed for their own protection. ”

“ It is not enough to ask what is most attractive, what line of life will ensure the greatest material gain or worldly honour? Rather should we ask, Where shall I be safest from moral danger, and, above all, in what position of life, open to me, can I do the most good? ”

“ This answer instantly raises the fourth question, But what is the best and noblest manner of living reasonably? Answer, By so regulating our moral nature, which is made up of reason and the passions, that reason shall govern and passion obey; in other words, by so regulating our moral nature as to develop the virtues: for the virtues arise out of the governance which reason exercises over the passions. This answer calls forward the fifth question, But how is this adjustment to be effected? by what means are the moral virtues to be developed? Answer, By means of custom. ”

“ Clothed in actual flesh and blood, the sweet persuasiveness of the ideal—the nobility and divineness of suffering voluntarily borne in the stead of another—made unwonted appeal to the heart of humanity, and for eighteen hundred years and more, accepted as a true symbol and interpretation of the moral order, it has been a chief molding force in the moral life of the Western world. ”

“ In our human world, as we know, the moral duties laid upon us—the duties in which, if we fail, we become outcasts in our own eyes or in those of others or in both—are of three kinds: the duties to oneself, the duties to the small circle of those we love, and the duties to the larger circle of mankind to which ultimately we belong, since out of it we proceed, and to it we owe all that we are. ”

“ The pleasures and pains which the moral sentiments originate will, like bodily pleasures and pains, become incentives and deterrents so adjusted in their strengths to the needs that the moral conduct will be the natural conduct. ”

“ We speak not of external acts; and hence we lay aside the whole scheme of natural necessity. We speak of the acts of the will; and we ask, if these be not free from the dominion of moral necessity, from necessitating causes over which we have no control, can we be accountable for them? Can we be to praise or to blame for them? Can they be our virtue or our vice? ”

“ It is, moreover, equally absurd to look upon moral values as ultimate and irreducible categories of good and evil, irrevocably codified by an omniscient Deity for the conduct of humanity for all time, and supposedly accessible to the intelligence of all who consult their conscience. ”

“ We note how emphatically the field in which this wisdom is to be exercised is declared to be the moral conduct of life. 'Righteousness and judgment and equity' are 'wise dealing,' and the end of true wisdom is to practise these. ”

“ The thoughts and faculties of your own intellectual frame, and all which you admire as wonderful in the genius of others,—the moral obligation, which, as obeyed or violated, is ever felt by you with delight or with remorse,—the virtues, of which you think as often as you think of those whom you love ”

“ They are necessary, because without these grand conceptions our moral language and our moral life would be wanting in dignity, in amplitude, in the inspiration and impulse which are often necessary for duty and always for restoration. ”

“ Such a widening of the moral horizon is necessary both for enlarging and refining the feeling of duty, and for rendering the meaning of moral terms deeper and more exact. And it stimulates the mind to frame an ideal conception of what is good and praiseworthy. ”

“ It is through these feelings that the conscience becomes a motive power for moral life. The perception of duty alone, as purely intellectual, would be, as said, "like a mirror accurately reflecting the ethical reality passing before it, but as indifferent as the mirror." But upon the perception the emotional nature springs into action. Knowledge, if at all, always goes into effect mediately through the sensibilities in which the soul is stirred by affections and desires. ”

“ As moral agents, for whom alone exist all the predicaments of merit and demerit, praise and blame, effort and failure, vice and virtue, we are impotent and lost;—we are saved through that in us which is passive and involuntary; we are saved through our affections, it is as beings acted upon and influenced that we are saved! ”

“ Yet this very tone of society, and all these standards of honor and uprightness, when traced to their origin, are found to arise from the precepts of revelation. We are all, physically and intellectually, the creatures of circumstance. Experience moulds and develops the intellect. Our moral natures are not innate, but solely and entirely the result of the influences by which we are surrounded. ”

“ And this accords with the best cosmic philosophy.172 For this holds all these relations as parts of a rationally designed system of world-order for universal well-being, and the moral reason as capacitated to discern, with more or less clearness and fulness, the moral requirement which they involve and present for observance. We know of no morality that exists, or can exist, in human life, apart from them. Strike them all away, and all duties disappear. Take, as illustration, the most generic virtue of all the virtues recognized by the ethical judgments, that of good-will or love. ”

“ In fine, example is of service to us, not in pointing out the precise things to be done, but in exhibiting the beauty, loveliness, and majesty of moral goodness, the possibility of exalted moral attainments, and the varied scope for their exercise in human life. ”

“ The obvious answer to this question is, that the due and proper working of man's moral nature must consist in such an adjustment between reason and passion, as that the one of these, the reason, shall guide and govern, and that the other, the passions, shall obey even while they contrive to impel. ”

“ But the question, 'Why should I be moral?' means, most naturally and usually, What inducements are there to me to do right?" The answer is that motives differ for different individuals. With some, outer social inducements, with others, the approbation and disapprobation of conscience are stronger. ”

“ All moral laws, I wish to shew, are merely statements that certain kinds of actions will have good effects. ”

“ In the same way no one will wish to deny that the moral feeling, as the natural expression of the inner voice of conscience, constitutes in social life the fundamental condition and the surest foundation for all lofty and noble sentiments. ”

“ In all such cases, which are familiar to every one, we recognise, therefore, a uniform relation between certain moral causes or motives, and the determinations of the human mind in willing certain acts. ”

“ This new intellectual life, speaking broadly, has reacted favorably upon the moral life. It has dispelled superstition, destroyed prejudices, widened the outlook of men, and broadened their moral sympathies. ”

“ They concerned the powers and possibilities of man in the crowning endowments of his nature, and in the highest ascent of their evident intention and adaptation. They touched the great problems of personal and social welfare in the most vital relations and decisive interests. So the old sages became moralists and their great themes were the themes of virtue and duty. Not very deeply, however, did they, for centuries, succeed in penetrating the rational principles of the moral life and the authority of the moral judgments. ”

“ The inducements to virtue are, in his view, our humane sentiments, on the one hand, and our self-love, or prudence, on the other; the two classes of motives conspiring to promote both our own good and the good of mankind. ”

“ As to moral philosophy, they have the same disputes among them as we have here. They examine what are properly good, both for the body and the mind; and whether any outward thing can be called truly good, or if that term belong only to the endowments of the soul. ”

“ It is upon that discipline chiefly that those qualities which I have called the moral qualities of the personal order, and which have their root in truthfulness and courage, depend for their evolution. ”

“ What we have aimed to present as a moral method is essentially this: to take into our reckoning all the factors in the situation, to take into account the other persons involved, to put ourselves into their places by sympathy as well as conceptually, to face collisions and difficulties not merely in terms of fixed concepts of what is good or fair, and what the right of each party concerned may be, but with the conviction that we need new definitions of the ideal life, and of the social order, and thus reciprocally of personality. ”

“ Again, our judgments of value and of merit are rooted in our sentiments; and our moral principles have the same source, for they are formed by our judgments of moral value.” ↑ The destructive effects of the mechanisation of modern life have lately been admirably set forth, and with much precise illustration, by Dr. ”

“ The realization of the good in personal morality is the habituated will, the moral character of individuals. It is actual in the virtues of the heart, and those virtues are the habits which, embodying good acts of will, have become part of the man’s self, and which answer to the various sides of his station, or more generally to his various relations to the ideal. ”

“ In previous lectures I have explained what I understand moral goodness to be, and how it is possible that there should be such a thing; in other words, what are the conditions on the part of reason and will which are implied in our being able to conceive moral goodness as an object to be aimed at, and to give some partial reality to the conception. ”

“ We thus sum up the constituents of man's moral nature: intelligence, the conscience, free-will, and capacities for affection and doing. Where these are united the subject is organized for knowing duty and fulfilling it. But a final fact, of profound import, needs yet to be added, not as a further faculty, but rather as a consequence resultant from the union and co-action of these endowments, viz.: that this organism of faculties presents not simply a capacity as a possibility of the moral life, but a positive, vital motive adjustment and organic pre-disposition toward it. ”

“ Moral experience—the actual possession and exercise of good character—is necessary truly to understand moral principles and profitably to apply them. ”

“ Its modern forms have been greatly varied, but they all153 agree in founding the morally good in utility. That which experience shows to be useful, as promotive of personal or social interests and happiness, becomes thereby right, or the norm of moral choices and conduct. The theory, in all its modifications, is a "goods" theory,51 interpreting obligation as simply the behest to conform life to the attainment of the various forms of good, even the chief, as happiness or enjoyment, provided for in man's nature and condition. ”

“ A mental construction having as its basis purity and duty. When the moral nature is cultivated and developed it controls every action of man, radiating from the individual to society and from society back again to the individual. ”

“ Although they usually define the aim of life in terms of power, happiness, and love, they cannot fairly be charged either with insensitiveness to moral values, or with indifference to the ethical advancement of mankind. ”

“ For unquestionably the essential trait in the moral consciousness is the control of some feeling or feelings by some other feeling or feelings. ”

“ And it may be admitted that, in some cases at least, it is right and proper that a man’s motives should thus influence our judgment. But the question is: What sort of moral judgment is it right and proper that they should influence? ”

“ Secondly, that while there is diversity as to many points, there is none in its judgments as to the great body of virtues and vices of human life. As to all the49 leading qualities of character and conduct there is full and universal agreement. With respect to all the cardinal virtues, such as justice, kindness, veracity, love, courage, fidelity, generosity, the moral judgments approve them as the magnet owns its pole, in all the multi-form relations and offices of life. ”

“ To the forwarding of this moral growth of man, two things seemed to me necessary—an Ideal which should stir the emotions and impel to action, and a clear understanding of the sources of evil and of the methods by which they might be drained. ”

“ Now, as we recognised in a previous chapter, the inclinations and desires are natural to man. Without them human life would not be possible. Even if we would, we could not destroy them all. But the progress of the moral life consists in controlling and organising them. ”

“ All the facts of our moral consciousness, therefore,—the knowledge of right and wrong, the judgments of conscience, the recognition of duty and responsibility, the feelings of reverence, remorse, and moral indignation,—all these could be traced, they thought, to an origin in experience, to an origin which in the last resort was sensuous, that is, due to the perceptions of the senses and the feelings of pleasure and pain which accompany or follow them. ”

“ For though, while in obeying our fallible conscience, we have thus failed to bring our whole outward action in the case into harmony with full duty, or have even done what to others about us or to God above us was wrong, we have maintained our own subjective personal moral integrity, in maintaining that which is the fundamental and essential element of all morality, the right intention and effort. ”