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A Reasonable Theory of Morality: (Alexander and Whitehead)

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  25 February 2009

Extract

During the later years of his life, the late Professor Alexander devoted much of his time to the study of our aesthetic and moral experience. In regard to the latter, Alexander was impressed by Adam Smith's treatment of the Moral Sentiments and especially with what he considered his sure insight in seeking for the ground of obligation in the causes of conduct, rather than in its effects. These causes were the passions. In this he was in sympathy with his contemporary Hobhouse, who asserted with conviction that action rested on impulse feeling, and that it was useless to look for anything whether it was called Practical Reason or anything else, that stood outside the body of impulse feeling and controlled it. I think it was the considered opinion of Alexander, as it was that of Hobhouse, that if Psychology had anything to teach us bearing upon Morals, it was that the springs of human conduct must be looked for in our inherited tendencies with their associated emotions. Fear, sorrow, joy, repulsion, curiosity, pugnacity, self-assertion, the sex instinct, and (in some species) acquisitiveness and constructiveness, are present, not only in men of all living races, but also in most of the higher animals. These specific tendencies and emotions, with certain complex passions such as admiration, reverence, scorn and the rest; together with one or two general tendencies such as sympathy and imitativeness, arising out of the nature of mental processes, must have played a leading role in the determination of human conduct, both in its lower and higher grades.

Type
Articles
Copyright
Copyright © The Royal Institute of Philosophy 1950

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References

page 57 note 1 Beauty and other forms of ValueGoogle Scholar.

page 57 note 2 Ibid.

page 59 note 1 Alexander. Beauty and other forms of Value.

page 60 note 1 Alexander, . Beauty and other forms of Value, p. 251Google Scholar.

page 60 note 2 Bergson. The Two Sources of Religion and Morality.

page 61 note 1 I am indebted to Professor Broad for his kind suggestion as to the interpretation of Alexander on these two points.

page 63 note 1 Alexander. Beauty and other forms of Value.

page 63 note 2 Ibid.

page 63 note 3 Ibid.

page 63 note 4 Whitehead, . Adventures of Ideas, p. 376Google Scholar.

page 63 note 5 Cf. Whitehead. Adventures of Ideas.

page 64 note 1 Process of Reality, p. 345.

page 64 note 2 Ibid.

page 65 note 1 Whitehead, . Adventures of Ideas, p. 379Google Scholar.

page 66 note 1 Whitehead, . Adventures of Ideas, p. 377Google Scholar.

page 66 note 2 Whitehead. Modes of Thought.

page 67 note 1 “When we examine the structure of the epoch of the Universe in which we find ourselves, this structure exhibits successive layers of types of order, each layer introducing some additional type of order within some limited region which shares in the more general type of order of some larger environment. Also this larger environment in its turn is a specialized region within the general epoch of creation as we know it.” Adventures of Ideas, pp. 256–7.