The Concept of Decision

Abstract

The rejection of intuition leaves a gap that has been filled in different ways. Some other rational basis has to be found at least for our deductive and empirical beliefs; within morals, so long as we can draw a line and keep the frontier closed, the alternative of irrationalism remains. Thus the Scottish philosophers of the eighteenth century used the notions of sense or sentiment to provide a new basis for ethical theory. On their view what we normally call judgements in morals, as against those of mathematics or science, are not properly judgements at all. What we must examine to explain these things are the emotions that certain objects arouse in us; these philosophers undertook to explain moral sentiments, pursuing this line of thought, in terms of the mechanism of the mind. And more recent irrationalists have set out from the same general position, though re-interpreting it in terms of their own linguistic preoccupations. Morality is referred to the emotions as before, or else — a useful new word that the eighteenth century understood only in its physical sense — to attitudes of a particular sort: these, then, are what moral utterances server to influence, or else merely to express. Another notion, more recently introduced, which has proved of infinite service to the opponents of intuition, and of the synthetic a priori in whatever form, is that of decision: and it is with this that the present paper will be chiefly concerned.