Abstract
Very few people are moral cynics. Although many people scoff at some, or even most of the moral customs of our society, almost everyone, no matter how depraved he may appear to be, has convictions about what he ought and ought not to do. He draws some moral line beyond which he will not go; or, if he does violate it, he condemns himself for having done wrong. According to an old saying “There is honor even among thieves.” The proverb is an overstatement; nevertheless it does, I think, contain this much truth, that a totally depraved human being is rarely found.
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David Hume, A Treatise of Human Nature, Book III, Part I, Sect. I. There has been considerable disagreement recently about just what Hume himself intended by this argument. Since my interest in the argument is a philosophical rather than a scholarly one, I shall not enter into the controversy.
Ibid.
I realize that the term “… fallacy” is out of favor today, for the good reason that philosophers have sometimes used it in referring to arguments with which they disagreed, thus relieving themselves of the necessity of having to refute those arguments. I do not intend to use it in that way. If a philosopher can show (as at least one we shall examine attempts to do) that an argument can commit the “deductive fallacy” and yet not be fallacious, I shall drop the term. In other words, one of our tasks in the book will be to decide whether the “deductive fallacy,” which certainly looks like a fallacy, really is one.
This subject could be pursued much further, being quite interesting in itself. However, I do not think that doing so would help us much with our problem of understanding what we mean by these moral concepts. I should add that although ordinary usage, if examined carefully, proves misleading, I shall continue to use it in this book. I think that I would only increase communication difficulties if I were to abandon it.
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© 1966 Martinus Nijhoff, The Hague, Netherlands
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Johnson, O.A. (1966). The Problem of Moral Knowledge. In: Moral Knowledge. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-011-9317-7_1
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-011-9317-7_1
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