Rule and end in morals / by John H. Muirhead.

  • John Henry Muirhead
Date:
1932
Catalogue details

Licence: In copyright

Credit: Rule and end in morals / by John H. Muirhead. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    idealists appeal to as the higher freedom, which comes with a character so completely conformed to what is required by the moral ideal (whether con¬ ceived of as conscience or as the Will of God), that the bearer of it simply ‘cannot do any other’, and of which we can say with Hegel that ‘its truth is necessity’. That, after all that can be said from the point of view of such an Axiology as I have tried to indicate on these and other problems which have been raised by the discussion has been said, there must remain the further question of the relation of the ‘whole of value’ to the ‘whole of reality’ within which it falls, and that beyond Ethics even when thus broadened out there is a more ‘commanding’ point of view still from which our conclusions may have to submit to criticism, perhaps to restatement, is undoubtedly a disturbing thought. But unless, in our zeal for the ‘autonomy of the Right’, we are prepared to attempt the rehabilitation of Kantian dualism, it is one that has to be faced if our Axiology is not to be left suspended in the air, but made a part of a true Moral Philosophy. I have tried elsewhere to suggest how it might be faced without surrender either to a Natu¬ ralism that would reduce persons to automata, or to an Idealism that would make them expressions of an Absolute to which they are adjectival.1 But that is another story. What perhaps we may meantime 1 The Platonic Tradition, &c., p. 435 foil.
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