Euthanasia : and other aspects of life and death / by Harry Roberts.

  • Harry Roberts
Date:
[1936]
Catalogue details

Licence: In copyright

Credit: Euthanasia : and other aspects of life and death / by Harry Roberts. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    to us.” Ethics and aesthetics have biological foundations; and virtue, like truth and beauty, has value in so far as it feeds inborn human aspirations. To quote Professor Alexander, who has done more than any other living writer to point out the true nature and biological origin of moral judgment and moral taste : Art, science and virtue owe their value and their existence to their satisfying certain human needs which these values arc constructed in order to satisfy. The marble is inde¬ pendent of us, but the statue made from it is made to satisfy the artistic need or instinct, and expresses the artistic emotion. Science is made to satisfy the theoretic instinct; and morality, we must say, is made to satisfy the moral instinct.” It is, of course, true that all genuine instincts had, at first, a purely utilitarian function. And this is as true of the social or gregarious instincts, out of which morality has arisen, as of that curiosity of which science is the humanized development. A similar utili¬ tarian origin may be found for the sense of beauty , and, in all three cases, the original purpose “ lapses into a secondary position. ’ There is a notion about, based on a misreading of the hedonistic doctrine, that, since no one—being such and such a man, in such and such circumstances—can act other than as he does, we cannot reasonably discriminate between good men and bad men ; much less praise or blame, reward or punish them. This contention is constantly cropping up in humanitarian and medico¬ legal circles. The mistake lies in confusing sin with crime, wickedness with law-breaking, and punishment with moral condemnation. Lots of sins are not, and