In saying this, Butler appears to me fairly to represent the common moral sense of ordinary mankind, in our own age no less than in his. The moral judgments that men habitually pass on one another in ordinary discourse imply for the most part that duty is usually not a difficult thing for an ordinary man to _know_, though various seductive impulses may make it difficult for him to _do_ it. And in such maxims as that duty should be performed ‘advienne que pourra,’ that truth should be spoken without regard to consequences, that justice should be done ‘though the sky should fall,’ it is implied that we have the power of seeing clearly that certain kinds of actions are right and reasonable in themselves, apart from their consequences;--or rather with a merely partial consideration of consequences, from which other consequences admitted to be possibly good or bad are definitely excluded.[153] And such a power is claimed for the human mind by most of the writers who have maintained the existence of moral intuitions; I have therefore thought myself justified in treating this claim as characteristic of the method which I distinguish as Intuitional. At the same time, as I have before observed, there is a wider sense in which the term ‘intuitional’ might be legitimately applied to either Egoistic or Universalistic Hedonism; so far as either system lays down as a first principle--which if known at all must be intuitively known--that happiness is the only rational ultimate end of action. To this meaning I shall recur in the concluding chapters (xiii. and xiv.) of this Book; in which I shall discuss more fully the intuitive character of these hedonistic principles. But since the adoption of this wider meaning would not lead us to a distinct ethical method, I have thought it best, in the detailed discussion of Intuitionism which occupies the first eleven chapters of this Book, to confine myself as far as possible to Moral Intuition understood in the narrower sense above defined.
§ 2. Here, perhaps, it may be said that in thus defining Intuitionism I have omitted its most fundamental characteristic; that the Intuitionist properly speaking--in contrast with the Utilitarian--does not judge actions by an external standard at all; that true morality, in his view, is not concerned with outward actions as such, but with the state of mind in which acts are done--in short with “intentions” and “motives.”[154] I think, however, that this objection is partly due to a misunderstanding. Moralists of all schools, I conceive, would agree that the moral judgments which we pass on actions relate primarily to intentional actions regarded as intentional. In other words, what we judge to be ‘wrong’--in the strictest ethical sense--is not any part of the actual effects, as such, of the muscular movements immediately caused by the agent’s volition, but the effects which he foresaw in willing the act; or, more strictly, his volition or choice of realising the effects as foreseen.[155] When I speak therefore of acts, I must be understood to mean--unless the contrary is stated--acts presumed to be intentional and judged as such: on this point I do not think that any dispute need arise.