Rational Intuitionism

Abstract

Cudworth, Clarke, Balguy, and Price took the faculty which forms moral judgments to be reason or understanding. They accepted Locke’s teaching that it is the work of the understanding to perceive agreements or disagreements between our ideas and that these relations constitute knowledge; and they contended that moral judgments are one aspect of such perception. It seemed to them as unnecessary to invoke a moral sense to explain our perception of this moral agreement or disagreement as it would have been to invoke an intellectual sense to explain how we perceive the agreement between the three angles of a triangle and two right angles.⁴¹ In the words of Clarke: ‘… that there is a fitness or suitableness of certain circumstances to certain persons and an insuitableness of others …; also that from the different relations of different persons one to another, there necessarily arises a fitness or unfitness of certain manners of behaviour of some persons towards others, is as manifest, as that the properties which flow from the essences of different mathematical figures have different congruities or incongruities between themselves. …’ He gave as examples of this moral fitness: ‘…’ tis …certainly fit that men should honour and worship, obey and imitate God’; and ‘…’ tis undeniably more fit, absolutely and in the nature of the thing itself, that all men should endeavour to promote the universal good and welfare of all, than that all men should be continually contriving the ruin and destruction of all.’⁴²