Moral Philosophy: Ethics, Deontology and Natural Law

Produced by Charles Aldarondo, Tiffany Vergon, David King,
Charles Franks and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team.
Nihil Obstat: JOSEPHUS KEATING, S.J. Censor deputatus
Imprimi potest: JOANNES H. WRIGHT, S.J. Præp. Prov. Angliæ
Nihil Obstat: C. SCHUT, D.D. Censor deputatus
Imprimatur: EDM. CAN. SURMONT Vie. Gen.
For fifteen years this Manual has enjoyed all the popularity that its author could desire. With that popularity the author is the last person to wish to interfere. Therefore, not to throw previous copies out of use, this edition makes no alteration either in the pagination or the text already printed. At the same time the author might well be argued to have lapsed into strange supineness and indifference to moral science, if in fifteen years he had learnt nothing new, and found nothing in his work which he wished to improve. Whoever will be at the expense of purchasing my Political and Moral Essays (Benziger, 1902, 6s.) will find in the first essay on the Origin and Extent of Civil Authority an advantageous substitute for the chapter on the State in this work. The essay is a dissertation written for the degree of B. Sc. in the University of Oxford; and represents, I hope, tolerably well the best contemporary teaching on the subject.
All that Ethics or Music can do for such a Philistine is to send him away to another city, pouring ointment on his head, and crowning him with wool, as Plato would dismiss the tragedian ( Republic III. 398). The author of the Magna Moralia well says (I. i. 13): No science or faculty ever argues the goodness of the end which it proposes to itself: it belongs to some other faculty to consider that. Neither the physician says that health is a good thing, nor the builder that a house is a good thing: but the one announces that he produces health and how he produces it, and the builder in like manner a house. The professor of Ethics indeed, from the very nature of his subject-matter, says in pointing out happiness that it is the rational sovereign good of man: but to any one unmoved by that demonstration Ethics can have no more to say. Ethics will not threaten, nor talk of duty, law, or punishment.