The Philosophy of Morals: An Investigation by a New and Extended Analysis of the Faculties and the Standards Employed in the Determination of Right and Wrong, Illustrative of the Principles of Theology, Jurisprudence, and General Politics, Volum 2

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Smith, Elder, 1835

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Side 147 - Actions in the abstract are right or wrong, according to their tendency ; the agent is virtuous or vicious, according to his design. Thus, if the question be, Whether relieving common beggars be right or wrong ? we inquire into the tendency of such a conduct to the public advantage or inconvenience. If the question be...
Side 48 - It has always been the general, and it is evidently the natural sense of mankind, that they cannot be accountable for what they have no power to avoid. Nothing can be more glaringly absurd, than applauding or reproaching ourselves for what we were no more the causes of, than our own beings, and what it was no more possible for us to prevent, than the returns of the seasons, or the revolutions of the planets.
Side 47 - By the necessity which is said to diminish the merit of good actions must be meant not a natural (which would take away the whole idea of action and will] but a moral necessity, or such as arises from the influence of motives and affections on the mind, or that certainty of determining one way, which may take place upon supposition of certain views, circumstances and principles of an agent.
Side 47 - must be meant, not a natural, (which would take away the whole idea of action and will,) but a moral necessity, or such as arises from the influence of motives and affections on the mind ; or that certainty of determining one way which may take place upon supposition of certain views, circumstances, and principles of an agent.
Side 86 - The fallacy in the reasoning here employed appears to me to lie in this, that it confounds an effect (as a change in the subject operated upon, from one specific state to another) with the specific mode of operation belonging to a cause, (as producing one change rather than, another,) and assumes a volition or act of will to be of the former, instead of the latter description.
Side 277 - For modes of faith let angry zealots fight, His can't be wrong, whose life is in the right.
Side 163 - Does it require so extraordinary a degree of reflection and ratiocination to discover that to feed the hungry, to clothe the naked, to heal the sick...
Side 239 - He is distinguished by a picture of a Circassian Chief selling, to a Turkish Pacha, captives of a neighbouring tribe taken in war.
Side 48 - ... consequently, can by no means lessen it. The more confidently we may depend on a being's doing an action, when convinced of its propriety, whatever obstacles may lie in his way, that is, the more efficacious and unconquerable the influence of conscience is within him, the more amiable we must think him. " In like manner, the most abandoned and detestable state of wickedness, implies the greatest necessity of sinning and the greatest degree of moral impotence.
Side 231 - By this logical formula we may prove that any two things possessing a single property in common must be the same generically and specifically. Thus : " Man is an animal, and a horse is an animal; therefore a horse is a man." And again : "Chalk is white, and snow is white ; therefore snow is chalk.

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