Wkład Harolda A. Pricharda w zrozumienie powinności

Abstract

We need to identify what class of principles Prichard is concerned with other philosophers have mistakenly tried to validate. He is concerned specifically with principles of obligation and not evaluative propositions in general. He distinguishes what we might call sense morality from philosophical morality. Prichard wants to show that the rightness of an action concerns an action not in the fuller sense of the term in which we include the motive in the action but in the narrower and commoner sense in which we distinguish an action from its motive. By moral philosophy he means the knowledge which would satisfy this demand, there is no such knowledge and all attempts to attain in are doomed to failure because they rest on mistake, the mistake of supposing in possibility of proving what can only be apprehended directly by an act of moral thinking. Is he right?