not be objectively right or
objectively wrong; but simply right to some people, wrong to others.
Hume would be right in holding the morality of an action to consist
simply in the pleasure it gives to the person who {72} contemplates it.
Rightness thus becomes simply a name for the fact of social
approbation.[2] And yet surely the very heart of the affirmation which
the moral consciousness makes in each of us is that right and wrong are
not matters of mere subjective feeling. When I assert 'this is right,'
I do not claim personal infallibility. I may, indeed, be wrong, as I
may be wrong in my political or scientific theories. But I do mean
that I think I am right; and that, if I am right, you cannot also be
right when you affirm that this same action is wrong. This objective
validity is the very core and centre of the idea of Duty or moral
obligation. That is why it is so important to assert that moral
judgements are the work of Reason, not of a supposed moral sense or any
other kind of feeling. Feelings may vary in different men without any
of them being in the wrong; red really is the same as green to a
colour-blind person. What we mean when we talk about the existence of
Duty is that things are right or wrong, no matter what you or I think
about them--that the laws of Morality {73} are quite as much
independent of my personal likings and dislikings as the physical laws
of Nature. That is what is meant by the 'objectivity' of the moral law.

Now, the question arises--'Can such an objectivity be asserted by those
who take a purely materialistic or naturalistic view of the Universe?'
Whatever our metaphysical theories about the nature of Reality may be,
we can in practice have no difficulty in the region of Physical Science
about recognizing an objective reality of some kind which is other than
my mere thinking about it. That fire will burn whether I think so or
not is practically recognized by persons of all metaphysical
persuasions. If I say 'I can cloy the hungry edge of appetite by bare
imagination of a feast,' I try the experiment, and I fail. I imagine
the feast, but I am hungry still: and if I persist in the experiment, I
die. But what do we mean when we say that things are right or wrong
whether I think them so or not, that the Moral Law exists outside me
and independently of my thinking about it? Where and how does this
moral law exist? The physical laws of Nature may be supposed by the
Materiali