efuse to believe that they can be so angry
without sufficient cause.[1]

[Footnote 1: Graham Wallas: _The Great Society_, pp. 224-25.]

The Empiricist insists that the morality of an act cannot
be told from the intensity of approval or disapproval which
it arouses in the individual. Actions are not moral or
immoral in themselves, but in their consequences or relations,
which are only discoverable in experience. The goodness or
badness of an act is measurable in terms of its consequences,
and the consequences of action are discoverable only in experience.
This does not imply that we calculate the results of
every action before performing it, or measure the consequences
of the acts of other persons before judging them.
Our immediate reactions are frequently not the result of reflection
at all, but are responses prompted by previously formed
habits, or by instinctive caprice. These immediate intuitions
are not to be relied upon as moral standards, precisely because
reflection frequently comes to an estimate of an act, directly
at variance with our instinctive reaction to it. We come,
upon reflection, to approve acts that we are, by instinct,
moved to condemn. And the reverse holds true.

When we see that a child's clothes have caught fire, we do not
need to reflect on any consequences for universal well-being before
we make up our minds that it is a duty to extinguish the flames, even
at the cost of some risk to ourselves. It is clear that the act will
conduce to pleasure and to the avoidance of pain. We should feel
an equally instinctive desire to kick out of the room a man whom we
saw making incisions in the flesh of a human being if we did not know
that he was a surgeon, and that the making of incisions will tend to
save the man's life. Were a competent physician to suggest that
the burning of the child's clothes upon its back would cure it of a
fever, every reasonable person would consider it his duty to reconsider
his _prima-facie_ view of the situation.[1]

[Footnote 1: Rashdall: _Ethics_, pp, 51-52.]

The Empiricist insists that moral standards are matters of
discovery; that the laws of conduct must be derived from
experience, just as must the laws of the physical sciences.
To condemn an act as evil means that the performance of that
act has in experience been found to produce harmful results.
Those moral laws which at the present stage of civilized society
seem to have attained universal assent, _have_ atta