ABSTRACT
In everyday life we have to make moral judgments fairly quickly, and we make use of ad hoc rules to guide our conduct. These rules are related to moral principles and social values but, in general, we do not think about such things, we follow the moral custom. We may think that we know intuitively what is right and what is wrong but most of our judgments are heavily influenced by social conditioning. This is inevitable and, in day-to-day affairs, it is necessary that we should have ready rules. However, it follows that if the rules are questioned, and when we have to engage in moral debate, we find deliberation difficult and perhaps disturbing. We are not accustomed to relating our rules to secondary principles, let alone deriving the latter from primary principles; and, in assessing our rules, we may have difficulty in distinguishing the moral from the conventional components. As Geoffrey Warnock says, there can be confusion about the content of morality: ‘When we talk about “morals” we do not all know what we mean; what moral problems, moral principles, moral judgments are is not a matter so clear that it can be passed over as a simple datum.’1
