ABSTRACT
It will perhaps be argued that even though this or that moral principle, or even all moral principles hitherto laid down, fail to be objectively valid or express a moral truth, there may nevertheless be in the human mind some "faculty" which makes the pronouncement of objectively valid moral judgments possible. Since the days of Immanuel Kant moral judgments have been referred to a special faculty or a part of the general faculty of reason, called "practical" or "moral" reason, as the source of the objective validity assigned to them; according to Kant the speculative and the practical reason "can ultimately be only one and the same reason which has to be distinguished merely in its application". The great variability of moral judgments does not of course eo ipso disprove the possibility of self-evident moral intuitions. The common sense idea that moral judgments possess objective validity is itself regarded as a proof of their really possessing such validity.
