ABSTRACT
FOR a very long time thinkers of the past did not discriminate between these two fields of human study. All that man thought and did came under the scrutiny of the philosopher-theologian or theologian-philosopher. It was only in the nineteenth century that psychology became a discipline to be cultivated with the accepted tools and methods of science. Even before this the scientific status of ethics had been undermined by David Hume and, in the present century, the crumbling edifice of the moral philosophical discipline was neatly removed by the logicalpositivist demolition squads. It is well known that ethics ceased to exist for the logical-positivist. It was replaced by the psychology of moral behaviour and by semantics, that is to say, by the analysis of moral language. Most philosophers today are still more or less committed to the analytic methods of logical positivism and for these there is no duality, no two disciplines, psychology and ethics, and consequently there is no relationship to speak of, for the existence of one of these two disciplines is denied. On the other hand, ethics survives for those who maintain that logical categories at our disposal are not capable of expressing all the facts of moral psychology. These contend that ethics survives in the body of psychology as a sufficiently autonomous discipline, although they admit too that the logical status of its propositions has not yet been defined. Nor is it clear how its autonomy within the psyche is compatible with its influence on the psyche.
