ABSTRACT

In this chapter, the author discusses a subject of some obscurity: the sense in which, as we say, people are more or less justified in having attitudes of certain sorts and of certain degrees of intensity towards objects and situations of certain sorts, and in certain typical constellations of circumstances. If we connect attitudes, in part at least, with peculiar active readinesses, we may pass on to that entirely traditional conception of their relation to their objects which looks upon this relation as causal, the object in its setting of circumstances being that which provokes, occasions or arouses some attitude in us. In favour of the policy of minimum meaning, it may be argued that the traditional policy tends to warp one's view of the wide variety of attitudes, some non-Butlerian and some only partially Butlerian, which are covered by such names as 'ethical', 'aesthetic', 'religious', 'scientific' and the like.