ABSTRACT
It is a common opinion, held by moralists who regard the intellect as the source of moral concepts, that moral emotions only arise after and in consequence of an intellectual process through which the moral quality of a certain course of conduct has been discerned. A moral judgment always has the character of disinterestedness. When pronouncing an act good or bad, the author means that it is so quite independently of any reference it might have to the author personally. While disinterested resentment may thus be felt in consequence of an injury inflicted upon another individual as a reaction against sympathetic pain, it may also be directly produced by the cognition of the signs of resentment. There is yet a third way in which disinterested resentment may arise. In many cases people feel hostile to a person who inflicts no injury on anybody.
