Oyonale - Créations 3D et expériences graphiques
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Cliquer sur les phrases pour les voir dans leur contexte. Les textes de Immanuel Kant et David Hume sont disponibles auprès du Projet Gutenberg.
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But this, in my opinion, is not a sufficient reason for excluding them from the catalogue of virtues. It is one thing to know virtue, and another to conform the will to it. Now as the means to an end can only be agreeable, where the end is agreeable; and as the good of society, where our own interest is not concerned, or that of our friends, pleases only by sympathy: It follows, that sympathy is the source of the esteem, which we pay to all the artificial virtues. But that reason, according to this hypothesis, discovers also vice and virtue. The virtue and vice must be part of our character in order to excite pride or humility. It is the same case, if justice, according to the system of certain philosophers, should be esteemed an artificial and not a natural virtue. All the difference is, that our superior reason may serve to discover the vice or virtue, and by that means may augment the blame or praise: But still this discovery supposes a separate being in these moral distinctions, and a being, which depends only on the will and appetite, and which, both in thought and reality, may be distinguished from the reason. Now justice is a moral virtue, merely because it has that tendency to the good of mankind; and, indeed, is nothing but an artificial invention to that purpose.