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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To suppose, that the mere regard to the virtue of the action. A very play or romance may afford us instances of this pleasure, which virtue conveys to us; and pain, which arises from vice. The case is the same, as when we correct the different sentiments of virtue, which proceed from its different distances from ourselves. We need no other explication of that esteem, which attends such of the natural virtues, as have a tendency to the public good. For granting that morality had no foundation in nature, it must still be allowed, that vice and virtue, either from self-interest or the prejudices of education, produce in us a real pain and pleasure; and this we may observe to be strenuously asserted by the defenders of that hypothesis. Of this kind I assert justice to be; and shall endeavour to defend this opinion by a short, and, I hope, convincing argument, before I examine the nature of the artifice, from which the sense of that virtue is derived. The very essence of virtue, according to this hypothesis, is to produce pleasure and that of vice to give pain. Without such a convention, no one would ever have dreamed, that there was such a virtue as justice, or have been induced to conform his actions to it.