Conscious feelings are connections. A man fears an enemy (although perhaps he has no enemy to be feared); he hopes for a rise in salary, he wishes he were twenty years younger, or that he could construct a square which could be proved to be equal in area to a given circle.

One of the most serious pre-occupations of post-medieval philosophy has been to distinguish those kinds of assertion which are either true or false from those which are neither true nor false. A solution to this problem would be of the highest importance. It would indicate in what areas rational inquiry has some hope of success and in what areas it is doomed to frustration. It would tell us, for example, whether it is worth trying to think about the possible mistakenness of our moral principles, or whether such thinking is bound to be ineffective since no truth or falsity attaches to them.

The House of Lords debate of July last on the Death Penalty Abolition Bill1 may prove to have been a landmark in British constitutional and legal history; certainly it was of the greatest interest as a specimen of current moral thinking and moral conflicts on the death penalty; and it is in this latter light that I shall discuss it here. Socialists and radicals might of course complain that a predominantly Conservative House of Lords could not be representative of current thinking; and they might contrast the voting for the second reading of Mr. Silverman's Bill in the Lords—Contents 95, Non-contents 238—with the votes that had previously been recorded in the Commons.

An important part of ethics consists in the attempt to find a theoretical framework for the sincere moral discourse of ordinary people; to present, if possible, a consistent account of the ways in which such terms as “good,” “right,” “duty,” “obligation” are used in moral contexts. It is surprising that it should ever have been thought possible to account for such utterances as expressions of emotion. For the most part nothing could be less like the sighs, groans, shouts, and chuckles with which we normally express emotion than are our assertions about right and wrong, good and bad; these are usually the outcome of careful consideration and they are almost invariably expressed in cognitive terms. That is, we describe ourselves as “thinking out what we ought to do,” “coming to a conclusion as to what is right,” “knowing the difference between right and wrong,” “recognizing our obligations,” “seeing our duty.” When we do employ “emotive” words in these contexts it is almost always for the purpose of expressing anger or remorse or disgust with regard to our own moral lapses or those of others. Moral utterances, in short, have all the appearance of being statements of fact, and statements, moreover, which cannot be made in other than moral terms.

In Chapter 4 of his essay Utilitarianism, “Of what sort of Proof the Principle of Utility is susceptible,” J. S. Mill undertakes to prove, in some sense of that term, the principle of utility. It has very commonly been argued that in the course of this “proof” Mill commits two very obvious fallacies. The first is the naturalistic fallacy (the fallacy of holding that a value judgment follows deductively from a purely factual statement) which he is held to commit when he argues that since “the only proof capable of being given that an object is visible, is that people actually see it. The only proof that a sound is audible is that people hear it: and so of the other sources of our experience. In like manner … the sole evidence it is possible to produce that anything is desirable, is that people do actually desire it.”1 Here Mill appears to hold that “X is desirable (=fit or worthy to be desired)”—a value judgment—follows deductively from “People desire x”—a factual statement. And the second is the fallacy of composition (i.e. an illicit transition from a statement about each several member of a collection to a statement about the collection as a whole) which seems to be involved in Mill'zs argument that since “each person's happiness is a good to that person … the general happiness (is), therefore, a good to the aggregate of all persons.”2

Professor A. D. Ritchie's remarks (Philosophy, January 1957, p. 65) cannot go without some reply, since otherwise they would only have the effect of increasing the already considerable confusion on the subject of Cybernetics.