Please visit our flagship Internet service Free-Market. The world's most comprehensive source for information on liberty . The Moral Criterion Speculative thought comes late in the history of mankind.
Men act before they philosophize about their actions.
They learned to talk, and developed language, ages before they developed any interest in grammar or linguistics. They worked and saved, planted crops, fashioned tools, built homes, owned, bartered, bought and sold, and developed money, long before they formulated any explicit theories of economics. They developed forms of government and law, and even judges and courts, before they formulated theories of politics or jurisprudence. And they acted implicitly in accordance with a code of morals, rewarded or punished, approved or disapproved of the actions of their fellows in adhering to or violating that code of morals, long before it even occurred to them to inquire into the rationale of what they were doing. It would seem at first glance both natural and logical, therefore, to begin the study of ethics with an inquiry into the history or evolution of ethical practice and judgments.