Theoretical Ethics

This volume is largely the outcome of Milton Valentine’s many years of classroom lecturing on the subject. Its object is to furnish for students and general readers a compendious view of the ethical facts and principles as he believes them to be established by the best accredited knowledge and thought of our times. Starting from the universal phenomenon of moral distinctions in life, it determines the conscience psychologically, as a rationally intuitive power discerning the moral distinction and the reality and authority of moral law. The implications of conscience and moral law necessarily become theistic. The disclosures of revelation confirm the ethical law of the natural reason, completing the moral view and supplying, in the divine forces of Christianity, the proper dynamic for the realization of the ethical life.