SHOULD WE DE-MORALIZE ETHICAL THEORY? (original) (raw)
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Normative ethics asks, what makes right acts right? W.D. Ross attempted to answer this question in The Right and the Good. Most theorists have agreed that Ross provided no systematic explanatory answers. Ross’s intuitionism lacks any decision procedure, and, McNaughton states, it ‘turns out after all to have nothing general to say about the relative stringency of our basic duties’. Here I’ll show that my own Rossian intuitionism does have a systematic way of explaining what makes right acts right. Deontological theories have struggled to say what internal to acts could make them right. From Price to Ross, the striking but uninformative answer has been the nature of the act. In this paper I’ll provide a Rossian theory of the moral natures of acts. It contains a set of self-evident principles of moral stringency and other considerations that can assist agents in deciding what prima facie duty overrides what.
Moral responses and moral theory: Socially-based externalist ethics
The Journal of ethics, 1998
The paper outlines a view called "social (or two-level) response-dependency" as an addition to standard alternatives in metaethics that allows for a position intermediate between standard versions of internalism and externalism on the question of motivational force. Instead of taking psychological responses as either directly supplying the content of ethics (as on emotivist or sentimentalist accounts) or as irrelevant to its content (as in classical versions of Kantian or utilitarian ethics), the view allows them an indirect role, as motivational props to moral teaching and thus to the general institution of moral discourse. However, they are not implied by any particular moral judgment (or speaker), so that amoralism comes out as possible. The response that defines the distinctively moral notion of "wrong" on this account is the second-level (social) response of forbidding some behavior; but this is ultimately to be understood in terms of (variable) individual reactions. Natural human emotion tendencies thereby constrain the content of ethics, while allowing for some degree of social variation in moral codes.
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Ethical Theory and Moral Practice, 2009
In this paper I discuss the viability of the claim that at least some forms of moral theory are harmful for sound moral thought and practice. This claim was put forward by e.g. Elisabeth Anscombe (1981(1958)) and by Annette Baier, Peter Winch, D.Z Phillips and Bernard Williams in the 1970’s–1980’s. To this day aspects of it have found resonance in both post-Wittgensteinian and virtue ethical quarters. The criticism has on one hand contributed to a substantial change and broadening of the scope of analytic moral philosophy. On the other hand it is, at least in its most strongly anti-theoretical formulations, now broadly considered outdated and—to the extent that it is still defended—insensitive to the changes that have occurred within the field in the last 20–30 years. The task of this paper is to relocate the anti-theoretical critique into the field of analytic ethics today.
Agent-focused Moral Realism Defended: Responses to my Critics
Australasian Philosophical Review, 2024
Moral realism, as a metaethical theory, arises from philosophical reflections on one of the most fundamental issues, if not the most fundamental one, of normative ethics: objectivity of moral properties or facts. Until recently, normative ethical theories dominating modern Western philosophical discourse have been consequentialism and deontology, both of which are primarily concerned about moral properties of rightness and wrongness of actions. Understandably, thus, moral realism has been also action-focused, aiming to show the objectivity of these moral properties, and classical criticisms of moral realism have been, also understandably, largely directed to this action-focused moral realism. However, in the last a few decades, virtue ethics as a normative theory, which is primarily concerned with the goodness and badness of human persons, has experienced an impressive revival and become a powerful rival to deontology and consequentialism. Unfortunately, however, most of our metaethical discussions, including the debate between moral realism and anti-realism, are lagging behind, failing to reflect this fundamental shift of the scene in normative ethics. It is in this context, as a virtual ethicist in normative ethics, someone who thinks that virtue ethics is a more plausible normative theory, that I’m motivated to develop an agent-focused moral realism, reflecting on issues arising from virtue ethics, to argue for the objectivity of moral properties of goodness and badness of persons, heavily drawing on, indeed mostly explicating, the view of the neo-Confucian philosopher Zhu Xi. As it is a novel approach, of course, I expect and indeed welcome criticisms from my fellow meta-ethicists who are commenting on my paper, to whom I’m most grateful and to whose comments I am most happy to make the following responses.