Moral Laws Presidential Lecture.docx (original) (raw)

In the following essay, I defend why ethics is a normative science. By normative science, I mean that ethics is like logic in the sense that it actively tries to arrive at knowledge of objective norms that apply to all people at all place and at all times. Moreover, ethicists have a particular expertise about the content in the same way that the law professor or physicist claim in their own respective fields if ethics can be made scientific. In what follows, I explain Edgar Sheffield Brightman’s (1884-1953) model of ethics and evaluate his reasons for thinking why ethics is a normative science.