“Taylor, Charles: Ethics.” (In Encyclopedia of the Philosophy of Law and Social Philosophy, eds. M. Sellers and S. Kriste. Dordrecht: Springer) (original) (raw)
Related papers
Given Taylor’s status as one of the most important thinkers in contemporary moral and political philosophy, it is somewhat surprising that so little attention has been paid to the implications of his views for metaethics. To fill this gap, this paper considers the highly unorthodox approach to metaethics articulated in his philosophy. While his views can be seen as “anti-metaethical,” I argue that Taylor in fact takes the cause of metaethics in a new direction by showing the problems of moral realism in a whole new light. To demonstrate this, I first sketch the mainstream debate on moral realism (§1) to clear the way for Taylor’s non-mainstream approach (§2). I continue to explain his unusual position by highlighting the contrast between the classical conception of moral facts and Taylor’s key concepts of “strong evaluation” and “moral sources” (§3). Against the background of this contrast, I turn to Taylor’s view on the nature of language to explain how it informs his distinctive conception of moral realism (§4). I conclude by discussing the implications of Taylor’s realism for wider trends within metaethics (§5).
A Critique of Charles Taylor’s Notions of Moral Sources and Constitutive Goods
In this paper I argue that moral realism does not, pace Charles Taylor, need “moral sources” or “constitutive goods”, and adding these concepts distorts the basic insights of moral realism. Yet Taylor's ideas of “moral topography” or “moral space” as well as the idea of “ontological background pictures” are OK, if separated from those notions.
Perspectives on the Philosophy of Charles Taylor
Sample chapters: "Introduction", Arto Laitinen, Nicholas H. Smith, pp. 5-9. http://www.jyu.fi/yhtfil/fil/armala/INTRO.pdf "On Identity, Alienation and Consequences of September 11th. An Interview with Charles Taylor", Arto Laitinen, Hartmut Rosa. pp.165-195. http://www.jyu.fi/yhtfil/fil/armala/texts/Part%20Four%201112.pdf "Culturalist Moral Realism", Arto Laitinen, p.115-131. http://www.jyu.fi/yhtfil/fil/armala/texts/2002c.pdf See the series: http://www.helsinki.fi/filosofia/acta.htm
This essay critically discusses Charles Taylor’s distinctive mode of argumentation in between ethics, phenomenology, and ontology. It also examines the different meanings of Taylor’s ontological claims by putting a spotlight on the underappreciated significance of Martin Heidegger and Iris Murdoch for Taylor’s ontology. I argue that Taylor’s hybrid position is best understood as a phenomenological attempt to connect Heideggerian ontology and Murdochean ethics. The paper is divided in five sections. The first section discusses Taylor’s engagement with Murdoch and his tendency towards non-anthropocentrism in ethics. After examining Taylor’s unusual interwoven mode of thought in the second section, I continue to argue that his position is mostly indebted to Heidegger in the third section. I then focus on Taylor’s hesitant interpretations of Heidegger and Murdoch in the fourth section, and finally reflect in the concluding fifth section on how these hesitations affect Taylor’s ethical view in general and its underlying ontology in particular.
Journal of Ethics and Social Philosophy 14, no. 2
2018
The journal is founded on the principle of publisher-funded open access. There are no publication fees for authors, and public access to articles is free of charge and is available to all readers under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 license. Funding for the journal has been made possible through the generous commitment of the Gould School of Law and the Dornsife College of Letters, Arts, and Sciences at the University of Southern California. The Journal of Ethics and Social Philosophy aspires to be the leading venue for the best new work in the fields that it covers, and it is governed by a correspondingly high editorial standard. The journal welcomes submissions of articles in any of these and related fields of research. The journal is interested in work in the history of ethics that bears directly on topics of contemporary interest, but does not consider articles of purely historical interest. It is the view of the associate editors that the journal's high standard does not preclude publishing work that is critical in nature, provided that it is constructive, wellargued, current, and of sufficiently general interest.
This conference centers on Charles Taylor’s paper “Ethics and Ontology” (2003) and its central theme of the relationship between ethical beliefs and ontological views. Taylor’s moral phenomenology defends commonsense moral reactions against reductionist views that attempt to dismiss these reactions altogether as mere projection on a neutral physical world. His criticism is that this naturalist ontology annihilates our very sense of morality, that is, the sense that moral values are in some way different from, higher than, or incommensurable with natural desires. Against this background, the central question of the conference is: What do our ethical views commit us to ontologically? In this way, this conference aims to discuss Taylor’s moral phenomenology in order to open up the question of the implicit ontological commitments behind our ethical beliefs. Keynotes: Ruth Abbey (University of Notre Dame) Nicholas Smith (Macquarie University) Arto Laitinen (University of Tampere)