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  1. Can Moral Realists Deflect Defeat Due to Evolutionary Explanations of Morality?Michael Klenk - 2017 - Pacific Philosophical Quarterly 98 (S1):227-248.
    I address Andrew Moon's recent discussion (2016, this journal) of the question whether third-factor accounts are valid responses to debunking arguments against moral realism. Moon argues that third-factor responses are valid under certain conditions but leaves open whether moral realists can use his interpretation of the third-factor response to defuse the evolutionary debunking challenge. I rebut Moon's claim and answer his question. Moon's third-factor reply is valid only if we accept externalism about epistemic defeaters. However, even if we do, I (...)
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  • Rethinking Right: Moral Epistemology in Management Research.Tae Wan Kim & Thomas Donaldson - 2018 - Journal of Business Ethics 148 (1):5-20.
    Most management researchers pause at the threshold of objective right and wrong. Their hesitation is understandable. Values imply a “subjective,” personal dimension, one that can invite religious and moral interference in research. The dominant epistemological camps of positivism and subjectivism in management stumble over the notion of moral objectivity. Empirical research can study values in human behavior, but hard-headed scientists should not assume that one value can be objectively better than another. In this article, we invite management researchers to rethink (...)
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  • Expressivism and Mind-Dependence.Sebastian Köhler - 2014 - Journal of Moral Philosophy 11 (6):750-764.
    Despite the efforts of meta-ethical expressivists to rebut such worries, one objection raised over and over again against expressivism is that, if the theory is true, matters of morality must be mind-dependent in some objectionable way. This paper develops an argument which not only shows that this is and cannot be the case, but also – and perhaps more importantly – offers a diagnosis why philosophers are nevertheless so often led to think otherwise.
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  • Reason, recognition, and internal critique.Antti Kauppinen - 2002 - Inquiry: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Philosophy 45 (4):479 – 498.
    Normative political philosophy always refers to a standard against which a society's institutions are judged. In the first, analytical part of the article, the different possible forms of normative criticism are examined according to whether the standards it appeals to are external or internal to the society in question. In the tradition of Socrates and Hegel, it is argued that reconstructing the kind of norms that are implicit in practices enables a critique that does not force the critic's particular views (...)
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  • How moral disagreement may ground principled moral compromise.Klemens Kappel - 2018 - Politics, Philosophy and Economics 17 (1):75-96.
    In an influential article, Simon C. May forcefully argued that, properly understood, there can never be principled reasons for moral compromise. While there may be pragmatic reasons for compromising that involve, for instance, concern for political expediency or for stability, there are properly speaking no principled reasons to compromise. My aim in the article is to show how principled moral compromise in the context of moral disagreements over policy options is possible. I argue that when we disagree, principled reasons favoring (...)
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  • Epistemic expressivism and the argument from motivation.Klemens Kappel & Emil F. L. Moeller - 2014 - Synthese 191 (7):1-19.
    This paper explores in detail an argument for epistemic expressivism, what we call the Argument from Motivation. While the Argument from Motivation has sometimes been anticipated, it has never been set out in detail. The argument has three premises, roughly, that certain judgments expressed in attributions of knowledge are intrinsically motivating in a distinct way (P1); that motivation for action requires desire-like states or conative attitudes (HTM); and that the semantic content of knowledge attributions cannot be specified without reference to (...)
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  • Veganism, Animal Welfare, and Causal Impotence.Samuel Kahn - 2020 - Journal of Animal Ethics 10 (2):161-176.
    Proponents of the utilitarian animal welfare argument (AWA) for veganism maintain that it is reasonable to expect that adopting a vegan diet will decrease animal suffering. In this paper I argue otherwise. I maintain that (i) there are plausible scenarios in which refraining from meat-consumption will not decrease animal suffering; (ii) the utilitarian AWA rests on a false dilemma; and (iii) there are no reasonable grounds for the expectation that adopting a vegan diet will decrease animal suffering. The paper is (...)
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  • Rule consequentialism and disasters.Leonard Kahn - 2013 - Philosophical Studies 162 (2):219-236.
    Rule consequentialism (RC) is the view that it is right for A to do F in C if and only if A's doing F in C is in accordance with the the set of rules which, if accepted by all, would have consequences which are better than any alternative set of rules (i.e., the ideal code). I defend RC from two related objections. The first objection claims that RC requires obedience to the ideal code even if doing so has disastrous (...)
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  • Rule Consequentialism and Scope.Leonard Kahn - 2012 - Ethical Theory and Moral Practice 15 (5):631-646.
    Rule consequentialism (RC) holds that the rightness and wrongness of actions is determined by an ideal moral code, i.e., the set of rules whose internalization would have the best consequences. But just how many moral codes are there supposed to be? Absolute RC holds that there is a single morally ideal code for everyone, while Relative RC holds that there are different codes for different groups or individuals. I argue that Relative RC better meets the test of reflective equilibrium than (...)
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  • Is Moral Projectivism Empirically Tractable?Richard Joyce - 2009 - Ethical Theory and Moral Practice 12 (1):53 - 75.
    Different versions of moral projectivism are delineated: minimal, metaphysical, nihilistic, and noncognitivist. Minimal projectivism (the focus of this paper) is the conjunction of two subtheses: (1) that we experience morality as an objective aspect of the world and (2) that this experience has its origin in an affective attitude (e.g., an emotion) rather than in perceptual faculties. Both are empirical claims and must be tested as such. This paper does not offer ideas on any specific test procedures, but rather undertakes (...)
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  • Rightness = right-maker.Long Joseph - 2015 - Disputatio 7 (41):193-206.
    I have recently argued that if the causal theory of reference is true, then, on pain of absurdity, no normative ethical theory is true. In this journal, Michael Byron has objected to my reductio by appealing to Frank Jackson’s moral reductionism. The present essay defends reductio while also casting doubt upon Jackson’s moral reductionism.
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  • Metaethics and emotions research: A response to Prinz.Karen Jones - 2006 - Philosophical Explorations 9 (1):45-53.
    Prinz claims that empirical work on emotions and moral judgement can help us resolve longstanding metaethical disputes in favour of simple sentimentalism. I argue that the empirical evidence he marshals does not have the metaethical implications he claims: the studies purporting to show that having an emotion is sufficient for making a moral judgement are tendentiously described. We are entitled to ascribe competence with moral concepts to experimental subjects only if we suppose that they would withdraw their moral judgement on (...)
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  • Mathematical and Moral Disagreement.Silvia Jonas - 2020 - Philosophical Quarterly 70 (279):302-327.
    The existence of fundamental moral disagreements is a central problem for moral realism and has often been contrasted with an alleged absence of disagreement in mathematics. However, mathematicians do in fact disagree on fundamental questions, for example on which set-theoretic axioms are true, and some philosophers have argued that this increases the plausibility of moral vis-à-vis mathematical realism. I argue that the analogy between mathematical and moral disagreement is not as straightforward as those arguments present it. In particular, I argue (...)
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  • Minding one's manners: Revisiting moral explanations.Robert N. Johnson - 1998 - Philosophical Studies 90 (2):181-203.
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  • Bioethics, Cultural Differences and the Problem of Moral Disagreements in End-Of-Life Care: A Terror Management Theory.M. -J. Johnstone - 2012 - Journal of Medicine and Philosophy 37 (2):181-200.
    Next SectionCultural differences in end-of-life care and the moral disagreements these sometimes give rise to have been well documented. Even so, cultural considerations relevant to end-of-life care remain poorly understood, poorly guided, and poorly resourced in health care domains. Although there has been a strong emphasis in recent years on making policy commitments to patient-centred care and respecting patient choices, persons whose minority cultural worldviews do not fit with the worldviews supported by the conventional principles of western bioethics face a (...)
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  • An argument against reduction in morality and epistemology.Jeremy Randel Koons - 2006 - Philosophical Investigations 29 (3):250–274.
    Many naturalistically-minded philosophers want to accomplish a naturalistic reduction of normative (e.g. moral and epistemic) claims. Mindful of avoiding the naturalistic fallacy, such philosophers claim that they are not reducing moral and epistemic concepts or definitions. Rather, they are only reducing the extension of these normative terms, while admitting that the concepts possess a normative content that cannot be naturalistically reduced. But these philosophers run into a serious problem. I will argue that normative claims possess two dimensions of normativity. I (...)
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  • Counterfactuals as Strict Conditionals.Andrea Iacona - 2015 - Disputatio 7 (41):165-191.
    This paper defends the thesis that counterfactuals are strict conditionals. Its purpose is to show that there is a coherent view according to which counterfactuals are strict conditionals whose antecedent is stated elliptically. Section 1 introduces the view. Section 2 outlines a response to the main argument against the thesis that counterfactuals are strict conditionals. Section 3 compares the view with a proposal due to Aqvist, which may be regarded as its direct predecessor. Sections 4 and 5 explain how the (...)
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  • Relativism, Absolutism, and Tolerance.Hye-Kyung Kim & Michael Wreen - 2003 - Metaphilosophy 34 (4):447-459.
    A common view is that relativism requires tolerance. We argue that there is no deductive relation between relativism and tolerance, but also that relativism is not incompatible with tolerance. Next we note that there is no standard inductive relation between relativism and tolerance—no inductive enumeration, argument to the best explanation, or causal argument links the two. Two inductive arguments of a different sort that link them are then exposed and criticized at length. The first considers relativism from the objective point (...)
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  • Troubles on moral twin earth: Moral queerness revived.Terence Horgan & Mark Timmons - 1992 - Synthese 92 (2):221 - 260.
    J. L. Mackie argued that if there were objective moral properties or facts, then the supervenience relation linking the nonmoral to the moral would be metaphysically queer. Moral realists reply that objective supervenience relations are ubiquitous according to contemporary versions of metaphysical naturalism and, hence, that there is nothing especially queer about moral supervenience. In this paper we revive Mackie's challenge to moral realism. We argue: (i) that objective supervenience relations of any kind, moral or otherwise, should be explainable rather (...)
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  • Naturalism and intentionality.Terence Horgan - 1994 - Philosophical Studies 76 (2-3):301-26.
    I argue for three principle claims. First, philosophers who seek to integrate the semantic and the intentional into a naturalistic metaphysical worldview need to address a task that they have thus far largely failed even to notice: explaining into- level connections between the physical and the intentional in a naturalistically acceptable way. Second, there are serious reasons to think that this task cannot be carried out in a way that would vindicate realism about intentionality. Third, there is much to be (...)
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  • Exploring Intuitions on Moral Twin Earth: A Reply to Sonderholm.Terry Horgan & Mark Timmons - 2015 - Theoria 81 (4):355-375.
    In his 2013 Theoria article, “Unreliable Intuitions: A New Reply to the Moral Twin-Earth Argument,” Jorn Sonderholm attempts to undermine our moral twin earth argument against Richard Boyd's moral semantics by debunking the semantic intuitions that are prompted by reflection on the thought experiment featured in the MTE argument. We divide our reply into three main sections. In section 1, we briefly review Boyd's moral semantics and our MTE argument against this view. In section 2, we set forth what we (...)
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  • Does Moral Disagreement Pose a Semantic Challenge to Moral Realism?Justin Horn - 2020 - Philosophia 48 (3):1059-1073.
    Many philosophers have argued that moral disagreement raises metaphysical and/or epistemological challenges for moral realism. In this paper, I consider whether widespread moral disagreement raises a different sort of challenge by threatening the semantic commitments of moral realism. In particular, I suggest that the character of many moral disagreements gives us reason to suspect that not all competent moral speakers pick out the same properties as one another when they use moral terms. If this is so, both sides of a (...)
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  • Copping out on moral twin earth.Terry Horgan & Mark Timmons - 2000 - Synthese 124 (1-2):139-152.
    In "Milk, Honey, and the Good Life on Moral Twin Earth", David Copp explores some ways in which a defender of synthetic moral naturalism might attempt to get around our Moral Twin Earth argument. Copp nicely brings out the force of our argument, not only through his exposition of it, but through his attempt to defeat it, since his efforts, we think, only help to make manifest the deep difficulties the Moral Twin Earth argument poses for the synthetic moral naturalist.
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  • Why Metaethics Needs Empirical Moral Psychology.Jeroen Hopster & Michael Klenk - 2020 - Critica 52 (155):27-54.
    What is the significance of empirical moral psychology for metaethics? In this article we take up Michael Ruse’s evolutionary debunking argument against moral realism and reassess it in the context of the empirical state of the art. Ruse’s argument depends on the phenomenological presumption that people generally experience morality as objective. We demonstrate how recent experimental findings challenge this widely-shared armchair presumption and conclude that Ruse’s argument fails. We situate this finding in the recent debate about Carnapian explication and argue (...)
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  • Fairness.Brad Hooker - 2005 - Ethical Theory and Moral Practice 8 (4):329 - 352.
    The main body of this paper assesses a leading recent theory of fairness, a theory put forward by John Broome. I discuss Broome's theory partly because of its prominence and partly because I think it points us in the right direction, even if it takes some missteps. In the course of discussing Broome's theory, I aim to cast light on the relation of fairness to consistency, equality, impartiality, desert, rights, and agreements. Indeed, before I start assessing Broome's theory, I discuss (...)
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  • Collective Acceptance and the Is-Ought Argument.Frank Hindriks - 2013 - Ethical Theory and Moral Practice 16 (3):465-480.
    According to John Searle’s well-known Is-Ought Argument, it is possible to derive an ought-statement from is-statements only. This argument concerns obligations involved in institutions such as promising, and it relies on the idea that institutions can be conceptualized in terms of constitutive rules. In this paper, I argue that the structure of this argument has never been fully appreciated. Starting from my status account of constitutive rules, I reconstruct the argument and establish that it is valid. This reconstruction reveals that (...)
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  • What do our intuitions about the experience machine really tell us about hedonism?Sharon Hewitt - 2010 - Philosophical Studies 151 (3):331 - 349.
    Robert Nozick's experience machine thought experiment is often considered a decisive refutation of hedonism. I argue that the conclusions we draw from Nozick's thought experiment ought to be informed by considerations concerning the operation of our intuitions about value. First, I argue that, in order to show that practical hedonistic reasons are not causing our negative reaction to the experience machine, we must not merely stipulate their irrelevance (since our intuitions are not always responsive to stipulation) but fill in the (...)
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  • “Economic man” in cross-cultural perspective: Behavioral experiments in 15 small-scale societies.Joseph Henrich, Robert Boyd, Samuel Bowles, Colin Camerer, Ernst Fehr, Herbert Gintis, Richard McElreath, Michael Alvard, Abigail Barr, Jean Ensminger, Natalie Smith Henrich, Kim Hill, Francisco Gil-White, Michael Gurven, Frank W. Marlowe & John Q. Patton - 2005 - Behavioral and Brain Sciences 28 (6):795-815.
    Researchers from across the social sciences have found consistent deviations from the predictions of the canonical model of self-interest in hundreds of experiments from around the world. This research, however, cannot determine whether the uniformity results from universal patterns of human behavior or from the limited cultural variation available among the university students used in virtually all prior experimental work. To address this, we undertook a cross-cultural study of behavior in ultimatum, public goods, and dictator games in a range of (...)
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  • Der Knobe-Effekt als Doppeleffekt.Moritz Heepe - 2021 - Zeitschrift Für Ethik Und Moralphilosophie 4 (2):313-335.
    ZusammenfassungDem sogenannten Knobe-Effekt zufolge bestimmt die moralische Valenz von Nebeneffekten menschlichen Verhaltens die Zuschreibung ihrer absichtlichen Verursachung. Wir argumentieren, dass erstens die empirisch ermittelten sozialpsychologischen Daten den Knobe-Effekt in der üblichen Lesart nicht belegen, vor allem wegen der unvollständigen Untersuchung der entscheidenden moralischen Varianzfaktoren. Zweitens zeigen wir, dass - und wie - eine spezifische Version des traditionellen Prinzips des Doppeleffekts den empirisch bestätigten Teil des Knobe-Effekts philosophisch erklärt. Die Erklärungskraft des Prinzips des Doppeleffekts kann auch als eine Rechtfertigung eben dieses (...)
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  • Could Morality Have a Source?Chris Heathwood - 2012 - Journal of Ethics and Social Philosophy 6 (2):1-19.
    It is a common idea that morality, or moral truths, if there are any, must have some sort of source, or grounding. It has also been claimed that constructivist theories in metaethics have an advantage over realist theories in that the former but not the latter can provide such a grounding. This paper has two goals. First, it attempts to show that constructivism does not in fact provide a complete grounding for morality, and so is on a par with realism (...)
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  • The subjective intuition.Jennifer S. Hawkins - 2010 - Philosophical Studies 148 (1):61 - 68.
    Theories of well-being are typically divided into subjective and objective. Subjective theories are those which make facts about a person’s welfare depend on facts about her actual or hypothetical mental states. I am interested in what motivates this approach to the theory of welfare. The contemporary view is that subjectivism is devoted to honoring the evaluative perspective of the individual, but this is both a misleading account of the motivations behind subjectivism, and a vision that dooms subjective theories to failure. (...)
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  • Moral Disagreement and Arational Convergence.Patrick Hassan - 2019 - The Journal of Ethics 23 (2):145-161.
    Smith has argued that moral realism need not be threatened by apparent moral disagreement. One reason he gives is that moral debate has tended to elicit convergence in moral views. From here, he argues inductively that current disagreements will likely be resolved on the condition that each party is rational and fully informed. The best explanation for this phenomenon, Smith argues, is that there are mind-independent moral facts that humans are capable of knowing. In this paper, I seek to challenge (...)
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  • Untergräbt der Relativismus die Autorität der Moral und die regulative Funktion ihrer Wahrheit?Manfred Harth - 2016 - Grazer Philosophische Studien 93 (2):291-322.
    In this article, various objections will be discussed that have been put forward against ethical relativism, but which haven’t been considered seriously enough on the part of relativists and have been overrated on the part of their opponents. The objections will be concentrated into three arguments: the action-theoretic, the epistemological and the truth-theoretic argument. The article will discuss whether they can be rebutted by proponents of the two main types of relativism: indexical relativism and truth-relativism. The conclusion will be as (...)
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  • The Role of Character in Business Ethics.Edwin M. Hartman - 1998 - Business Ethics Quarterly 8 (3):547-559.
    Abstract:There is good reason to take a virtue-based approach to business ethics. Moral principles are fairly useful in assessing actions, but understanding how moral people behave and how they become moral requires reference to virtues, some of which are important in business. We must go beyond virtues and refer to character, of which virtues are components, to grasp the relationship between moral assessment and psychological explanation. Virtues and other character traits are closely related to (in technical terms, they supervene on) (...)
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  • Moral relativism is moral realism.Gilbert Harman - 2015 - Philosophical Studies 172 (4):855-863.
    I begin by describing my relation with Nicholas Sturgeon and his objections to things I have said about moral explanations. Then I turn to issues about moral relativism. One of these is whether a plausible version of moral relativism can be formulated as a claim about the logical form of certain moral judgments. I agree that is not a good way to think of moral relativism. Instead, I think of moral relativism as a version of moral realism. I compare moral (...)
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  • Family Resemblances: Human Reproductive Cloning as an Example for Reconsidering the Mutual Relationships between Bioethics and Science Fiction.Solveig L. Hansen - 2018 - Journal of Bioethical Inquiry 15 (2):231-242.
    In the traditions of narrative ethics and casuistry, stories have a well-established role. Specifically, illness narratives provide insight into patients’ perspectives and histories. However, because they tend to see fiction as an aesthetic endeavour, practitioners in these traditions often do not realize that fictional stories are valuable moral sources of their own. In this paper I employ two arguments to show the mutual relationship between bioethics and fiction, specifically, science fiction. First, both discourses use imagination to set a scene and (...)
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  • Making good choices: toward a theory of well-being in medicine.Alicia Hall - 2016 - Theoretical Medicine and Bioethics 37 (5):383-400.
    The principle of beneficence directs healthcare practitioners to promote patients’ well-being, ensuring that the patients’ best interests guide treatment decisions. Because there are a number of distinct theories of well-being that could lead to different conclusions about the patient’s good, a careful consideration of which account is best suited for use in the medical context is needed. While there has been some discussion of the differences between subjective and objective theories of well-being within the bioethics literature, less attention has been (...)
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  • Law and Coherence.Jaap Hage - 2004 - Ratio Juris 17 (1):87-105.
    This paper deals with the questions of whether the law should be coherent and what this coherence would amount to. In this connection so‐called “integrated coherentism” is introduced. According to integrated coherentism, an acceptance set is coherent if and only if it contains everything that should rationally be accepted according to what else one accepts and does not contain anything that should rationally be rejected according to what else one accepts. Such an acceptance set is ideally a theory of everything, (...)
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  • A Typology of Conceptual Explications.Dirk Greimann - 2012 - Disputatio 4 (34):645-670.
    Greimann-Dirk_A-typology-of-conceptual-explications.
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  • Towards a Cognitive Scientific Vindication of Moral Realism: The Semantic Argument.Abraham D. Graber - 2015 - Ethical Theory and Moral Practice 18 (5):1059-1069.
    In a methodological milieu characterized by efforts to bring the methods of philosophy closer to the methods of the sciences, one can find, with increasing regularity, meta-ethical arguments relying on scientific theory or data. The received view appears to be that, not only is it implausible to think that a scientific vindication of a non-mentalist moral semantics will be forthcoming but that evidence from a variety of sciences threatens to undermine non-mentalist views. My aim is to push back against this (...)
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  • Creating truths by winning arguments: the problem of methodological artifacts in philosophy.Abraham Graber - 2015 - Synthese 192 (2):487-503.
    In this paper I will argue that there is a bi-directional relationship between philosophy and meaning such that doing philosophy can change the meaning of terms. A rhetorically powerful work of philosophy that garners widespread interest has the potential to change how people use a predicate. This gives rise to three concerns. First, one’s conclusion can become right in virtue of one doing a particularly good job arguing for it. Second, it may be implausible to take philosophy to be a (...)
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  • Quasi-Naturalism and the Problem of Alternative Normative Concepts.Camil Golub - 2022 - Journal of Moral Philosophy 19 (5):474-500.
    The following scenario seems possible: a community uses concepts that play the same role in guiding actions and shaping social life as our normative concepts, and yet refer to something else. As Eklund argues, this apparent possibility poses a problem for any normative realist who aspires to vindicate the thought that reality itself favors our ways of valuing and acting. How can realists make good on this idea, given that anything they might say in support of the privileged status of (...)
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  • Indeterminacy and variability in meta-ethics.Michael B. Gill - 2009 - Philosophical Studies 145 (2):215-234.
    In the mid-20th century, descriptive meta-ethics addressed a number of central questions, such as whether there is a necessary connection between moral judgment and motivation, whether moral reasons are absolute or relative, and whether moral judgments express attitudes or describe states of affairs. I maintain that much of this work in mid-20th century meta-ethics proceeded on an assumption that there is good reason to question. The assumption was that our ordinary discourse is uniform and determinate enough to vindicate one side (...)
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  • Unprincipled Ethics.Gerald Dworkin - 1995 - Midwest Studies in Philosophy 20 (1):224-239.
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  • How to Know the Good: The Moral Epistemology of Plato's Republic.Jyl Gentzler - 2005 - Philosophical Review 114 (4):469-496.
    John Mackie famously dismissed the rational tenability of moral objectivism with two quick arguments. The second, the so-called “argument from queerness,” proceeds as follows. A commitment to moral objectivism brings with it a commitment to the existence of moral properties as “queer” as Platonic Forms that are apprehended only through occult faculties like so-called “moral intuition” (Mackie 1977, 38). Since we have no reason to believe that there is any faculty such as moral intuition that serves as a reliable Form (...)
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  • Why there are no objective values: A critique of ethical intuitionism from an evolutionary point of view. [REVIEW]Gebhard Geiger - 1992 - Biology and Philosophy 7 (3):315-330.
    Using concepts of evolutionary game theory, this paper presents a critique of ethical intuitionism, or non-naturalism, in its cognitivist and objectivist interpretation. While epistemological considerations suggest that human rational learning through experience provides no basis for objective moral knowledge, it is argued below that modern evolutionary theory explains why this is so, i.e., why biological organisms do not evolve so as to experience objective preferences and obligations. The difference between the modes of the cognition of objective and of valuative environmental (...)
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  • Evolutionary anthropology and the non-cognitive foundation of moral validity.Gebhard Geiger - 1993 - Biology and Philosophy 8 (2):133-151.
    This paper makes an attempt at the conceptual foundation of descriptive ethical theories in terms of evolutionary anthropology. It suggests, first, that what human social actors tend to accept to be morally valid and legitimate ultimately rests upon empirical authority relations and, second, that this acceptance follows an evolved pattern of hierarchical behaviour control in the social animal species. The analysis starts with a brief review of Thomas Hobbes'' moral philosophy, with special emphasis on Hobbes'' authoritarian view of moral validity (...)
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  • A Defense of the Autonomy of Ethics.Eric H. Gampel - 1996 - Canadian Journal of Philosophy 26 (2):191-209.
    There has recently been a revival of interest in ‘naturalizing’ ethics. A naturalization seeks to vindicate ethical realism — the idea that ethical judgments can be true reflections of a moral reality — without violating the naturalist constraint that science sets the limits of ontology. The recent revival has been prompted by examples of successful scientific reduction, and by the emergence of new, nonreductive naturalist strategies. In this paper, I argue against such naturalist approaches to ethics. My argument builds on (...)
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  • Toleration as the Balance Between Liberty and Security.Anna Elisabetta Galeotti & Federica Liveriero - 2021 - The Journal of Ethics 25 (2):161-179.
    Traditionally, an adequate strategy to deal with the tension between liberty and security has been toleration, for the latter allows the maximization of individual liberty without endangering security, since it embraces the limits set by the harm principle and the principle of self-defense of the liberal order. The area outside the boundary clearly requires repressive measures to protect the security and the rights of all. In this paper, we focus on the balance of liberty and security afforded by toleration, analyzing (...)
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  • Belief and Motivation.Daniel Friedrich - 2013 - Theoria 80 (3):255-268.
    Humeans claim that all motivation is by desire. Anti-Humeans maintain that some beliefs can motivate all by themselves. This dispute, I argue, hinges on the question whether belief can rationalize motivation. Moreover, I argue belief can rationalize motivation since rationality requires that one be motivated to φ if one believes one has most reason to φ, and it is possible to be motivated to φ because one believes one has most reason to φ and one exercises one's capacity for rational (...)
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