Was Reid a Moral Realist?

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Gordon Graham
Keyword(s):  
Good Reason ◽  
Moral Judgments ◽  
Moral Sense ◽  
Sense Perception ◽  
Moral Realist ◽  
Moral Properties ◽  
Intellectual Power ◽  
Moral Facts

This chapter argues that, contrary to a very widely held view, Reid’s express disagreement with Hume on the matter of morality cannot satisfactorily be pressed into the “realism versus sentimentalism” dichotomy. Hume is certainly a sentimentalist, but there is good reason to interpret Reid’s use of the analogy between moral sense and sense perception in a way that does not imply the existence of “real” moral properties. Reid makes judgment central to the analogy, and this gives the exercise of an intellectual “power” primacy over passive sensual experience. The analogy thus allows him to apply the concepts “true” and “false” to moral judgments, without any quasi-realist appeal to moral facts.

Meta-Ethics

2020 ◽  
pp. 264-278
Author(s):  
Terence Irwin
Keyword(s):  
Moral Judgments ◽  
Moral Concepts ◽  
Natural Properties ◽  
Moral Properties ◽  
The Difference ◽  
Definition Of ◽  
Objective Property ◽  
The Way ◽  
Moral Facts

Moore’s arguments begin a debate that revives sentimentalist and rationalist arguments. According to Moore, ‘good’ is indefinable, because there is no definition of it that mentions only ‘natural’ properties. Non-naturalist objectivists argue that we know about objective moral properties, but not in the way we know about other properties. Non-cognitivists argue that goodness is not an objective property at all; when we say that something is good, we are not stating a fact about it, but expressing an emotion, or issuing some prescription. Even if objectivism is correct about the meaning of moral judgments, we may still deny that any moral judgments are true, on the ground that we have no reason to believe that there are any moral facts of the sort that objectivists claim to describe. Further discussion of these arguments against objectivism requires closer attention to the difference between moral concepts and moral properties.

Utilitarianism and Its Critics

2020 ◽  
pp. 279-290
Author(s):  
Terence Irwin
Keyword(s):  
Practical Reason ◽  
Good Reason ◽  
Moral Judgments ◽  
Respect For Persons ◽  
Moral Concepts ◽  
Correct Account ◽  
Moral Properties ◽  
Principles Of Justice ◽  
Considered Moral Judgments ◽  
Supreme Principle

Later defences of utilitarianism, by Lewis and Hare, support Sidgwick’s claim that the utilitarian outlook is the outlook of practical reason. They argue that the appropriate extension of sympathy requires imaginative identification with the pleasures and pains of other people, in a way that leads to the utilitarian attitude. Ross, however, argues that utilitarianism gives us neither a correct account of moral concepts nor a correct account of moral properties. When we consider what makes right actions right, we have good reason to agree with Price in rejecting utility as the supreme principle of morality. Rawls defends this argument against utilitarianism. To decide what our considered moral judgments commit us to, we describe fair conditions in which we can choose between different principles of justice. In these fair conditions we accept principles that conflict with utilitarianism, but conform to Kant’s principle of respect for persons as ends.

Rationalism: A Rational Ground for Morality

2020 ◽  
pp. 164-187
Author(s):  
Terence Irwin
Keyword(s):  
Practical Reason ◽  
Good Reason ◽  
Emotional Reactions ◽  
Moral Judgments ◽  
Moral Consideration ◽  
Course Of Action ◽  
Rational Desire ◽  
Rational Ground ◽  
Rational Preferences ◽  
Moral Facts

Rationalists (including Butler, Price, and Reid) defend an alternative to the sentimentalist position, in three main areas: (1) Against the view that practical reason is subordinate to non-rational desire, they argue that some of our actions result from desires that are responsive to reason, so that we are guided by the apparent merits of different course of action, not just by our non-rational preferences. (2) Against the view that moral judgments depend on our emotions, and moral facts are partly constituted by our emotional reactions, they argue that moral judgments cannot be understood unless we recognize that they are rational judgments about objective facts. (3) Against the view that our moral outlook is utilitarian, they argue that utility is only one relevant moral consideration, and that we have good reason to attend to justice, generosity, and other aspects of morality that are not subordinate to utility.

scholarly journals There Are No Easy Counterexamples to Legal Anti-Positivism

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Emad H. Atiq
Keyword(s):  
General Theory ◽  
Social Philosophy ◽  
Social Practices ◽  
Legal Rule ◽  
False Negatives ◽  
Moral Properties ◽  
Theory Of Law ◽  
Inclusive Form ◽  
Moral Facts

Journal of Ethics & Social Philosophy, ForthcomingLegal anti-positivism is widely believed to be a general theory of law that generates far too many false negatives. If anti-positivism is true, certain rules bearing all the hallmarks of legality are not in fact legal. This impression, fostered by both positivists and anti-positivists, stems from an overly narrow conception of the kinds of moral facts that ground legal facts: roughly, facts about what is morally optimific — morally best or morally justified or morally obligatory given our social practices. A less restrictive view of the kinds of moral properties that ground legality results in a form of anti-positivism that can accommodate any legal rule consistent with positivism, including the alleged counterexamples. I articulate an ‘inclusive’ form of anti-positivism that is not just invulnerable to extensional challenge from the positivist. It is the only account that withstands extensional objections, while incorporating, on purely conceptual grounds, a large part of the content of morality into law.

Nietzsche’s Anti-Realism about Value

2019 ◽  
pp. 17-48
Author(s):  
Brian Leiter
Keyword(s):  
Moral Values ◽  
Moral Judgments ◽  
Explanatory Role ◽  
Moral Philosophers ◽  
Moral Facts

Nietzsche defends the metaphysical thesis that there are no objective (i.e. mind-independent) facts about values, including moral values. His primary arguments for his moral anti-realism are “best explanation” arguments: the best explanation of our moral judgments, indeed of the two-millennium long disagreements among moral philosophers, make no reference to objective moral facts. The details of an “inference to the best explanation” are laid out, and illustrated with Nietzsche’s own texts. Contemporary attempts to defend the explanatory role of moral facts are critiqued, and the radical implications of the argument from disagreement among philosophers considered and defended.

Moral realism

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jonathan Dancy
Keyword(s):  
Moral Realism ◽  
Moral Fact ◽  
Moral Realist ◽  
The World ◽  
The Right ◽  
Natural Fact ◽  
Moral Facts

Moral realism is the view that there are facts of the matter about which actions are right and which wrong, and about which things are good and which bad. But behind this bald statement lies a wealth of complexity. If one is a full-blown moral realist, one probably accepts the following three claims. First, moral facts are somehow special and different from other sorts of fact. Realists differ, however, about whether the sort of specialness required is compatible with taking some natural facts to be moral facts. Take, for instance, the natural fact that if we do this action, we will have given someone the help they need. Could this be a moral fact – the same fact as the fact that we ought to do the action? Or must we think of such a natural fact as the natural ‘ground’ for the (quite different) moral fact that we should do it, that is, as the fact in the world that makes it true that we should act this way? Second, realists hold that moral facts are independent of any beliefs or thoughts we might have about them. What is right is not determined by what I or anybody else thinks is right. It is not even determined by what we all think is right, even if we could be got to agree. We cannot make actions right by agreeing that they are, any more than we can make bombs safe by agreeing that they are. Third, it is possible for us to make mistakes about what is right and what is wrong. No matter how carefully and honestly we think about what to do, there is still no guarantee that we will come up with the right answer. So what people conscientiously decide they should do may not be the same as what they should do.

An Exploratory Phenomenological Psychological Approach to the Experience of the Moral Sense

1992 ◽  
Vol 23 (1) ◽  
pp. 50-86 ◽  
Author(s):  
Amedeo Giorgi
Keyword(s):  
Decision Making ◽  
Negative Emotions ◽  
Phenomenological Approach ◽  
Qualitative Approach ◽  
Empirical Approach ◽  
Moral Judgments ◽  
Moral Sense ◽  
Psychological Approach ◽  
The Awakening ◽  
Long Time

AbstractThe study of the moral sense was neglected for a long time in psychology until recently when Kohlberg, following the work of Piaget, constructed a scale for studying moral judgments. In this article the more scientific and empirical approach to the moral sense is questioned and an argument is made that a qualitative approach would yield more meaningful results. The work of Coles is cited as one example of a qualitative approach, and this article suggests a phenomenological approach. Five brief descriptions describing learning, resentment, decision-making, and the experience of autonomy were used for both analyses of the moral sense and psychological concomitants. The results indicate that the moral sense is a meaning that refers to an "ought" and that the awakening of the moral sense is frequently associated with negative emotions or feelings.

scholarly journals Précis of Moral Error Theory: History, Critique, Defence

2016 ◽  
Vol 13 (4) ◽  
pp. 397-402
Author(s):  
Jonas Olson
Keyword(s):  
Moral Realism ◽  
Error Theory ◽  
Moral Judgments ◽  
Moral Beliefs ◽  
Moral Error Theory ◽  
Ontological Question ◽  
Moral Error ◽  
Contemporary Perspective ◽  
Moral Facts

Moral error theorists and moral realists agree about several disputed metaethical issues. They typically agree that ordinary moral judgments are beliefs and that ordinary moral utterances purport to refer to moral facts. But they disagree on the crucial ontological question of whether there are any moral facts. Moral error theorists hold that there are not and that, as a consequence, ordinary moral beliefs are systematically mistaken and ordinary moral judgments uniformly untrue. Perhaps because of its kinship with moral realism, moral error theory is often considered the most notorious of moral scepticisms. While the view has been widely discussed, it has had relatively few defenders. Moral Error Theory: History, Critique, Defence (henceforth met) examines the view from a historical as well as a contemporary perspective, and purports to respond to some of its most prominent challenges. This précis is a brief summary of the book’s content.

scholarly journals Sorting Out Solutions to the Now-What Problem

2019 ◽  
Vol 17 (3) ◽  
Author(s):  
François Jaquet
Keyword(s):  
Point Of View ◽  
Moral Judgments ◽  
Moral Error ◽  
Moral Facts

Moral error theorists face the so-called “now-what problem”: what should we do with our moral judgments from a prudential point of view if these judgments are uniformly false? On top of abolitionism and conservationism, which respectively advise us to get rid of our moral judgments and to keep them, three revisionary solutions have been proposed in the literature: expressivism (we should replace our moral judgments with conative attitudes), naturalism (we should replace our moral judgments with beliefs in non-moral facts), and fictionalism (we should replace our moral judgments with fictional attitudes). In this paper, I argue that expressivism and naturalism do not constitute genuine alternatives to abolitionism, of which they are in the end mere variants—and, even less conveniently, variants that are conform to the very spirit of abolitionism as formulated by its proponents. The main version of fictionalism, by contrast, provides us with a recommendation to which abolitionists cannot consistently subscribe. This leaves us with only one revisionary solution to the now-what problem.

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