scholarly journals Moorean Arguments and Moral Revisionism

2017 ◽  
Vol 3 (2) ◽  
pp. 1-25 ◽  
Author(s):  
Tristram McPherson

G. E. Moore famously argued against skepticism and idealism by appealing to their inconsistency with alleged certainties, like the existence of his own hands. Recently, some philosophers have offered analogous arguments against revisionary views about ethics such as metaethical error theory. These arguments appeal to the inconsistency of error theory with seemingly obvious moral claims like “it is wrong to torture an innocent child just for fun.” It might seem that such ‘Moorean’ arguments in ethics will stand or fall with Moore’s own arguments in metaphysics and epistemology, in virtue of their shared structure. I argue that this is not so. I suggest that the epistemic force of the canonical Moorean arguments can best be understood to rest on asymmetries in indirect evidence. I then argue that this explanation suggests that Moorean arguments are less promising in ethics than they are against Moore’s own targets. I conclude by examining the competing attempt to vindicate Moorean arguments by appealing to Rawls’s method of reflective equilibrium.

2000 ◽  
Vol 26 ◽  
pp. 139-173
Author(s):  
Susan E. Babbitt

Moral naturalism, as I use the term here, is the view that there are moral facts in the natural world – facts that are both natural and normative – and that moral claims are true or false in virtue of their corresponding or not to these natural facts. Moral naturalists argue that, since moral claims are about natural facts, we can establish the truth about moral claims through empirical investigation. Moral knowledge, on this view, is a form of empirical knowledge.One objection to this metaethical view is that even if moral naturalists are correct in their claims about truth, they cannot answer the question of normativity. Jean Hampton, for instance, argues that it is not enough to explain the conduct's wrongness by showing it to be a property that necessarily supervenes on natural properties. For nothing in this analysis explains the relationship between these properties and us. The question is why should people care about these properties. Christine Korsgaard claims that moral realists take the normative question to be one about truth and knowledge.


2020 ◽  
Vol 50 (8) ◽  
pp. 950-965
Author(s):  
K. Lindsey Chambers

AbstractMany accounts of the morality of abortion assume that early fetuses must all have or lack moral status in virtue of developmental features that they share. Our actual attitudes toward early fetuses don’t reflect this all-or-nothing assumption. If we start with the assumption that our attitudes toward fetuses are accurately tracking their value, then we need an account of fetal moral status that can explain why it is appropriate to love some fetuses but not others. I argue that a fetus can come to have moral claims on persons who have taken up the activity of person-creation.


2020 ◽  
Vol 61 (145) ◽  
pp. 55-72
Author(s):  
Andrea Faggion

ABSTRACT Many prominent legal philosophers believe that law makes some type of moral claim in virtue of its nature. Although the law is not an intelligent agent, the attribution of a claim to law does not need to be as mysterious as some theorists believe. It means that law-making and law- applying acts are intelligible only in the light of a certain presupposition, even if a lawmaker or a law-applier subjectively disbelieves the content of that presupposition. In this paper, I aim to clarify what type of moral claim would be suitable for law if law were to make a claim to be morally justified. I then argue that legal practice is perfectly intelligible without moral presuppositions - that is, that the law does not necessarily make moral claims.


Author(s):  
M. SCARFONE

Abstract Metaethical Mooreanism is the view that without being able to explain how we know certain moral claims we can nevertheless be sure that we do know them. In this article I focus on the Moorean argument against moral error theory. I conclude that it fails. To show this failure, I first distinguish Moorean claims from Moorean arguments, and then so-called presumptive support from dialogical support. With these distinctions in place, I argue that the key Moorean claim requires dialogical support in order to be used within the Moorean argument against moral error theory, but metaethical Mooreans have provided only presumptive support for the Moorean claim. Not only is this presumptive support inadequate for fending off the moral error theory, it is doubtful that Mooreans can actually provide dialogical support for the key Moorean claim.


JAMA ◽  
1966 ◽  
Vol 196 (5) ◽  
pp. 418-421
Author(s):  
H. C. Shirkey
Keyword(s):  

Crisis ◽  
1999 ◽  
Vol 20 (2) ◽  
pp. 78-85 ◽  
Author(s):  
Thomas Reisch ◽  
Petra Schlatter ◽  
Wolfgang Tschacher

This study assesses the efficacy of the treatment approach implemented in the Bern Crisis Intervention Program, where particular emphasis is placed on the remediation of suicide ideation and suicidal behavior, and depression, fear, and phobia are generally considered to be contributing factors. Four questionnaires addressing psychopathology, emotional well-being, social anxiety, and personality were administered prior to and after the treatment of 51 patients over a period of 2 to 3 weeks. The reduction of symptoms contributing to suicidal ideation and behavior was interpreted as indirect evidence of an antisuicidal effect of the program. Significant improvements were found in the psychopathology ratings, with depression and anxiety showing the largest reductions. The impact on personality and social phobia, however, was only moderate, and on average patients still exhibited symptoms after attending the program. This residual symptomatology points to the necessity of introducing a two-step therapy approach of intensive intervention targeted at the precipitating causes of the crisis, augmented by long-term therapy to treat underlying problems.


1997 ◽  
Vol 77 (02) ◽  
pp. 329-331 ◽  
Author(s):  
Guglielmina Pepe ◽  
Olga Rickards ◽  
Olga Camacho Vanegas ◽  
Tamara Brunelli ◽  
Anna Maria Gori ◽  
...  

SummaryA difference in the prevalence of venous thromboembolism (TE) in major human groups has been described and an uneven distribution of FV Leiden mutation over the world has recently been reported.We investigated FV Leiden mutation in 584 apparently healthy sub#jects mostly from populations different from those previously investi#gated: 170 Europeans (Spanish, Italians), 101 sub-saharan Africans (Fon, Bariba, Berba, Dendi), 115 Asians (Indonesians, Chinese, Tharus), 57 Amerindians (Cayapa), 84 Afroamericans (Rio Cayapa, Viche), and 57 Ethiopians (Amhara, Oromo).The mutation was detected in only 1/115 Asian (Tharu) and in 5/170 Europeans (4 Italians, 1 Spanish).These data confirm that in non-Europeans the prevalence of FV mutation is at least 7 times lower than in Europeans and provide indirect evidence of a low prevalence not only of the FV Leiden gene but also of other genes leading to more severe thrombophilia. Finally, findings from the literature together with those pertaining to this study clearly show a marked heterogeneity among Europeans.


1979 ◽  
Author(s):  
G. Palareti ◽  
M. Poggi ◽  
G. Fortunato ◽  
S. Coccheri

A series of 40 patients with TIA (25 males and 15 females) was thoroughly investigated by means of angiography and computerized tomography, and divided into a group (A) of 15 “sine materia”, and a group (B) of 25 with direct or indirect evidence of vascular occlusive or stenotic changes. Blood viscosity at 230 sec-1 37° was cp 4.2 ± 0.3 in the controls, cp 4.7 ± 0.7 in all patients (p < 0.05) cp 4.98 ± 0.7 in all male patients (p < 0.01 versus male controls), and cp 4.75 ± 0.8 in group B (p < 0.02). Haematocrit and Fibrinogen were also significantly increased in all male patients and in group B. Circulating platelet aggregates (CPA) were increased in 40% of the patients. Almost all patients with elevated CPA were males, with a slight prevalence in group B. Changes in blood viscosity parameters and in platelet aggregation in TIA patients were therefore related both to evidence of vascular lesions, and to sex, since they were found to prevail in male patients of both groups.


2007 ◽  
pp. 5-27 ◽  
Author(s):  
J. Searle

The author claims that an institution is any collectively accepted system of rules (procedures, practices) that enable us to create institutional facts. These rules typically have the form of X counts as Y in C, where an object, person, or state of affairs X is assigned a special status, the Y status, such that the new status enables the person or object to perform functions that it could not perform solely in virtue of its physical structure, but requires as a necessary condition the assignment of the status. The creation of an institutional fact is, thus, the collective assignment of a status function. The typical point of the creation of institutional facts by assigning status functions is to create deontic powers. So typically when we assign a status function Y to some object or person X we have created a situation in which we accept that a person S who stands in the appropriate relation to X is such that (S has power (S does A)). The whole analysis then gives us a systematic set of relationships between collective intentionality, the assignment of function, the assignment of status functions, constitutive rules, institutional facts, and deontic powers.


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