Thomas Reid on Common Sense and Morals

2013 ◽  
Vol 11 (2) ◽  
pp. 109-130 ◽  
Author(s):  
Keith Lehrer
Keyword(s):  
Common Sense ◽  
Moral Disagreement ◽  
Moral Judgments ◽  
Philosophical Theory ◽  
Thomas Reid ◽  
Moral Concepts ◽  
Moral Faculty ◽  
Moral Properties

Reid's philosophy of the moral faculty must be interpreted in the context of his philosophical theory concerning the human faculties and their connection with truth. One purpose of this paper is to offer an account of the development of our moral concepts that accords with a proposal of Esther Kroeker (Kroeker 2010) and also my own ( Lehrer 2010 ). Another is to explain how Reid combines an account of the objectivity of moral judgments with the denial of the existence of moral properties, the affirmation of a necessary connection of the moral judgments with sentiment and the accommodation of moral disagreement.

Common sense in Thomas Reid

2014 ◽  
Vol 41 (S1) ◽  
pp. 142-155 ◽  
Author(s):  
John Greco
Keyword(s):  
Common Sense ◽  
Philosophical Theory ◽  
Thomas Reid

This paper explains the nature and role of common sense in Reid and uses the exposition to answer some of Reid's critics. The key to defending Reid is to distinguish between two kinds of priority that common sense beliefs are supposed to enjoy. Common sense beliefs enjoy epistemological priority in that they constitute a foundation for knowledge; i.e. they have evidential status without being grounded in further evidence themselves. Common sense beliefs enjoy methodological priority in that they constrain philosophical theory: they serve as pre-theoretical commitments that philosophical theories ought to respect in the absence of good reasons for rejecting them.

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.

The Legacy of Reid's Common Sense in Analytic Epistemology

2019 ◽  
Vol 17 (1) ◽  
pp. 23-37
Author(s):  
Mark Boespflug
Keyword(s):  
Common Sense ◽  
Thomas Reid ◽  
The Common

The common sense that heavily informs the epistemology of Thomas Reid has been recently hailed as instructive with regard to some of the most fundamental issues in epistemology by a burgeoning segment of analytic epistemologists. These admirers of Reid may be called dogmatists. I highlight three ways in which Reid's approach has been a model to be imitated in the estimation of dogmatists. First, common sense propositions are taken to be the benchmarks of epistemology inasmuch as they constitute paradigm cases of knowledge. Second, dogmatists follow Reid in taking common sense propositions to provide boundaries for philosophical theorizing. Inasmuch as philosophical theorizing leads one to deny a common sense proposition, such theorizing is stepping outside of the bounds of what it can or should do. Third, dogmatists follow Reid in focusing heavily on the problem of skepticism and by responding to it by refusing to answer the demand for a meta-justification that the skeptic wants.

Thomas Reid on Causation and Scientific Explanation

2016 ◽  
Vol 14 (1) ◽  
pp. 51-67 ◽  
Author(s):  
Manuel Barrantes ◽  
Juan M. Durán
Keyword(s):  
Common Sense ◽  
Scientific Explanation ◽  
Thomas Reid ◽  
Contemporary Debate ◽  
The Common

We argue that there is no tension between Reid's description of science and his claim that science is based on the principles of common sense. For Reid, science is rooted in common sense since it is based on the (common sense) idea that fixed laws govern nature. This, however, does not contradict his view that the scientific notions of causation and explanation are fundamentally different from their common sense counterparts. After discussing these points, we dispute with Cobb's ( Cobb 2010 ) and Benbaji's ( Benbaji 2003 ) interpretations of Reid's views on causation and explanation. Finally, we present Reid's views from the perspective of the contemporary debate on scientific explanation.

The Skeptic and The Madman: The Proto‐Pragmatism of Thomas Reid

2006 ◽  
Vol 4 (2) ◽  
pp. 125-137 ◽  
Author(s):  
Erik Lundestad
Keyword(s):  
Common Sense ◽  
John Dewey ◽  
Charles Sanders Peirce ◽  
The Other ◽  
Thomas Reid ◽  
Other Hand

Even though the philosophy of common sense is not justifi able as such, the assump- tion upon which it rests, namely that there are things which we are not in position to doubt is correct. The reason why Thomas Reid was unable to bring this assumption out in a justifi able manner is that his views, both on knowledge and nature, are to be considered dogmatic. American pragmatists such as Charles Sanders Peirce and John Dewey on the other hand, may be seen as offering us a ‘critical’ and post-Darwinian philosophy of common sense.

The “New Empire of Common Sense”

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Paul B. Wood
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Common Sense ◽  
Atlantic World ◽  
Thomas Reid ◽  
The Enlightenment ◽  
Joseph Priestley ◽  
Common Sense Philosophy

Although the rise of Scottish common sense philosophy was one of the most important intellectual developments of the Enlightenment, significant gaps remain in our understanding of the reception of Scottish common sense philosophy in the Atlantic world during the second half of the eighteenth century. This chapter focuses on the British context in the period 1764–93, and examines published responses to James Oswald, James Beattie, and, especially, Thomas Reid. The chapter contextualizes the polemics of Joseph Priestley against the three Scots and argues that it was Joseph Berington rather than Priestley who was the first critic to claim that the appeal to common sense was the defining feature of “the Scotch school” of philosophy. It also shows that Reid was widely acknowledged to be the founder and most accomplished exponent of the “school”, whereas Beattie and Oswald were typically dismissed as being derivative thinkers.

Reality and Morality

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Billy Dunaway
Keyword(s):  
Moral Realism ◽  
Explanatory Power ◽  
Moral Disagreement ◽  
Moral Language ◽  
Moral Properties ◽  
Realist View

This book develops and defends a framework for moral realism. It defends the idea that moral properties are metaphysically elite, or privileged parts of reality. It argues that realists can hold that this makes them highly eligible as the referents for our moral terms, an application of a thesis sometimes called reference magnetism. And it elaborates on these theses by introducing some natural claims about how we can know about morality, by having beliefs that are free from a kind of risk of error. This package of theses in metaphysics, meta-semantics, and epistemology is motivated with a view to an explanation of possible moral disagreements. Many writers have emphasized the scope of moral disagreement, and have given compelling examples of possible users of moral language who appear to be genuinely disagreeing, rather than talking past one another, with their use of moral language. What has gone unnoticed is that there are limits to these possible disagreements, and not all possible users of moral language are naturally interpreted as capable of genuine disagreement. The realist view developed in this book can explain both the extent of, and the limits to, moral disagreement, and thereby has explanatory power that counts significantly in its favor.

scholarly journals La aproximación sensocomunista de Thomas Reid al tema de los colores

2018 ◽  
Vol 6 (10) ◽  
pp. 101
Author(s):  
José Hernández Prado
Keyword(s):  
Common Sense ◽  
Human Mind ◽  
Thomas Reid ◽  
Sobre Todo

Este artículo presenta y comenta las consideraciones que Thomas Reid (1710-1796), principal exponente de la Escuela Escocesa del Sentido Común, hizo en torno al tema de los colores y de las «cualidades primarias» y «secundarias» en sus obras epistemológicas principales —An Inquiry into the Human Mind on the Principles of Common Sense, de 1764, y Essays on the Intellectual Powers of Man, de 1785—, y persigue mostrar que tales consideraciones fueron visionarias, muy críticas de la tendencia idealista de la filosofía moderna y, sobre todo, sensatas.

Thomas Reid on Moral Disagreement

2010 ◽  
pp. 67-87
Author(s):  
William C. Davis
Keyword(s):  
Moral Disagreement ◽  
Thomas Reid
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