Category: Metaethics
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Norms in Nature? Some Doubts
Substack latest. It opens like this: Our friend Malcolm Pollack, riffing on some complaints of mine about Michael Anton's talk of natural rights, wrote the following: Rights are normative in their essence, while Nature simply is. Therefore, I see only two possibilities: 1) “Natural” rights flow from an intrinsic source of normative authority. Since brute and indifferent Nature…
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After MacIntyre: On Deriving Ought from Is
Are there any (non-trivial*) valid arguments that satisfy the following conditions: (i) The premises are all purely factual in the sense of purporting to state only what is the case; (ii) the conclusion is normative/evaluative? Alasdair MacIntyre gives the following example (After Virtue, U. of Notre Dame Press, 1981, p. 55): 1. This watch is…
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The Source of the Normativity of the Ought-to-Be
I was working on this four years ago. It might never get finished. So here it is. ………………………………… Is there any justification for talk of the ought-to-be in cases where they are not cases of the ought-to-do? If so, what is the source of their normativity? I am led to pose this question by my…
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Two Assurances of Religion and the Case of the Philosophically Sophisticated Rapist
Karl Britton, Philosophy and the Meaning of Life, Cambridge UP, 1969, p. 192: Religion tries to provide two great assurances: that there is an absolute good and bad in the world at large, and that the absolute good has power. I agree that religion does attempt to provide these two great assurances. The first assurance…
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On a Putative Counterexample to ‘Ought Implies Can‘
I have long subscribed to Kant's famous meta-ethical principle according to which our moral obligations cannot outrun our abilities. 'Ought' implies 'can.' If I am under a moral obligation to do X, then I must be able to do X. We are concerned here with moral not legal oughts, and we understand 'ought' in accordance…
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War, Torture, and the Aporetics of Moral Rigorism
That the deliberate targeting of noncombatants is intrinsically evil and cannot be justified under any circumstances is one of the entailments of Catholic just war doctrine. I am sensitive to its moral force. I am strongly inclined to say that certain actions are intrinsically wrong, wrong by their very nature as the types of actions…
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Utilitarianism and Natural Normativity: Further Foot Notes
Philippa Foot argues (Natural Goodness, Oxford UP 2001, p. 48 ff.) that a naturalistic approach to normativity rules out utilitarianism. In this entry I try to understand the argument. Foot writes, . . . utilitarianism never gets off the ground in a schema such as we find in the work of Elizabeth Anscombe and Michael…
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Natural Normativity: More Foot Notes
I am trying to come to grips with Philippa Foot's Natural Goodness (Oxford UP, 2001). For Foot, norms are ingredient in nature herself; they are not projected by us or expressive of our psychological attitudes. They are ingredient not in all of nature, but in all of living nature. Living things bear within themselves norms…
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Aristotelian Categoricals and Natural Norms
Here are some notes on Chapter Two, "Natural Norms," of Philippa Foot's Natural Goodness, Oxford UP, 2001. As I mentioned previously, Foot essays "a naturalistic theory of ethics: to break really radically both with G. E. Moore's anti-naturalism and with the subjectivist theories such as emotivism and prescriptivism that have been seen as clarifications…
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After MacIntyre: Can a Normative Conclusion be Derived from Purely Factual Premises?
Are there any valid arguments that satisfy the following conditions: (i) The premises are all factual in the sense of purporting to state only what is the case; (ii) the conclusion is normative/evaluative? Alasdair MacIntyre gives the following example (After Virtue, U. of Notre Dame Press, 1981, p. 55): 1. This watch is inaccurate. Therefore…
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Oughtness, Obligation, Duty
If I ought to do something, am I obliged to do it? And if I am obliged to do something, is it my duty to do it? I tend to assume the following principle, where A is an agent and X an act or rather act-type such as feed one's children. P. Necessarily, A morally…
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The Obligatory, the Supererogatory, and Two Moral Senses of ‘Ought’
This is an old post from the Powerblogs site, written a few years ago. The points made still seem correct. ………………… Peter Lupu's version of the logical argument from evil (LAFE) is committed to a principle that I formulate as follows: P. Necessarily, agent A ought to X iff A is morally obligated to X.…
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How to ‘Derive’ Ought from Is
I demanded an argument valid in point of logical form all of whose premises are purely factual but whose conclusion is categorically (as opposed to hypothetically or conditionally) normative. Recall that a factual proposition is one which, whether true or false, purports to record a fact, and that a purely factual proposition is a factual…
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After MacIntyre: Is and Ought
This follows up on yesterday's discussion. Thanks to Hodges for getting me started on this, to Milos for reminding me of MacIntyre, and to Peter for agreeing with me so far. Are there any valid arguments that satisfy the following conditions: (i) The premises are all factual in the sense of purporting to state only…