Suchergebnisse

Frontmatter -- Contents -- Preface -- Introduction: What Is Ethics? -- Part I: Making the Turn -- 1. An Overview of Individualistic Perfectionism -- 2. The Search for Universal Principles in Ethics and Politics -- 3. Tethering I -- 4. Tethering II -- Part II: Facing a New Direction -- 5. The Perfectionist Turn -- 6. Because -- 7. Toward the Primacy of Responsibility -- 8. The Entrepreneur as Moral Hero -- Afterword: Big Morality -- Index

A recent trend in metaethics has been to reject the apparent choice between pure cognitivism and pure noncognitivism by adopting views that seek to combine the strengths of each side while avoiding the standard problems for each. Some such views claim that moral judgments are complexes of belief-like and desire-like components. Other such views claim that normative language serves both to ascribe properties and to express desire-like attitudes. These essays examine the prospects for such 'hybrid views' of normative thought and language (focusing mainly but not exclusively on moral thought & talk)

The word 'ought' is one of the core normative terms, but it is also a modal word. This book develops a careful account of the semantics of 'ought' as a modal operator and uses this to motivate a novel inferentialist account of why ought-sentences have the meaning that they have. The inferentialist theory defended in this book agrees with descriptivist theories in metaethics that specifying the truth conditions of normative sentences is a central part of the explanation of their meaning.

Frontmatter -- Contents -- acknowledgments -- prolegomenon to any future feminist metaethics -- list of abbreviations -- 1. Feminist Wittgensteinian Metaethics? Revising the Big Book -- 2. Does the Fabric of the World Include Moral Properties? Realist/Antirealist Debates -- 3. Neither a Realist nor an Antirealist Be -- 4. Felted Contextualism: Heterogeneous Stability -- 5. Normativity and Grammar -- 6. Philosophical Rags and Mice: Changing the Subject in Moral Epistemology -- 7. Stability and Objectivity: The Felted World -- bibliography -- index

This book motivates a novel inferentialist account of the meaning of a core set of normative sentences. Building on a careful truth-conditionalist semantics for 'ought' considered as a modal word, Chrisman argues that ought-sentences mean what they do neither because of how they describe reality nor because of the noncognitive attitudes they express, but because of their inferential role.

Reasoning about ends : life as a value in Ayn Rand's ethics / Darryl Wright -- The choice to value / Allan Gotthelf -- The foundations of the ethics : objectivism and analytic philosophy / Irfan Khawaja -- Egoism and eudaimonism : replies to Khawaja / Paul Bloomfield -- Nietzsche and Rand as virtuous egoists / Christine Swanton -- Virtue and sacrifice : response to Swanton / Darryl Wright -- Rational selves, friends, and the social virtues / Helen Cullyer -- Egoistic relations with others : response to Cullyer / Tara Smith -- Virtuous egoism and virtuous altruism / Christine Swanton -- On altruism, and on the role of virtues in Rand's egoism : response to Swanton / Tara Smith -- What is included in virtue? / Lester H. Hunt -- The primacy of action in virtue : response to Hunt / Tara Smith