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.

Metaethics from a First Person Standpoint addresses in a novel format the major topics and themes of contemporary metaethics, the study of the analysis of moral thought and judgement. Metathetics is less concerned with what practices are right or wrong than with what we mean by 'right' and 'wrong.' Looking at a wide spectrum of topics including moral language, realism and anti-realism, reasons and motives, relativism, and moral progress, this book engages students and general readers in order to enhance their understanding of morality and moral discourse as cultural practices. Catherine Wilson innovatively employs a first-person narrator to report step-by-step an individual's reflections, beginning from a position of radical scepticism, on the possibility of objective moral knowledge. The reader is invited to follow along with this reasoning, and to challenge or agree with each major point. Incrementally, the narrator is led to certain definite conclusions about 'oughts' and norms in connection with self-interest, prudence, social norms, and finally morality. Scepticism is overcome, and the narrator arrives at a good understanding of how moral knowledge and moral progress are possible, though frequently long in coming. Accessibly written, Metaethics from a First Person Standpoint presupposes no prior training in philosophy and is a must-read for philosophers, students and general readers interested in gaining a better understanding of morality as a personal philosophical quest.

This book collects together new essays by moral and legal philosophers that are aimed at knocking down a disciplinary wall that divides contemporary philosophical thinking about the nature of morality and contemporary philosophical thinking about the nature of law.

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.