Contemporary Metaethics Part 1 My Personal Notes © James Gray 2009-2011 Originally published at http://ethicalrealism.wordpress.com/ 1 Table of Contents 1. What is “Morality?”................................................................................................................5 What does “morality” mean?..................................................................................................6 Moral and nonmoral standards...............................................................................................9 2. The Debate Over Moral Realism..........................................................................................11 What is Moral realism?........................................................................................................11 Is moral realism true?...........................................................................................................14 3. Meta-Ethical Theories...........................................................................................................16 Moral naturalism..................................................................................................................16 Moral intuitionism................................................................................................................17 Emotivism.............................................................................................................................17 Moral relativism...................................................................................................................18 Error theory..........................................................................................................................19 4. Moral Reason........................................................................................................................21 Uncontroversial moral truths................................................................................................21 Analogies..............................................................................................................................22 Thought experiments............................................................................................................23 Theoretical virtues................................................................................................................24 5. History of Metaethics............................................................................................................26 1. Ancient Ethics..................................................................................................................26 2. Modern Metaethics...........................................................................................................30 Contemporary meta-ethics....................................................................................................32 Chapter 1: "Critique of Ethics and Theology" by A. J. Ayer....................................................35 What kinds of argument does Ayer use to defend his theory of emotivism?.......................35 Critique.................................................................................................................................36 Chapter 2: “Ethical Consistency” by Bernard Williams...........................................................40 My Objections to Williams's Argument...............................................................................41 Chapter 3: “Supervenience Revisited” by Simon Blackburn....................................................44 Moral Supervenience is Analytically Necessary..................................................................45 Blackburn's Reply to an Objection.......................................................................................46 A Final Objection.................................................................................................................48 Chapter 4: “Ethics, Mathematics, and Relativism” by Jonathan Lear......................................50 Cognitivist Moral Relativism...............................................................................................50 Non-Cognitivist Moral Relativism.......................................................................................51 My Objections......................................................................................................................51 Chapter 5: “The Subjectivity of Values” by J. L. Mackie........................................................53 Subjectivism.........................................................................................................................53 Whether or not objective values are real is a meaningless question....................................53 Noncognitivism....................................................................................................................54 Categorical Imperatives........................................................................................................54 Mackie's arguments against objective values.......................................................................54 My Objections to the Argument from Queerness:...............................................................56 Chapter 6: “Ethics and Observation” by Gilbert Harman.........................................................58 Gilbert Harman's Argument.................................................................................................58 My Comment........................................................................................................................59 2 Chapter 7: “Truth, Invention, and the Meaning of Life” by David Wiggins............................60 Living a Meaningful Life.....................................................................................................60 Intrinsic Value......................................................................................................................61 My Objections......................................................................................................................61 Chapter 8: “Values and Secondary Qualities” by John McDowell...........................................63 My Response........................................................................................................................64 Chapter 9: “How to be a Moral Realist” by Richard N Boyd...................................................65 Boyd's Argument..................................................................................................................65 We Should be Scientific Realists.........................................................................................66 Objections to Moral Realism................................................................................................70 Boyd's Reply to the Objections............................................................................................72 Homeostatic Consequentialism............................................................................................74 Another Objection to Moral Naturalism...............................................................................74 Chapter 10: “Moral Explanations” by Nicholas L Sturgeon.....................................................76 Background Information......................................................................................................76 Sturgeon's Argument............................................................................................................77 My Objection........................................................................................................................79 Chapter 11: “Moral Theory and Explanatory Impotence” by Geoffrey Sayre-McCord...........81 Observation and Moral Facts................................................................................................81 Explanatory Impotence.........................................................................................................82 My Objections......................................................................................................................86 Chapter 12: “Moral Reality” by Mark Platts.............................................................................87 What is intuitinism?..............................................................................................................87 Objections to moral realism..................................................................................................88 My Objections......................................................................................................................92 3 Preface This ebook is a collection of my personal notes originally published at http://ethicalrealism.wordpress.com/. I spent a couple of hours to make it, which means I corrected some typos and added a little consistency to the formatting, but it isn't perfect. My opinions throughout are also inconsistent because I wrote the notes within a kind of stream of consciousness. I changed my opinion based on the readings. I updated this book on 6/24/2011 and rewrote most of the introduction using my newer notes on the meaning and nature of meta-ethics. If you are interested in Metaethics, I recommend reading Moral Realism and the Foundations of Ethics by David Brink. The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy is also a helpful resource at http://plato.stanford.edu. Here are some links to specific articles