Download or read book The Moral Skeptic written by Anita M. Superson and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2009-03-13 with total page 265 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Anita Superson challenges the traditional picture of the skeptic who asks, "Why be moral?" While holding that the skeptic's position is important, she builds an argument against it by understanding it more deeply, and then shows what it would take to successfully defeat it. Superson argues that we must defeat not only the action skeptic, but the disposition skeptic, who denies that being morally disposed is rationally required, and the motive skeptic, who believes that merely going through the motions in acting morally is rationally permissible. We also have to address the amoralist, who is not moved by moral reasons he recognizes. Superson argues for expanding the skeptic's position from self-interest to privilege to include morally unjustified behavior targeting disenfranchised social groups, as well as revising the traditional expected utility model to exclude desires deformed by patriarchy as irrational. Lastly she argues that the challenge can be answered if it can be shown that it is, in an important way, inconsistent and therefore irrational to privilege oneself over others. The Moral Skeptic makes an important contribution to both metaethics/moral theory and feminist philosophy, and brings feminist thinking into the larger discussion of the skeptical challenge.
Download or read book Whatever Happened to Good and Evil written by Russ Shafer-Landau and published by Oxford University Press, USA. This book was released on 2004 with total page 150 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This is a brief introduction to ethics, with a point of view. The book addresses "meta-ethical" questions that go beyond what most introductory ethics books address, which are "normative" theories (egoism, utilitarianism, etc.) and "applied" ethics (abortion, capital punishment, etc.).
Download or read book Moral Skepticism written by Diego E. Machuca and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2020-08-14 with total page 244 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Moral skepticism is at present a vibrant topic of philosophical inquiry. Particularly since the turn of the millennium, the debates between moral skeptics of various stripes and their opponents have gained renewed force not only by taking account of innovative ideas in moral philosophy, but also by drawing on novel positions in epistemology, metaphysics, and philosophy of language as well as on recent findings in empirical sciences. As a result, new arguments for and against moral skepticism have been devised, while the traditional ones have been reexamined. This collection of original essays will advance the ongoing debates about various forms of moral skepticism by discussing such topics as error theory, disagreement, constructivism, non-naturalism, expressivism, fictionalism, and evolutionary debunking arguments. It will be a valuable resource for academics and advanced students working in metaethics and moral philosophy more generally.
Download or read book No Morality No Self written by James Doyle and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 2018-01-01 with total page 257 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Elizabeth Anscombe’s “Modern Moral Philosophy” and “The First Person” have become touchstones of analytic philosophy but their significance remains controversial or misunderstood. James Doyle offers a fresh interpretation of Anscombe’s theses about ethical reasoning and individual identity that reconciles seemingly incompatible points of view.
Download or read book Moral Responsibility written by Carlos Moya and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2006-09-27 with total page 245 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "This book lays out the major arguments for scepticism about moral responsibility and subjects them to sustained and penetrating critical analysis. Moral Responsibility lays out the intricate dialectic involved in these issues in a helpful and accessible way. The book goes on to suggest a way in which scepticism can be avoided, arguing that an excessive pre-eminence given to the will might lie at the root of scepticism of moral responsibility. Carlos Moya offers an alternative to scepticism, showing how a cognitive approach to moral responsibility which stresses the importance of belief would rescue our natural and centrally important faith in the reality of moral responsibility."--Jacket.
Download or read book The Moral Skeptic written by Anita M. Superson and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2009-03-13 with total page 265 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Anita Superson challenges the traditional picture of the skeptic who asks, "Why be moral?" While holding that the skeptic's position is important, she builds an argument against it by understanding it more deeply, and then shows what it would take to successfully defeat it. Superson argues that we must defeat not only the action skeptic, but the disposition skeptic, who denies that being morally disposed is rationally required, and the motive skeptic, who believes that merely going through the motions in acting morally is rationally permissible. We also have to address the amoralist, who is not moved by moral reasons he recognizes. Superson argues for expanding the skeptic's position from self-interest to privilege to include morally unjustified behavior targeting disenfranchised social groups, as well as revising the traditional expected utility model to exclude desires deformed by patriarchy as irrational. Lastly she argues that the challenge can be answered if it can be shown that it is, in an important way, inconsistent and therefore irrational to privilege oneself over others.The Moral Skeptic makes an important contribution to both metaethics/moral theory and feminist philosophy, and brings feminist thinking into the larger discussion of the skeptical challenge.
Download or read book Moral Skepticism written by Diego E. Machuca and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2017-10-20 with total page 238 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Moral skepticism is at present a vibrant topic of philosophical inquiry. Particularly since the turn of the millennium, the debates between moral skeptics of various stripes and their opponents have gained renewed force not only by taking account of innovative ideas in moral philosophy, but also by drawing on novel positions in epistemology, metaphysics, and philosophy of language as well as on recent findings in empirical sciences. As a result, new arguments for and against moral skepticism have been devised, while the traditional ones have been reexamined. This collection of original essays will advance the ongoing debates about various forms of moral skepticism by discussing such topics as error theory, disagreement, constructivism, non-naturalism, expressivism, fictionalism, and evolutionary debunking arguments. It will be a valuable resource for academics and advanced students working in metaethics and moral philosophy more generally.
Download or read book Justice for Hedgehogs written by Ronald Dworkin and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 2011-05-03 with total page 521 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The fox knows many things, the Greeks said, but the hedgehog knows one big thing. In his most comprehensive work, Ronald Dworkin argues that value in all its forms is one big thing: that what truth is, life means, morality requires, and justice demands are different aspects of the same large question. He develops original theories on a great variety of issues very rarely considered in the same book: moral skepticism, literary, artistic, and historical interpretation, free will, ancient moral theory, being good and living well, liberty, equality, and law among many other topics. What we think about any one of these must stand up, eventually, to any argument we find compelling about the rest. Skepticism in all its forms—philosophical, cynical, or post-modern—threatens that unity. The Galilean revolution once made the theological world of value safe for science. But the new republic gradually became a new empire: the modern philosophers inflated the methods of physics into a totalitarian theory of everything. They invaded and occupied all the honorifics—reality, truth, fact, ground, meaning, knowledge, and being—and dictated the terms on which other bodies of thought might aspire to them, and skepticism has been the inevitable result. We need a new revolution. We must make the world of science safe for value.
Download or read book Nietzsche s Political Skepticism written by Tamsin Shaw and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2010-07-21 with total page 171 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: It is difficult to spell out the precise political implications of Nietzsche's critique of morality. He himself never did so in any systematic way. Tamsin Shaw argues there is a reason for this: that Nietzsche's insights entail a distinctive form of political skepticism.
Download or read book The Evolution of Morality written by Richard Joyce and published by MIT Press. This book was released on 2007-08-24 with total page 285 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Moral thinking pervades our practical lives, but where did this way of thinking come from, and what purpose does it serve? Is it to be explained by environmental pressures on our ancestors a million years ago, or is it a cultural invention of more recent origin? In The Evolution of Morality, Richard Joyce takes up these controversial questions, finding that the evidence supports an innate basis to human morality. As a moral philosopher, Joyce is interested in whether any implications follow from this hypothesis. Might the fact that the human brain has been biologically prepared by natural selection to engage in moral judgment serve in some sense to vindicate this way of thinking—staving off the threat of moral skepticism, or even undergirding some version of moral realism? Or if morality has an adaptive explanation in genetic terms—if it is, as Joyce writes, "just something that helped our ancestors make more babies"—might such an explanation actually undermine morality's central role in our lives? He carefully examines both the evolutionary "vindication of morality" and the evolutionary "debunking of morality," considering the skeptical view more seriously than have others who have treated the subject. Interdisciplinary and combining the latest results from the empirical sciences with philosophical discussion, The Evolution of Morality is one of the few books in this area written from the perspective of moral philosophy. Concise and without technical jargon, the arguments are rigorous but accessible to readers from different academic backgrounds. Joyce discusses complex issues in plain language while advocating subtle and sometimes radical views. The Evolution of Morality lays the philosophical foundations for further research into the biological understanding of human morality.
Download or read book Essays in Moral Skepticism written by Richard Joyce and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2016-01-28 with total page 285 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Moral skepticism is the denial that there is any such thing as moral knowledge. Some moral skeptics deny that moral judgments are beliefs; some allow that moral judgments are beliefs but claim that they are all untrue; others claim that all moral judgments are unjustified. Since the publication of The Myth of Morality in 2001, Richard Joyce has explored the terrain of moral skepticism and, perhaps more than any other living philosopher, has been willing to advocate versions of this radical view. Joyce's attitude toward morality is analogous to an atheist's attitude toward religion: he claims that in making moral judgments speakers attempt to state truths (e.g., that breaking promises is usually wrong) but that the world simply isn't furnished with the properties and relations necessary to render such judgments true. Moral thinking, he argues, probably emerged as a human adaptation, but one whose usefulness derived from its capacity to bolster social cohesion rather than its ability to track truths about the world. This forms the basis of Joyce's 'evolutionary debunking argument,' according to which evidence that a certain kind of judgment can be explained with no reference to its truth may reveal those judgments to lack warrant. Essays in Moral Skepticism gathers together a dozen of Joyce's most significant papers from the last decade, following the developments in his ideas, presenting responses to critics, and charting his exploration of the complex landscape of modern moral skepticism.
Download or read book The Moral Arc written by Michael Shermer and published by Macmillan + ORM. This book was released on 2015-01-20 with total page 592 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Bestselling author Michael Shermer's exploration of science and morality that demonstrates how the scientific way of thinking has made people, and society as a whole, more moral From Galileo and Newton to Thomas Hobbes and Martin Luther King, Jr., thinkers throughout history have consciously employed scientific techniques to better understand the non-physical world. The Age of Reason and the Enlightenment led theorists to apply scientific reasoning to the non-scientific disciplines of politics, economics, and moral philosophy. Instead of relying on the woodcuts of dissected bodies in old medical texts, physicians opened bodies themselves to see what was there; instead of divining truth through the authority of an ancient holy book or philosophical treatise, people began to explore the book of nature for themselves through travel and exploration; instead of the supernatural belief in the divine right of kings, people employed a natural belief in the right of democracy. In The Moral Arc, Shermer will explain how abstract reasoning, rationality, empiricism, skepticism--scientific ways of thinking--have profoundly changed the way we perceive morality and, indeed, move us ever closer to a more just world.
Download or read book Skepticism and Moral Principles written by Curtis L. Carter and published by Taylor & Francis. This book was released on 1973 with total page 158 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Answering Moral Skepticism written by Shelly Kagan and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2023-07-14 with total page 409 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Most thoughtful people worry at one time or another about whether there can actually be such a thing as objective moral truth. They might wonder, for example, whether the prevalence of moral disagreement makes it reasonable to conclude that there aren't really any moral facts at all. Or they might be bothered by questions like these: What could objective moral facts possibly be like? Isn't it obvious that morality is simply relative to particular societies and particular times? If there were moral facts, how could we ever come to know anything about them? Can morality really have the motivating and rational force we normally take it to have? How can one possibly find a place for objective moral values in a scientific worldview? Some people are driven by questions like these to the conclusion that we should embrace skepticism about morality, denying the very existence of anything worthy of the name. In Answering Moral Skepticism, Shelly Kagan shows how those who accept the existence of objective moral truth can provide plausible answers to these questions. Focusing throughout on issues that trouble reflective individuals, Kagan provides an accessible defense of the belief in objective morality will be of interest to both students of metaethics as well as anyone worried about the objectivity of their own moral judgements.
Download or read book Moral Skepticism written by Walter Sinnott-Armstrong and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2007-10-19 with total page 286 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "All contentious moral issues - from gay marriage to abortion and affirmative action - raise difficult questions about the justification of moral beliefs. How can we be justified in holding on to our own moral beliefs while recognizing that other intelligent people feel quite differently and that many moral beliefs are distorted by self-interest and by corrupt cultures? Even when almost everyone agrees - e.g. that experimental surgery without consent is immoral - can we know that such beliefs are true? If so, how?" "These profound questions lead to fundamental issues about the nature of morality, language, metaphysics, justification, and knowledge. They also have tremendous practical importance in handling controversial moral questions in health care ethics, politics, law, and education. Walter Sinnott-Armstrong here provides an extensive overview of these difficult subjects, looking at a wide variety of questions, including: Are any moral beliefs true? Are any justified? What is justified belief? The second half of the book explores various moral theories that have grappled with these issues, such as naturalism, normativism, intuitionism, and coherentism, all of which are attempts to answer moral skepticism. Sinnott-Armstrong argues that all these approaches fail to rule out moral nihilism - the view that nothing is really morally wrong or right, bad or good. Then he develops his own novel theory, - "moderate Pyrrhonian moral skepticism"--Which concludes that some moral beliefs can be justified out of a modest contrast class but no moral beliefs can be justified out of an extreme contrast class. While explaining this original position and criticizing alternatives, Sinnott-Armstrong provides a wide-ranging survey of the epistemology of moral beliefs."--Jacket.
Download or read book Moral Epistemology written by Aaron Zimmerman and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2010-06-10 with total page 257 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: How do we know right from wrong? Do we even have moral knowledge? Moral epistemology studies these and related questions about our understanding of virtue and vice. It is one of philosophy’s perennial problems, reaching back to Plato, Aristotle, Aquinas, Locke, Hume and Kant, and has recently been the subject of intense debate as a result of findings in developmental and social psychology. In this outstanding introduction to the subject Aaron Zimmerman covers the following key topics: What is moral epistemology? What are its methods? Including a discussion of Socrates, Gettier and contemporary theories of knowledge skepticism about moral knowledge based on the anthropological record of deep and persistent moral disagreement, including contextualism moral nihilism, including debates concerning God and morality and the relation between moral knowledge and our motives and reasons to act morally epistemic moral scepticism, intuitionism and the possibility of inferring ‘ought’ from ‘is,’ discussing the views of Locke, Hume, Kant, Ross, Audi, Thomson, Harman, Sturgeon and many others how children acquire moral concepts and become more reliable judges criticisms of those who would reduce moral knowledge to value-neutral knowledge or attempt to replace moral belief with emotion. Throughout the book Zimmerman argues that our belief in moral knowledge can survive sceptical challenges. He also draws on a rich range of examples from Plato’s Meno and Dickens’ David Copperfield to Bernard Madoff and Saddam Hussein. Including chapter summaries and annotated further reading at the end of each chapter, Moral Epistemology is essential reading for all students of ethics, epistemology and moral psychology.
Download or read book Nietzsche and the Ancient Skeptical Tradition written by Jessica Berry and published by Oxford University Press, USA. This book was released on 2011 with total page 243 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This work presents a portrait of Nietzsche as the skeptic par excellence in the modern period, by demonstrating how a careful and informed understanding of ancient Pyrrhonism illuminates his reflections on truth, knowledge and morality, as well as the very nature and value of philosophic inquiry.
