Ethics

Normative theories, metaethics and moral psychology.

What the course covers

Ethics asks three questions, and most confusion in the subject is one of them being answered while another was asked. What ought I to do is about acts. What is worth having is about states of affairs. Why should I care is about the person being addressed. A moral theory is largely a decision about which of the three comes first, because whichever comes first supplies the material the other two get built from. This module works through the four great answers, then turns on all of them and asks whether a moral claim can be true at all, and ends where the subject actually is, with that question open.

Ethics as a subject

Three questions, not one. One judgement, three different things being asked.
The right and the good. The distinction the whole subject is built on.
Obligation, good, virtue. Three basic concepts, and which one a theory starts from.
Why should I be moral? Glaucon’s ring, and whether morality pays.
The amoralist. Someone who follows the argument and shrugs.

Consequentialism

Only outcomes matter. The claim at full strength, before any objection.
Higher pleasures. Mill’s repair, and what it costs him.
Adding across people. One sum, and the boundaries it does not notice.
How much does morality demand? Singer’s pond, and how far the argument runs.
Integrity. Williams on what the theory does to the agent.
Rules instead of acts. Moving the calculation back a step.
Where consequentialism stands. What survived, and what it cost.

Kant and deontology

The good will. Why Kant starts with the will and not the act.
Acting from duty. The shopkeeper, the philanthropist and the jibe.
Hypothetical and categorical. Two kinds of ought, and why morality needs the second.
The formula of universal law. The test, run rather than described.
The two contradictions. Perfect and imperfect duties, and what separates them.
Humanity as an end. The formulation people actually find persuasive.
Constraints. The lines a theory of the right has to draw.
Ross and prima facie duties. Deontology without a supreme principle.
Contractualism. What no one could reasonably reject.

Virtue ethics

Anscombe’s complaint. An obligation with no lawgiver behind it.
The function argument. What a human being is for, and whether that is a question.
The doctrine of the mean. Between two failures, and not in the middle.
Habituation and practical wisdom. How a virtue is acquired, and what completes it.
Does it tell you what to do? The guidance objection, and Hursthouse’s answer.
The situationist challenge. Whether character survives the experiments.

Early modern moral philosophy

Voluntarism. Morality as command, and the oldest objection to it.
Rationalism. Moral truths known as mathematical ones are.
The moral sense. Approval as the ground rather than the evidence.
Reason and passion. The argument behind the most quoted sentence in ethics.
Is and ought. The most cited paragraph, and what it actually claims.

Objectivity

What would make a moral claim true? The map the rest of the part is drawn on.
The open question. Moore’s argument, and what it was meant to prove.
Naturalism after Moore. Moral properties as natural ones, identified rather than defined.
Relativity. Disagreement as evidence, and what it is evidence for.
Queerness and error theory. What objective values would have to be, and what follows.
Emotivism and prescriptivism. Moral language doing something other than describing.
Expressivism and Frege-Geach. The objection that nearly finished non-cognitivism.
Explaining value beliefs. The argument Oxford examines by name.

Moral psychology

Does judging oblige you to act? Four plausible claims that cannot all be true.
The Humean theory of motivation. Two states, and whether one of them can act alone.
Akrasia. Knowing better and doing worse.
Conscience. Authority without strength, and what happens when it is wrong.
Guilt and shame. Two emotions, and a hierarchy worth doubting.
Practical reasoning and moral learning. Which reasons are yours, and how you came to have them.

Responsibility

What responsibility requires. Two conditions, and the difference between an excuse and an exemption.
Frankfurt cases. A counterexample that has survived fifty years of repair.
The reactive attitudes. Strawson, and why the metaphysics may not matter.
Moral luck. Two identical drivers, and one dead child.

Rights, justice and equality

What a right is. Four incidents, and what makes a right different from a good.
What grounds a right. Will against interest, and what each gets wrong.
Justice as a moral notion. What justice adds that beneficence does not.
Equality, priority, sufficiency. Three things that look alike until one case separates them.

Well-being

Hedonism. One good, one tank, and a decision to make.
Desire satisfaction. Getting what you want, and the desires you should not have.
The objective list. Some things are good for you whether or not you want them.
The shape of a life. Whether when a good arrives makes any difference.
Where the module leaves you. The whole module, as one argument.

One lesson in full

Relativity. Disagreement as evidence, and what it is evidence for.

Societies have disagreed about slavery, revenge, the treatment of women and what may be done to strangers, and have done so with complete conviction on both sides for centuries. Ask what best explains that pattern before deciding what it proves.

Not an argument for relativism

Mackie is not saying each society is right by its own lights. He is arguing that if objective values existed and we perceived them, we would expect the convergence that physics shows and morality does not, so their absence is evidence against them.

The better explanation

People do not disagree about the good because half of them see it wrongly. They approve of the ways of life they participate in, which differ. That explanation needs no objective values at all, and Mackie takes economy to settle the matter.

The reply from convergence

Much apparent disagreement dissolves. Two societies may share a value and differ about facts, such as whether the dead can be harmed. Once factual error is subtracted, defenders claim, the residue of genuine moral difference is far smaller than it looks.

The reply from hard cases

Persistent disagreement in a domain is not by itself evidence that the domain lacks facts. Philosophers, historians and economists disagree durably. If that pattern refuted objectivity, it would refute far more than Mackie intended.

A question to try

What does Mackie conclude from the variation in moral codes?

that no moral claim can be known to be true
that each society’s moral code is correct relative to that society
that differing ways of life explain the variation better than misperceived values
that moral disagreement is deeper than scientific disagreement

The answer, and why

The answer: that differing ways of life explain the variation better than misperceived values.

An inference to the best explanation. If objective values existed and we perceived them, we would expect the convergence physics shows and morality does not.

that no moral claim can be known to be true. A conclusion about knowledge, where the argument is about the best explanation of a pattern.
that each society’s moral code is correct relative to that society. That is relativism, and Mackie is not a relativist. His error theory says every moral claim is false, including the ones a society endorses.
that moral disagreement is deeper than scientific disagreement. True and only the premise. The argument needs the further step to what best explains the difference.

All university philosophy courses