PHIL 469: ETHICS AND RATIONALITY: METAETHICS
PHIL 469: Ethics and Rationality: Metaethics
Thomas Carson
There is widespread skepticism about the objectivity of moral judgments and moral standards. Many claim that moral standards are "relative to" different societies or different individuals. Moral relativism/skepticism is prompted by the pervasive phenomenon of disagreement about morality and moral standards. This course examines both skeptical and relativist challenges to the objectivity of morality and various attempts to provide a rational justification for morality. This is a course in "metaethics" - it is concerned primarily with "second-order" questions about the meaning and status of moral/ethical judgments, e.g., "what do we mean when we say something is good or bad or right or wrong," "are moral judgments statements that purport to be objectively true or false?" "In what sense, if any, can moral judgments be true/correct?" "Can moral judgments be rationally justified/unjustified?" These issues arise in all ethics courses -- all ethics teachers need to be prepared to address them.
Topics to be discussed include the following:
1. Moore’s “open question argument” to show that "good" is indefinable.
2. Moore’s theory of right and wrong and his theory of the good life. His "intuitionist" methodology/epistemology.
3. Theories about the meaning of moral ethical judgments: what does it mean to say that something is right or wrong or good or bad? a. Naturalism , b. Moore's non-naturalism, c. Emotivism, d. Hare's "prescriptivism," e. Foot's "neo-naturalism," f. Gibbard’s "expressivism," and g. Brentano's theory of correct and incorrect emotions.
4. Hare’s attempt use consistency arguments to provide a rational foundation for moral judgments; the Golden Rule and the Universalizability Principle.
5. Moral Realism and Anti-Realism. Arguments for and against moral realism. Are there “moral facts” that are independent of what we believe or would believe if we were rational?
6. Moral Relativism. Descriptive moral relativism as an empirical theory in anthropology. Meta-ethical relativism – the view that the truth of moral judgments is relative to different people so that a particular moral judgment can be "true for" some people but "false for" others. Normative relativism, the view that the rightness or wrongness of what someone does is relative the moral standards of her society, i.e., each person ought to follow the moral standards of her own society. Moral relativism vs. moral skepticism.
7. (Time Permitting ) Morality, Relativism, and Religion. Can we have moral objectivity without God? Zagzebski’s version of virtue ethics and her “exemplarism” (her view that moral concepts should be defined by reference to moral exemplars or morally excellent people). Zagzebski’s divine motivation theory and claim that Jesus Christ is the ultimate moral exemplar.
Required Texts:
G.E. Moore, Principia Ethica
Allan Gibbard, Wise Choices and Apt Feelings
Moser and Carson, eds., Moral Relativism: A Reader
Carson and Moser, eds., Morality and the Good Life
Suggested Text:
Linda Zagzebski, Divine Motivation Theory
This course satisfies the distribution requirements for either ethics or Anglo-American Philosophy. It also touches on continental philosophy (particularly Nietzsche) at several points. For more information contact the instructor at tcarson@luc.edu.