Morality in a Natural World: Selected Essays in Metaethics (Cambridge Studies in Philosophy)
David Copp
Language: English
Pages: 376
ISBN: 0521863716
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
The central philosophical challenge of metaethics is to account for the normativity of moral judgment without abandoning or seriously compromising moral realism. In Morality in a Natural World, David Copp defends a version of naturalistic moral realism that can accommodate the normativity of morality. Moral naturalism is often thought to face special metaphysical, epistemological, and semantic problems as well as the difficulty in accounting for normativity. In the ten essays included in this volume, Copp defends solutions to these problems. Three of the essays are new, while seven have previously been published. All of them are concerned with the viability of naturalistic and realistic accounts of the nature of morality, or, more generally, with the viability of naturalistic accounts of reasons.
Evolutionary Ethics and Contemporary Biology (Cambridge Studies in Philosophy and Biology)
Media, Society, World: Social Theory and Digital Media Practice
Millions Like Us - Women's Lives in the Second World War
Double-Effect Reasoning: Doing Good and Avoiding Evil
Bonjour, Laurence. 1998. In Defense of Pure Reason. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Boyd, Richard. 1988. “How to Be a Moral Realist.” In Essays on Moral Realism, ed. Geoffrey Sayre-McCord, 181–228. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press. Brink, David O. 1989. Moral Realism and the Foundations of Ethics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Copp, David. 1995. Morality, Normativity, and Society. New York: Oxford University Press. Dancy, Jonathan. 2001. “Moral Particularism.” Stanford.
To judge and respond enable us to have a special moral sensitivity to the morally relevant characteristics of situations. Together with dispositions to reflect, they explain how moral perception is possible, how immediate inferences are grounded in general moral beliefs or dispositions to believe, and why reasoning that tends toward wide reflective equilibrium is characteristic of moral reasoning. Suppose then that your belief that capital punishment is wrong is in fact true. You believe this.
Suggests that the standard view is that the principle is correct just in case it is M-necessary. The thesis that there are moral necessities is nevertheless puzzling. It is plausible to think that what morality requires of us depends on human nature and on the circumstances of human life. But these are contingent matters, so it may seem difficult to understand how there could be any interesting moral propositions that are necessarily true. Moreover, the examples with which I began are substantive.
Relation holds of necessity and anything that is Nplus obviously must be N. Intuitively, for example, the property of being a bachelor is partly constituted by the property of being unmarried, so there is no possibility of instantiating the former without also instantiating the latter. This explains why it is necessary that a bachelor is unmarried. Intuitively, however, the wrongness property is not a constituent of the painful death property. An action may be wrong other things being equal.
Virtue of expressive conventions governing the use of moral terms, but it is not entailed by what she says in making the judgment that M. I am proposing a view of this kind. More specifically, as discussed in the previous section, I am proposing that moral terms have a coloring such that a person making a moral judgment that M using moral terms Frege-expresses a corresponding state C-M. Finally, (3c), one might agree that a speaker making a moral judgment that M typically communicates that she is.