Moral explanation

Last updated

Moral explanation relates to the way of dealing with an individual towards society, cultural norms, and social behaviors. It focuses on honesty and fair dealing with everyone. Moral Explanation describes ways in which are considered correct and honest towards each member of the society. [1]

Moral Properties tend to describe an individual in an explanatory way. The notable thinkers have carried out specific trials to form correctness and acceptability regarding Moral explanation and its properties. The first philosopher to have discussed it in detail is Gilbert Harman (Nature of Morality ch. 1; “Moral Explanations”; “Responses to Critics”). [2] [3]

Nicholas Sturgeon discusses it further in his article, “Moral Explanations.” See also Harman’s contribution to Moral Relativism.) [4]

Harman discussed a group of street gangsters to elaborate immorality. The goons were pouring gasoline over the cat. Anybody who witnesses this process of setting the cat on fire may regard it as immoral or wrong. But Harman denies to accept that the actual wrong is not the action. He believes that this judgement has doubtful credibility relevant to the onlooker. He adds that it is a non‐naturalistic form of moral realism. [5] [6]

Harman compares it with the example of a scientist. While a scientist performs an experiment where a vapor forms at the cloud chamber and scientist declares the emulsion of a proton as something very recent- everyone will demand the proof and correctness of the statement. While no one would ask for further psychological correctness of the phenomenon occurred to the cat. This is where the difference lies. [7] [8]

The advocates of moral explanation declare that instances where we need to define moral property may source, or explicate non-psychological events. [6]

Related Research Articles

<span class="mw-page-title-main">J. L. Mackie</span> Australian philosopher (1917–1981)

John Leslie Mackie was an Australian philosopher. He made significant contributions to the philosophy of religion, metaphysics, and the philosophy of language.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Incompatibilism</span> View of free will and determinism as incompatible and precluding each other

Incompatibilism is the view that a deterministic universe is completely at odds with the notion that persons have free will, the latter being defined as the capacity of conscious agents to choose a future course of action among several available physical alternatives. Thus, incompatibilism implies that there is a dichotomy between determinism and free will, where philosophers must support at most one or the other, not both. The incompatibilist view is pursued further in at least three different ways: libertarians deny that the universe is deterministic, hard determinists deny that any free will exists, and pessimistic incompatibilists deny both that the universe is determined and that free will exists.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Moral nihilism</span> Philosophical view that nothing is objectively morally right or morally wrong

Moral nihilism is the meta-ethical view that nothing is objectively morally right or morally wrong.

Moral psychology is a field of study in both philosophy and psychology. Historically, the term "moral psychology" was used relatively narrowly to refer to the study of moral development. Moral psychology eventually came to refer more broadly to various topics at the intersection of ethics, psychology, and philosophy of mind. Some of the main topics of the field are moral judgment, moral reasoning, moral sensitivity, moral responsibility, moral motivation, moral identity, moral action, moral development, moral diversity, moral character, altruism, psychological egoism, moral luck, moral forecasting, moral emotion, affective forecasting, and moral disagreement.

Gilbert Harman was an American philosopher, who taught at Princeton University from 1963 until his retirement in 2017. He has published widely in philosophy of language, cognitive science, philosophy of mind, ethics, moral psychology, epistemology, statistical learning theory, and metaphysics. He and George Miller co-directed the Princeton University Cognitive Science Laboratory. Harman has taught or co-taught courses in Electrical Engineering, Computer Science, Psychology, Philosophy, and Linguistics.

Experimental philosophy is an emerging field of philosophical inquiry that makes use of empirical data—often gathered through surveys which probe the intuitions of ordinary people—in order to inform research on philosophical questions. This use of empirical data is widely seen as opposed to a philosophical methodology that relies mainly on a priori justification, sometimes called "armchair" philosophy, by experimental philosophers. Experimental philosophy initially began by focusing on philosophical questions related to intentional action, the putative conflict between free will and determinism, and causal vs. descriptive theories of linguistic reference. However, experimental philosophy has continued to expand to new areas of research.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">T. M. Scanlon</span> American philosopher

Thomas Michael "Tim" Scanlon, usually cited as T. M. Scanlon, is an American philosopher. At the time of his retirement in 2016, he was the Alford Professor of Natural Religion, Moral Philosophy, and Civil Polity in Harvard University's Department of Philosophy, where he had taught since 1984. He was elected to the American Philosophical Society in 2018.

Epistemological pluralism is a term used in philosophy, economics, and virtually any field of study to refer to different ways of knowing things, different epistemological methodologies for attaining a fuller description of a particular field. A particular form of epistemological pluralism is dualism, for example, the separation of methods for investigating mind from those appropriate to matter. By contrast, monism is the restriction to a single approach, for example, reductionism, which asserts the study of all phenomena can be seen as finding relations to some few basic entities.

Anti-individualism is an approach to linguistic meaning in philosophy, the philosophy of psychology, and linguistics.

Moral foundations theory is a social psychological theory intended to explain the origins of and variation in human moral reasoning on the basis of innate, modular foundations. It was first proposed by the psychologists Jonathan Haidt, Craig Joseph, and Jesse Graham, building on the work of cultural anthropologist Richard Shweder. It has been subsequently developed by a diverse group of collaborators and popularized in Haidt's book The Righteous Mind. The theory proposes six foundations: Care/Harm, Fairness/Cheating, Loyalty/Betrayal, Authority/Subversion, Sanctity/Degradation, and Liberty/Oppression. Its authors remain open to the addition, subtraction, or modification of the set of foundations.

Frances Egan is a professor of philosophy at Rutgers University. She has authored a number of articles and book chapters on philosophy of mind, philosophy of cognitive science, and perception.

Hannah Ginsborg is Willis S and Marion Slusser Professor of Philosophy at the University of California, Berkeley.

Conciliationism is a view in the epistemology of disagreement according to which one should revise one's opinions closer to one's epistemic peers in the face of epistemic disagreement. Nathan Ballantyne and E.J. Coffman define the view as follows:

The philosophy of linguistics is the philosophy of science applied to linguistics. It is concerned with topics including what the subject matter and theoretical goals of linguistics are, what forms linguistic theories should take, and what counts as data in linguistic research. This distinguishes the philosophy of linguistics from the philosophy of language, which deals primarily with the philosophical study of meaning and reference.

Jennifer Nagel is a Canadian philosopher at the University of Toronto. Her research focuses on epistemology, philosophy of mind, and metacognition. She has also written on 17th century (Western) philosophy, especially John Locke and René Descartes.

Sharon Street is a Professor of Philosophy and Chair of the Department of Philosophy at New York University. She specializes in metaethics, focusing in particular on how to reconcile our understanding of normativity with a scientific conception of the world.

Laura Ruetsche is an American philosopher focusing on the foundations of quantum physics, feminist philosophy and philosophy of science. Ruetsche is a Professor and Chair of the department of philosophy at the University of Michigan. Her book, Interpreting Quantum Theories: The Art of the Possible was published in 2011 and received the 2013 Lakatos Award. She has also published on a diverse array of topics, exploring, among other things, philosophically salient differences between non-relativistic quantum mechanics and quantum field theory, modal semantics for quantum physics and virtue-epistemological theories of warrant. She is the partner of Gordon Belot also at the philosophy department of the University of Michigan.

Humeanism refers to the philosophy of David Hume and to the tradition of thought inspired by him. Hume was an influential Scottish philosopher well known for his empirical approach, which he applied to various fields in philosophy. In the philosophy of science, he is notable for developing the regularity theory of causation, which in its strongest form states that causation is nothing but constant conjunction of certain types of events without any underlying forces responsible for this regularity of conjunction. This is closely connected to his metaphysical thesis that there are no necessary connections between distinct entities. The Humean theory of action defines actions as bodily behavior caused by mental states and processes without the need to refer to an agent responsible for this. The slogan of Hume's theory of practical reason is that "reason is...the slave of the passions". It restricts the sphere of practical reason to instrumental rationality concerning which means to employ to achieve a given end. But it denies reason a direct role regarding which ends to follow. Central to Hume's position in metaethics is the is-ought distinction. It states that is-statements, which concern facts about the natural world, do not imply ought-statements, which are moral or evaluative claims about what should be done or what has value. In philosophy of mind, Hume is well known for his development of the bundle theory of the self. It states that the self is to be understood as a bundle of mental states and not as a substance acting as the bearer of these states, as is the traditional conception. Many of these positions were initially motivated by Hume's empirical outlook. It emphasizes the need to ground one's theories in experience and faults opposing theories for failing to do so. But many philosophers within the Humean tradition have gone beyond these methodological restrictions and have drawn various metaphysical conclusions from Hume's ideas.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Aesthetics of science</span> Branch of philosophy

Aesthetics of science is the study of beauty and matters of taste within the scientific endeavour. Aesthetic features like simplicity, elegance and symmetry are sources of wonder and awe for many scientists, thus motivating scientific pursuit. Conversely, theories that have been empirically successful may be judged to lack aesthetic merit, which contributes to the desire to find a new theory that subsumes the old.

Experimental jurisprudence (X-Jur) is an emerging field of legal scholarship that explores the nature of legal phenomena through psychological investigations of legal concepts. The field departs from traditional analytic legal philosophy in its ambition to elucidate common intuitions in a systematic fashion employing the methods of social science. Equally, unlike research in legal psychology, X-Jur emphasises the philosophical implications of its findings, notably, for questions about whether, how, and in what respects, the law's content is a matter of moral perspective. Whereas some legal theorists have welcomed X-Jur's emergence, others have expressed reservations about the contributions it seeks to make.

References

  1. ↑ "Definition of MORAL". www.merriam-webster.com. Retrieved 2020-05-28.
  2. ↑ Oyedola, David A (February 2015). "'The Nature of Morality' in Gilbert Harman: An Appraisal" (PDF). International Research Journal of Interdisciplinary & Multidisciplinary Studies (IRJIMS). I: 80–88 – via Scholar Publications.
  3. ↑ Fullinwider, Robert K. (1980). "Harman's "The Nature of Morality"". Metaphilosophy. 11 (3/4): 272–277. doi:10.1111/j.1467-9973.1980.tb00647.x. ISSN   0026-1068. JSTOR   24435640.
  4. ↑ Majors, Brad (2006-11-27). "Moral Explanation". Philosophy Compass. 2: 1–15. doi:10.1111/j.1747-9991.2006.00049.x.
  5. ↑ Majors, Brad (2007). "Moral Explanation". Philosophy Compass. 2 (1): 1–15. doi:10.1111/j.1747-9991.2006.00049.x. ISSN   1747-9991.
  6. 1 2 Railton, Peter (1998). Harman, Gilbert; Thomson, Judith Jarvis (eds.). "Moral Explanation and Moral Objectivity". Philosophy and Phenomenological Research. 58 (1): 175–182. doi:10.2307/2653637. ISSN   0031-8205. JSTOR   2653637.
  7. ↑ Loeb, Don (January 2005). "Moral Explanations of Moral Beliefs" (PDF). Philosophy and Phenomenological Research. LXX: 193–208. doi:10.1111/j.1933-1592.2005.tb00511.x.
  8. ↑ Cline, Brendan (September 2015). "Moral Explanations, Thick and Thin" (PDF). Journal of Ethics & Social Philosophy. 9 (2): 1–20. doi: 10.26556/jesp.v9i2.89 .
This page is based on this Wikipedia article
Text is available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 license; additional terms may apply.
Images, videos and audio are available under their respective licenses.