Contemporary ethics

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Ethics is, in general terms, the study of right and wrong. It can look descriptively at moral behaviour and judgements; it can give practical advice (normative ethics), or it can analyse and theorise about the nature of morality and ethics. [1]

Contents

Contemporary study of ethics has many links with other disciplines in philosophy itself and other sciences. [2] Normative ethics has declined, while meta-ethics is increasingly followed. Abstract theorizing has in many areas been replaced by experience-based research. [3]

Practical and theoretical areas

Psychology, sociology, politics, medicine and neurobiology are areas which have helped and been helped in progress in ethics. [4] Within philosophy, epistemology (or the study of how we know) has drawn closer to ethics. [5] This is in part due to the recognition that knowledge, like value and goodness, can be seen as a normative concept. The traditional analyses and definitions of knowledge have been shown to be unsound by the Gettier problem.

New interest has flourished in meta-ethics. [6] This has in recent years developed as a recognised category proceeding from the work of Hume, G. E. Moore and the error theories of J. L. Mackie [7] who seeks a real basis, if any, for talk of values and right and wrong. Mackie is sceptical about solving the dilemma posed by the distinction between values and facts.

Reason vs intuition

The dominance of reason has come under increasing challenge from various quarters. [8] Heidegger's work has become increasingly translated and interpreted in the Anglo-American sphere and the wisdom of always following reason is widely questioned. [9] [10]

The ethics of care, and environmental ethics are other flourishing areas of research. These point to a general increasing cultural awareness of the hitherto dominance of reason and male based values [11] in society rather than a relational, contextual and communitarian view of the social world. Reason and emotion are seen as more equal partners in human actions [12]

There remain major divergences of perspective, for example between continental and analytic approaches, and process/ pragmatism vs logical, a priori approaches.

Edmund Gettier wrote a short but influential article [13] showing that knowledge is not captured by a traditionally accepted reason based definitions. Pragmatism, and process philosophy in general, is increasingly adopted as a response to a constantly changing understanding of a dynamic world, both physically and in the realms of experiment and investigation.

Changed focus

Mackie (1977) states that increasing secularisation has meant that religion is not seen by many as the ground for deciding how we should act. Quine's critique [14] of the analytic–synthetic distinction has implications for morality (for example in the work of Kant). Logic is a diverse and apparently flexible branch of thought, rather than being thought to underlie mathematics and reasoning, as previously.

Postmodernism and its aftermath has left behind the aspiration for an overarching theory of ethics, single ideas which were reputed to explain or justify whole aspects of human experience and knowledge, such as Marxism, religion, Freudianism or nationalism. Writers as diverse as Jean-François Lyotard [15] and J L Mackie (1977) point to the decline in grand narratives. Mackie (1977), in particular, saw this decline as undermining the legitimacy of traditional morality.

This has stimulated the development of both error theory and meta-ethics as moves to either review or to strengthen the basis of our inherited value systems. As a result, there is growing acceptance of the plausibility of making decisions based on the context, [16] and the particular situation being considered, rather than by reference to principles. This move away from grand theory confirms earlier views of Adam Smith, [17] who held that moral theories derived from moral actions rather than conversely.

Challenges remaining

Major challenges for ethics include the fact/value distinction, [18] the error theory which seems to undermine the reality [19] of moral claims [20] [21] and apparent relativism [22] [23] across cultures and eras. Some feel that the persistence of problems in ethics theory has led to an overall decline in the interest in working in the field of pure ethics as more opportunities arise in applied ethics and meta-ethics. Stephen Darwall et al [24] referred to "a genuinely new period in twentieth century ethics, the vigorous revival of metaethics coincidental with the emergence .. of a criticism of the enterprise of moral theory itself".

Related Research Articles

Ethics is the philosophical study of moral phenomena. Also called moral philosophy, it investigates normative questions about what people ought to do or which behavior is morally right. Its main branches include normative ethics, applied ethics, and metaethics.

In metaphilosophy and ethics, metaethics is the study of the nature, scope, ground, and meaning of moral judgment, ethical belief, or values. It is one of the three branches of ethics generally studied by philosophers, the others being normative ethics and applied ethics.

Moral relativism or ethical relativism is used to describe several philosophical positions concerned with the differences in moral judgments across different peoples and cultures. An advocate of such ideas is often referred to as a relativist.

Moral realism is the position that ethical sentences express propositions that refer to objective features of the world, some of which may be true to the extent that they report those features accurately. This makes moral realism a non-nihilist form of ethical cognitivism with an ontological orientation, standing in opposition to all forms of moral anti-realism and moral skepticism, including ethical subjectivism, error theory, and non-cognitivism. Moral realism's two main subdivisions are ethical naturalism and ethical non-naturalism.

Moral skepticism is a class of meta-ethical theories all members of which entail that no one has any moral knowledge. Many moral skeptics also make the stronger, modal claim that moral knowledge is impossible. Moral skepticism is particularly opposed to moral realism: the view that there are knowable and objective moral truths.

Cognitivism is the meta-ethical view that ethical sentences express propositions and can therefore be true or false, which noncognitivists deny. Cognitivism is so broad a thesis that it encompasses moral realism, ethical subjectivism, and error theory.

Ethical subjectivism is the meta-ethical view which claims that:

  1. Ethical sentences express propositions.
  2. Some such propositions are true.
  3. The truth or falsity of such propositions is ineliminably dependent on the attitudes of people.

Moral nihilism is the meta-ethical view that nothing is morally right or morally wrong and that morality does not exist.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Gilbert Harman</span> American philosopher (1938–2021)

Gilbert Harman was an American philosopher, who taught at Princeton University from 1963 until his retirement in 2017. He 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 taught or co-taught courses in Electrical Engineering, Computer Science, Psychology, Philosophy, and Linguistics.

In meta-ethics, expressivism is a theory about the meaning of moral language. According to expressivism, sentences that employ moral terms – for example, "It is wrong to torture an innocent human being" – are not descriptive or fact-stating; moral terms such as "wrong", "good", or "just" do not refer to real, in-the-world properties. The primary function of moral sentences, according to expressivism, is not to assert any matter of fact but rather to express an evaluative attitude toward an object of evaluation. Because the function of moral language is non-descriptive, moral sentences do not have any truth conditions. Hence, expressivists either do not allow that moral sentences to have truth value, or rely on a notion of truth that does not appeal to any descriptive truth conditions being met for moral sentences.

Evolutionary ethics is a field of inquiry that explores how evolutionary theory might bear on our understanding of ethics or morality. The range of issues investigated by evolutionary ethics is quite broad. Supporters of evolutionary ethics have argued that it has important implications in the fields of descriptive ethics, normative ethics, and metaethics.

Cornell realism is a view in meta-ethics, associated with the work of Richard Boyd, Nicholas Sturgeon, and David Brink, who earned his Ph.D. at Cornell University. There is no recognized and official statement of Cornell realism, but several theses are associated with the view.

Philosophy is the study of general and fundamental problems concerning matters such as existence, knowledge, values, reason, mind, and language. It is distinguished from other ways of addressing fundamental questions by being critical and generally systematic and by its reliance on rational argument. It involves logical analysis of language and clarification of the meaning of words and concepts.

Metaepistemology is the branch of epistemology and metaphilosophy that studies the underlying assumptions made in debates in epistemology, including those concerning the existence and authority of epistemic facts and reasons, the nature and aim of epistemology, and the methodology of epistemology.

Peter Albert Railton is an American philosopher who is Gregory S. Kavka Distinguished University Professor and John Stephenson Perrin Professor of Philosophy at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, where he has taught since 1979.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Geoffrey Sayre-McCord</span> American philosopher

Geoffrey Sayre-McCord is an American philosopher who works in moral theory, ethics, meta-ethics, the history of ethics and epistemology. He teaches at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. He is also the director of the Philosophy, Politics and Economics Society.

The following outline is provided as an overview of and topical guide to ethics.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Pragmatic ethics</span> Theory of normative philosophical ethics and meta-ethics

Pragmatic ethics is a theory of normative philosophical ethics and meta-ethics. Ethical pragmatists such as John Dewey believe that some societies have progressed morally in much the way they have attained progress in science. Scientists can pursue inquiry into the truth of a hypothesis and accept the hypothesis, in the sense that they act as though the hypothesis were true; nonetheless, they think that future generations can advance science, and thus future generations can refine or replace their accepted hypotheses. Similarly, ethical pragmatists think that norms, principles, and moral criteria are likely to be improved as a result of inquiry.

Moral constructivism or ethical constructivism is a view both in meta-ethics and normative ethics which posits that:

  1. Ethical sentences express propositions.
  2. Some such propositions are true.
  3. The truth or falsity of such propositions is ineliminably dependent on the result of a suitable constructivist procedure.

David Enoch is an ethicist and philosopher of law with research interests in moral, political and legal philosophy within the analytic tradition. He is the co-director of the Center for Moral and Political Philosophy and has been the Rodney Blackman Chair in the Philosophy of Law at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem since 2005. He received his Bachelor of Arts in philosophy and Bachelor of Laws degrees from Tel Aviv University in 1993. He then completed his PhD in philosophy at New York University in 2003.

References

  1. ↑ "Ethics [Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy]". Iep.utm.edu. Retrieved 2012-08-15.
  2. ↑ Almond, Brenda (ed. with D Hill),1991 Applied Philosophy: Morals and Metaphysics in Contemporary Debate London: Routledge.
  3. ↑ Appiah, Kwame Anthony. (2008). Experiments in Ethics. Harvard University Press.
  4. ↑ LaFollette, Hugh (2002). Ethics in Practice (2nd Edition). Blackwell Publishing. ISBN   0-631-22834-9.
  5. ↑ Cuneo, Terence, 2007. The Normative Web: An Argument for Moral Realism, Oxford University Press, ISBN   978-0-19-921883-7
  6. ↑ Michael Brady (ed.). 2011 New Waves in Metaethics. Aldershot : Palgrave Macmillan.
  7. ↑ Mackie, J. L. Ethics, Inventing right and wrong. 1977 Penguin
  8. ↑ Brewer, T. (2009). The retrieval of ethics . Oxford: Oxford University Press.
  9. ↑ Campbell, R. J. (2011). The concept of truth. Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire: Palgrave Macmillan.
  10. ↑ Smith, Holly(1991). "Deriving Morality From Rationality". In Peter Vallentyne (ed.), Contractarianism and Rational choice: Essays on David Gauthier's Morals by Agreement. Cambridge University Press.
  11. ↑ Noddings, Nel, “Ethics from the Stand Point Of Women,” in Deborah L. Rhode, ed., Theoretical Perspectives on Sexual Difference (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1990).
  12. ↑ Damasio, A. R. (1994). Descartes' error: emotion, reason, and the human brain. New York: Putnam.
  13. ↑ Edmund L. Gettier 1963. "Is Justified True Belief Knowledge?" From Analysis 23 ( 1963): 121-123.
  14. ↑ Quine, W.V.O. (1951), "Two Dogmas of Empiricism," The Philosophical Review 60: 20-43. Reprinted in his 1953 From a Logical Point of View. Harvard University Press.
  15. ↑ (Lyotard, Jean François, 1979, The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge
  16. ↑ Dancy, Stephen 2004 Ethics Without Principles. Oxford: Clarendon Press.
  17. ↑ Smith, Adam (2002) [1759]. Knud Haakonssen. ed. The Theory of Moral Sentiments. Cambridge University Press. ISBN   0521598478.
  18. ↑ Stroud, Barry 2011, Engagement and Metaphysical Dissatisfaction: Modality and Value, Oxford University Press, ISBN   978-0-19-976496-9.
  19. ↑ Miller, C. (2009). "The Conditions of Moral Realism." The Journal of Philosophical Research, 34, 123-155.
  20. ↑ FitzPatrick, William J Recent work on ethical realism Analysis.2009; 69: 746-760
  21. ↑ Joyce, Richard and Kirchin, Simon (Eds.) A World without Values: Essays on John Mackie's Moral Error Theory Springer 2010
  22. ↑ Moral Relativism Gilbert Harman Princeton University December 17, 2011, unpublished
  23. ↑ Moral Relativism
  24. ↑ Darwall, Stephen et al.1997 Moral Discourse and Practice, Oxford, p 7
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