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In analytic philosophy, anti-realism is a position which encompasses many varieties such as metaphysical, mathematical, semantic, scientific, moral and epistemic. The term was first articulated by British philosopher Michael Dummett in an argument against a form of realism Dummett saw as 'colorless reductionism'.
In ethical philosophy, consequentialism is a class of normative, teleological ethical theories that holds that the consequences of one's conduct are the ultimate basis for judgement about the rightness or wrongness of that conduct. Thus, from a consequentialist standpoint, a morally right act is one that will produce a good outcome. Consequentialism, along with eudaimonism, falls under the broader category of teleological ethics, a group of views which claim that the moral value of any act consists in its tendency to produce things of intrinsic value. Consequentialists hold in general that an act is right if and only if the act will produce, will probably produce, or is intended to produce, a greater balance of good over evil than any available alternative. Different consequentialist theories differ in how they define moral goods, with chief candidates including pleasure, the absence of pain, the satisfaction of one's preferences, and broader notions of the "general good".
Ethics or moral philosophy is the philosophical study of moral phenomena. It investigates normative questions about what people ought to do or which behavior is morally right. It is usually divided into three major fields: normative ethics, applied ethics, and metaethics.
Jurisprudence is the philosophy and theory of law. It is concerned primarily with both what the law is and what it ought to be. That includes questions of how persons and social relations are understood in legal terms, and of the values in and of law. Work that is counted as jurisprudence is mostly philosophical, but it includes work that also belongs to other disciplines, such as sociology, history, politics and economics.
In metaphilosophy and ethics, metaethics is the study of the nature, scope, and meaning of moral judgment. It is one of the three branches of ethics generally studied by philosophers, the others being normative ethics and applied ethics.
Normative ethics is the study of ethical behaviour and is the branch of philosophical ethics that investigates questions regarding how one ought to act, in a moral sense.
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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.
Simon Walter Blackburn is an English academic philosopher known for his work in metaethics, where he defends quasi-realism, and in the philosophy of language. More recently, he has gained a large general audience from his efforts to popularise philosophy. He has appeared in multiple episodes of the documentary series Closer to Truth. During his long career, he has taught at Oxford University, Cambridge University, and University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill.
Michael A. Slote is a professor of ethics at the University of Miami and an author of a number of books.
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.
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Allan Fletcher Gibbard is the Richard B. Brandt Distinguished University Professor of Philosophy Emeritus at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. Gibbard has made major contributions to contemporary ethical theory, in particular metaethics, where he has developed a contemporary version of non-cognitivism. He has also published articles in the philosophy of language, metaphysics, and social choice theory: in social choice, he first proved the result known today as Gibbard-Satterthwaite theorem, which had been previously conjectured by Michael Dummett and Robin Farquharson.
Richard Newell Boyd was an American philosopher, who spent most of his career teaching philosophy at Cornell University where he was Susan Linn Sage Professor of Philosophy and Humane Letters Emeritus. He specialized in epistemology, the philosophy of science, language, and mind.
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The "Big Book" is a thought experiment developed by Ludwig Wittgenstein about the nature of ethics and the verifiability of ethical knowledge. This account is given by him in an early work, the 1929 Lecture on Ethics, and it matches also his position given in the early Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus.
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.
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, or it can analyse and theorise about the nature of morality and ethics.
Barbara Herman is the Griffin Professor of Philosophy and Professor of Law at the University of California, Los Angeles Department of Philosophy. A well-known interpreter of Kant's ethics, Herman works on moral philosophy, the history of ethics, and social and political philosophy. Among her many honors and awards include a Guggenheim Fellowship (1985-1986) and election to the American Academy of Arts & Sciences (1995).
References
- ↑ "Curriculum Vitae Peter Railton" (PDF). Archived from the original (PDF) on 2015-02-08. Retrieved 2015-07-06.
- ↑ 4 U-M scholars named AAAS fellows
- ↑ "Nye medlemmer i Vitenskapsakademiet" (in Norwegian). Norwegian Academy of Science and Letters. 26 February 2016. Retrieved 17 June 2020.
- ↑ "Professor's reflections on his battle with depression touch many at recent disciplinary meeting".
- ↑ "Moral Realism", The Philosophical Review, Vol. 95, No. 2 (April 1986), p. 165
