5.1 Introduction
1. K: Killing innocent people is always wrong.
a. “Innocent”?
b. “euthanasia”, so there are substantial questions about whether K is true, even after all
terminological issues are resolved.
2. Ethics: “Philosophical reflection on morality” (178)
a. Deals with first-order questions “about what is right or wrong, good and bad” i.e.
“questions about which moral beliefs we should accept” (179)
3. Metaethics: the branch of philosophy that investigates “questions about nature, structure, and
status of first order moral views” (179)
5.2 Facts and Values
1. Moral Rationalism: “The view that moral questions are to be decided by reason.” (180)
2. Hume on common systems of morality, pp.182-183
a. Is/ought gap, fact/value distinction
3. Capula: “is” or “is not”
4. The moral content question: “What do moral judgments mean?” (183)
5. Moral Epistemology: the branch of metaethics that investigates the question “what justifies
moral judgments?”
6. While factual questions can be settles by “observation and experiment or proof alone”,
evaluative questions such as moral questions are “matters of value [that] do not seem to be
settles by experience or logic alone”. (180)
5.3 Realism and Emotivism
1. Moral realism: the view that “there are moral facts in the world that determine the truth values
of moral claims”. (184)
2. A mental state is action-guiding iff it “commit(s) is to action whatever our preferences or
desires”. (184)
3. Immanuel Kant (1724-1804) distinguished categorical and hypothetical kinds of imperatives. i.e.
“ought’s” or commands.
a. Categorical are action-guiding
b. Hypothetical, depend “on a hypothesis about that you want” (185)
c. You can’t always distinguish these by the form of the sentence. Rather the speaker’s
intentions must also be considered.
4. Emotivism: the view that moral sentences express feelings, preference, or desires.
5. Pro-attitudes: “action-guiding mental states that dispose you towards doing something” (186)
6. Con-attitudes: action-guiding mental states “that dispose you against some action” (186)
7. Cognitivism: “the view that we can have moral knowledge” because moral judgments are
beliefs. (186)
8. Noncognitivism: the views that moral judgments are not beliefs and hence we cannot have
moral knowledge.
9. “one challenge for moral realism… is to explain the categorical nature of moral
imperatives”(185)
10. Realism, however, is compatible with a moral epistemology that combines noncognitivism with
realibilism. P.187
5.4 Intuitionism
1. Intuitionism: the view that we have a faculty of moral intuition “that allows us to perceive
moral qualities” (187)
2. Moore’s intuitionism in Principa Ethica:
a. Moral realism and cognitivism
b. The open question argument
3. Hedonism: the view that what is good of morally valuable is what makes people happy.
4. The naturalistic fallacy: “any attempt to identify a natural and non-natural property” or “to
derive an ‘ought’ from an ‘is’ “ (189)
5. Objections to Moore, pp. 190-191
a. The idea of moral perception is problematic
b. Alasdair McIntyre. “Moore’s view fails to explain the action-guiding character of
moral judgment” or “ why the moral ought is categorical” (191)
5.5 Emotivism again
1. Relativism: “the view that what is good depends on who you are (or in what culture or when you
live)” (192)
2. Basic desire: a desire that can be criticized bot because it depends on a false belief, but because
its end itself is irrational.
3. C.L. Stevenson’s (1908 – 1979) emotivism, pp.193-197
4. Kant’s principle of universalizability, aka the categorical imperative:
a. “You ought to act only on maxims that you can at the same time will should become
universal laws of nature.” It doesn’t make sense, but it’s what we wrote! Figures.
5.6 Kant’s Universalizability Principle
1. Kant argued that all moral principles are derived from one and only categorical imperative
a. The golden rule: do unto others as we would have them do unto us”
2. The rational universalizability test: “when deciding that to do, you consider what your general
reason is for acting in this particular way.” (187) i.e. what the maxim of your action is.
3. As far as morality goes, maxims must be impersonal, so apply to everybody.
4. Maxims generally have the following forms:
a. When conditions ‘C’ obtain, you ought to do ‘A’
b. Objections:
i. “The case of promising… is misleading”
ii. “Someone who is both uncaring about others and sufficiently ingenious can
always describe the maxim of his or her action in such a way that he or she
would be willing to universalize it.” (200)
1. Two examples: Attila the Hun, psychopaths (“fanatics” p203)
2. Hitler, racists
5.7 Dealing with Relativism
1. Attempting to deal with some of these problems, R.M. Hare (1919-2002) argues that we need to
“restrict the kinds of features of actions and situations that we are allowed to take into account
in universalizing our categorical imperatives” (202) so that we consider only “the likely effects of
possible actions in those situations on people”
2. Hare on Hitler and the Hun, pp. 202-204
3. Sophisticated emotivism, relativism and two senses of “subjective” pp.203-204
5.8 Prescriptivism and Supervenience
1. Hare’s view that “the meaning of moral terms is never equivalent to any descriptive of factual
terms; moral sentences prescribe rather than describe.
2. Supervenience, p. 205
a. X supervenes on Y iff it is necessary that if something is the same with respect to Y, then
it will be the same with respect to X
5.9 Problems of Utilitarianism I: Defending Utility
1. Theoretical: having to do with what to think
2. Practical: having to do with what to do
3. Utilitarianism: the greatest happiness for the greatest number
a. Consequentialism and Hedonism
b. Jeremy Bentham, James Mill, JS Mill
4. Absolutism/deontology contrasts with consequentialism in holding that “certain kinds of acts
are wrong and right whatever the consequences”. (206)
5. Utility: a more precise way of measuring happiness (besides brute appeal to pleasure)
a. But how to do this is not so clear
b. Economics operationalize “utility” in terms of desire satisfaction
6. Problem of the interpersonal comparison of utility: “unless interpersonal comparisons of utility
are possible, utilitarianism cannot be applied”. (208)