Search results
Results from the WOW.Com Content Network
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 (questions of how one ought to be and act) and applied ethics (practical questions of right behavior in given, usually contentious, situations).
He asked questions about which actions are right or wrong and shied away from meta-ethics, which focuses more on logic and language. In Part I of Reasons and Persons Parfit discussed self-defeating moral theories, namely the self-interest theory of rationality ("S") and two ethical frameworks: common-sense morality and consequentialism. He ...
The parity thesis holds that because metaethics and metaepistemology have important structural similarities to one another, their answers to metanormative questions such as whether there are any normative facts will be the same. For example, according to the parity thesis, if epistemic realism is true, then moral realism must also be true. The ...
He argues that, if one were to believe that there are no objective morals, then to engage in moralism is a deceptive behavior. It is wrong because it harms one’s epistemological integrity. Furthermore, by refusing to make moral judgements generally, people would be more likely to engage with others in a more genuine fashion.
There is no straightforward definition, [23] and most interesting definitions are controversial. [27] As Bertrand Russell wrote: "We may note one peculiar feature of philosophy. If someone asks the question what is mathematics, we can give him a dictionary definition, let us say the science of number, for the sake of argument.
Moral skepticism (or moral scepticism in British English) 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.
In philosophy, he is best known as the proponent of quasi-realism in meta-ethics [7] and as a defender of neo-Humean views on a variety of topics. "The quasi-realist is someone who endorses an anti-realist metaphysical stance but who seeks, through philosophical maneuvering, to earn the right for moral discourse to enjoy all the trappings of realist talk."
Evolutionary metaethics asks how evolutionary theory bears on theories of ethical discourse, the question of whether objective moral values exist, and the possibility of objective moral knowledge. For example, some evolutionary ethicists have appealed to evolutionary theory to defend various forms of moral anti-realism (the claim, roughly, that ...