Here are some basic ideas you should be able to explain briefly but precisely:

• agent-based vs agent-focused virtue ethics
• moral worth (how does Foot think a virtue ethicist should explain the distinction between an action that is right but lacks moral worth, and one that is morally worthy as well as being right?)
• trust (Baier) (how does Baier think that the notion of trust can integrate a "masculine" concern with obligation and a "feminine" concern with caring and love?)
• nonnatural property
• open question argument
• emotivism
• argument from queerness
• argument from relativity
• moral realism
• homeostatic property-cluster definitions (sorry, couldn't resist)
• projectivism
• quasi-realism
• secondary quality

 

Here is an overview of some of the main issues we have discussed so far:

I. Virtue Ethics

During the first half of the semester, we began to discuss a number of issues about virtue ethics, culminating with MacIntyre's attempt to give an analysis of what a virtue is in terms of dispositions which are necessary to obtain the goods internal to practices.  We have continued the discussion of virtue ethics in the second half of the semester.

A.  Positive Accounts. After MacIntyre, we looked at John McDowell's argument that in a certain sense virtue is knowledge, but a kind of knowledge which resists formalization in any sort of system of principles. We also examined Philippa Foot's positive remarks about the virtues, including the following suggestions:  that the virtues are beneficial characteristics which one needs both for one's own good and for that of others; that they are distinguished from other beneficial characteristics such as health or concentration by being excellences of the will (rather than of the body or the mind); that the virtues are "corrective," that is, that we do not regard a characteristic as a virtue unless there is some sort of natural tendency to act otherwise.  We also discussed Foot's interesting account of the conditions under which an action has moral worth, namely that it is both in accordance with virtue and done out of virtue.

B.  Problems.  Robert Louden presented a number of difficulties he believes are faced by virtue ethics. There are many of these.  The first, and one of the most important, is the suggestion that virtue ethics is really not of much value for "casuistry" or applied ethics, i.e. detailed moral reasoning about particular cases.  The worry is that, because virtue ethics does not supply principles for determining whether actions are right or wrong, it is incapable of giving specific advice about particular cases.  Among the other objections raised by Louden are the worry that we don't know how to tell who is virtuous and who is not (leaving the advice "act as a virtuous person would" rather unhelpful), and the worry that for several reasons we need a form of evaluation directed at particular actions rather than at one's character -- for instance, because even virtuous people may act wrongly, and because character may be rather changeable.

C.  Responses to the problems.  Rosalind Hursthouse attempts to show by example that virtue ethics can be useful in applied contexts even though it does not provide a system of precise rules for determining whether conduct is morally permissible or not.  Michael Slote explores some possible directions that might be taken by a rather extreme "agent-based" version of virtue ethics.  The possibilities explored by Slote include the "cool" idea of morality as inner strength, and the "warm" ideas of morality as universal benevolence and as caring, or more focused benevolence. Annette Baier suggests that, if "masculine" ethics is characterized by an emphasis on systems of rules which formalize the notion of obligation, and "feminine" ethics is characterized by an emphasis on love and caring, then we might hope for an ethical theory which integrates both of these into a single framework.  Her proposal for a guiding idea for such a synthesis is the idea of trust.

II. Metaethics

A. Problems.  Gilbert Harman and J. L. Mackie presented problems for the analysis of ethics which could be construed as arguments for anti-realism about moral properties.  Three of the main problems are:
 
1.  Observational irrelevance.  Harman argues that observation seems relevant to empirical judgments in a way it does not to moral judgments.  Observation in both areas is "theory-laden" -- that is, how we describe what we see is affected by our theoretical commitments.  So we may observe that something is wrong in the same way we observe that an electron has flashed through a cloud chamber.  But there seems to be an important difference:  in order to explain the observation of the electron, we seem to need to assume that a real electron caused the observation.  On the other hand, it is not at all clear that to explain our moral observations, we need to appeal to moral facts which cause those observations.

2.  The argument from queerness.  Mackie argues that, if there were any moral properties, they would have to be very strange properties.  It is hard to see how we could come to know about them (this is related to Harman's problem); more importantly, it is hard to see how any objective property could have the kind of connection with motivation that moral properties seem to have.

3.  The argument from relativity.  People in different cultures and at different times and places have very different moral beliefs.  Mackie argues that this is most plausibly explained by rejecting the idea that there are objective moral properties, and explaining moral beliefs instead in terms of social and cultural factors.
 

B. Extreme solutions.
 
1.  Non-naturalistic realism.  G.E. Moore defends the view that good is a nonnatural (but objective) property.  It is not definable in terms of natural properties, as is shown, he believes, by the "open question argument":  For any proposed definition of good in terms of X, we can always meaningfully ask, "I know my action is X, but is it good?"  By contrast, we cannot meaningfully ask, say, "I know that this figure is a set of points equidistant from a given point, but is it a circle?"

2.  Naturalistic realism.  Boyd and Railton both argue that good is an ordinary empirical property.  (Boyd argues that it may not be definable in any straightforward sense, while Railton offers the beginnings of a proposed definition, but both agree that moral properties are the kind of properties that we can learn about by means of the sciences.

3.  Emotivism.  Emotivism is the most extreme anti-realist position.  Emotivism holds that there are no moral properties; moral language does not describe any sort of facts about the world, either natural or nonnatural.  Instead, moral language serves only to express our emotions.  It is as though to say "That's good" were tantamount to making an affirmative grunting noise, while "That's bad" is essentially making a negative grunting noise.  You aren't saying anything, you're just expressing how you feel.
 

C. More moderate solutions.
 
1.  Moderate anti-realism.  Blackburn offers a kind of moderate anti-realism.  There are no objective moral properties, on his view, but we act as though there are.  We "project" our own attitudes onto the world, taking them to be properties of objects.  The result is what Blackburn calls "quasi-realism" -- essentially talking and acting as though realism were true even though it's not!

2.  Moderate realism.  In the "sensibility theories" of McDowell and Wiggins, we find a more moderate version of realism.  On these views, moral properties are like color properties.  They are objective properties of real things, but they are properties that we pick out because of their effects on us.  Just as we classify red things as red because they produce a certain sort of experience in ideal observers under ideal conditions of observation, so we classify right actions or good states of affairs as right or good because they produce a certain sort of affirmative reaction in ideal observers under ideal conditions of observation.  We have spent a substantial amount of time in class attempting to work out some of the details of this sort of view, and see how it makes it possible to respond to the problems with which we began our discussion.