Category Archive

I’ve not thought about ethics, in a philosophical sense, for a while so this may seem shallow and naïve to those that do. But I’m going to plough ahead anyway.

I was thinking about why someone would want to do ethical theory. I’m taking as my starting point the thought that most people have some feeling about what they should do much of the time. My evidence is that many people act for reasons they take to be moral even when they know no moral theory. Given that it seems that three reasons for going in for moral theorising present themselves:

1. Checking our moral intuitions.
2. Diagnosing what is wrong with those who are (by our lights) depraved.
3. Extending our intuitions into hard cases by means of a system.

Immediately there is a problem. The problem is that the main way that competing theories are assessed seems to be by dismissing those that conflict with intuition. So, the order of determination suggested by (1) is false. We check our theories by our intuitions and not vice versa. I’m going to put (2) on one side too. It seems to be the hardest problem for any moral theory. If the point is to solve it then nobody seems to have succeeded, at least if that would involve having a sound argument to offer amoral people for not being amoral.

(3) looks much more promising. We need a moral theory because in simple cases our intuitions are clear and to be followed. In more complex cases our intuitions fail but we can deduce principles from the simple cases and apply those principles to the hard cases. There might well be worries here about the underdetermination of principles by intuition but I want to focus on something else. It’s not so much an objection as just something I find puzzling.

In metaethics various considerations are brought to bear on theory choice that have to do with the metaphysics of morals. One theory is to be preferred over another if it is naturalistic, say. But what does this have to do with the success of a system for organising and rationalising our intuitions?