Reasoning Moral 33: Issues in Ethics. Section 9 Relativism I
www.fas.harvard.edu/~rippon/mr33 Practicalities Next week section taping in the Bok Center temporarily moving to Science Center 317. I dont have your position papers ready to return to you yet, but Ill bring them with me to lecture on Thursday so see me after lecture or come to my office hour at 3 on Thursday if youd like to pick yours up. From Last Week: The Principle of Double Effect When we were discussing Thomsons article on physician-assisted suicide and euthanasia last week, we came across the Principle of Double Effect. What is it? PDE: If an action has both a good effect and a bad one, and the agents good effect is good enough compared to the bad one, then it is permissible to perform the act if the agent performs it while intending the good effect and foreseeing the bad effect, but not intending the bad effect either as an end or as a means to the good effect. If PDE is right, does it show why disconnecting and nonconnecting might be permissible, while drug-providing is not and drug-injecting in some cases is not? Is death a bad effect in these cases? Is PDE plausible? Does it explain why strategic bombing might be permissible while terrorism is not? Does intention make a difference to the morality of an action? Is PDE popular only because people are confused between the questions of whether an act is permissible and whether the person who acts is bad? (Thomson suggests this confusion).
Relativism Some things that moral relativism isnt: - Skepticism. The view that no moral judgments are correct. - The view that the same set of objective moral principles has different outcomes in terms of requirements and responsibilities in different societies and cultures. - The empirical fact that peoples moral beliefs diverge. What it is: - Agent-based relativism is the view that there is no single morality that everyone has good reason to obey. - Judge-based relativism is the view that divergent moral judgments about the same agent and action can both be correct.
Mackie Presents a form of the argument from relativity against moral objectivism. P1: People in different societies, and within them, have different moral beliefs and moral codes. P2: This disagreement is best explained by their moral beliefs being caused by their participation in different ways of life rather than by their making mistaken judgments about objective facts Conclusion: There are objective no moral truths. Objection: Their different codes are to be explained as rules deriving from objective uniform ultimate moral principles. Reply: Thats a partial response. But then lots of our moral judgments that are taken to be objective are only derivatively and contingently valid. So what is usually affirmed as basic in moral thought, things that people think could not be otherwise, could be otherwise. And since ordinary moral thought depends on moral sense or intuition about these basic judgments, and not on principles of reason like utilitarianism, we need to be relativists about it. Harman [Megans presentation] [Stephanies presentation] Argues for a form of relativism about only moral judgments involving what people ought to or should do. He calls these internal judgments Internal ought-judgments are claimed to have the logical form of a four-place predicate: Ought (A, D, C, M), where an agent A has reason to do type of act D given considerations C and motivating attitudes M. And for internal judgments, the judge must share with the agent the motivating attitudes M. At least part of his evidence for this thesis is his intuitions about language. NB: Harman doesnt (at least in this article) argue for relativism about judgments about an agents character (e.g. Hitler was evil), or about the wrongness of actions (al though whether its wrong for A to do D is relative), or about the badness of situations. Is Harman right that we cant make l...