Essays on Moral Realism

Essays on Moral Realism

Author: Geoffrey Sayre-McCord

Publisher: Cornell University Press

Published: 1988

Total Pages: 340

ISBN-13: 9780801495410

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This collection of influential essays illustrates the range, depth, and importance of moral realism, the fundamental issues it raises, and the problems it faces.


Essays on Moral Realism

Essays on Moral Realism

Author: Geoffrey Sayre-McCord

Publisher:

Published: 1988

Total Pages: 342

ISBN-13:

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This collection of influential essays illustrates the range, depth, and importance of moral realism, the fundamental issues it raises, and the problems it faces.


Does Anything Really Matter?

Does Anything Really Matter?

Author: Peter Singer

Publisher: Oxford University Press

Published: 2017-01-12

Total Pages: 344

ISBN-13: 0191084395

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In the first two volumes of On What Matters Derek Parfit argues that there are objective moral truths, and other normative truths about what we have reasons to believe, and to want, and to do. He thus challenges a view of the role of reason in action that can be traced back to David Hume, and is widely assumed to be correct, not only by philosophers but also by economists. In defending his view, Parfit argues that if there are no objective normative truths, nihilism follows, and nothing matters. He criticizes, often forcefully, many leading contemporary philosophers working on the nature of ethics, including Simon Blackburn, Stephen Darwall, Allen Gibbard, Frank Jackson, Peter Railton, Mark Schroeder, Michael Smith, and Sharon Street. Does Anything Really Matter? gives these philosophers an opportunity to respond to Parfit's criticisms, and includes essays on Parfit's views by Richard Chappell, Andrew Huddleston, Katarzyna de Lazari-Radek and Peter Singer, Bruce Russell, and Larry Temkin. A third volume of On What Matters, in which Parfit engages with his critics and breaks new ground in finding significant agreement between his own views and theirs, is appearing as a separate companion volume.


Realism and Antirealism in Kant's Moral Philosophy

Realism and Antirealism in Kant's Moral Philosophy

Author: Robinson dos Santos

Publisher: Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG

Published: 2017-12-18

Total Pages: 242

ISBN-13: 3110574519

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The debate between moral realism and antirealism plays an important role in contemporary metaethics as well as in the interpretation of Kant’s moral philosophy. This volume aims to clarify whether, and in what sense, Kant is a moral realist, an antirealist, or something in-between. Based on an explication of the key metaethical terms, internationally recognized Kant scholars discuss the question of how Kant’s moral philosophy should be understood in this regard. All camps in the metaethical field have their inhabitants: Some contributors read Kant’s philosophy in terms of a more or less robust moral realism, objectivism, or idealism, and some of them take it to be a version of constructivism, constitutionism, or brute antirealism. In any case, all authors introduce and defend their terminology in a clear manner and argue thoughtfully and refreshingly for their positions. With contributions of Stefano Bacin, Jochen Bojanowski, Christoph Horn, Patrick Kain, Lara Ostaric, Fred Rauscher, Oliver Sensen, Elke Schmidt, Dieter Schönecker, and Melissa Zinkin.


The Normative Web

The Normative Web

Author: Terence Cuneo

Publisher: Clarendon Press

Published: 2010-03-04

Total Pages: 272

ISBN-13: 0191614815

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Antirealist views about morality claim that moral facts or truths do not exist. Do these views imply that other types of normative facts, such as epistemic ones, do not exist? The Normative Web develops a positive answer to this question. Terence Cuneo argues that the similarities between moral and epistemic facts provide excellent reason to believe that, if moral facts do not exist, then epistemic facts do not exist. But epistemic facts, it is argued, do exist: to deny their existence would commit us to an extreme version of epistemological skepticism. Therefore, Cuneo concludes, moral facts exist. And if moral facts exist, then moral realism is true. In so arguing, Cuneo provides not simply a defense of moral realism, but a positive argument for it. Moreover, this argument engages with a wide range of antirealist positions in epistemology such as error theories, expressivist views, and reductionist views of epistemic reasons. If the central argument of The Normative Web is correct, antirealist positions of these varieties come at a very high cost. Given their cost, Cuneo contends, we should find realism about both epistemic and moral facts highly attractive.


Realism, Ethics and Secularism

Realism, Ethics and Secularism

Author: George Levine

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 2008-10-09

Total Pages: 295

ISBN-13: 1139474650

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George Levine is one of the world's leading scholars of Victorian literature and culture. This collection of his essays develops the key themes of his work: the intersection of nineteenth-century British literature, culture and science and the relation of knowledge and truth to ethics. The essays offer perspectives on George Eliot, Thackeray, the Positivists, and the Scientific Naturalists, and reassess the complex relationship between Ruskin and Darwin. In readings of Lawrence and Coetzee, Levine addresses Victorian and modern efforts to push beyond the limits of realist art by testing its aesthetic and epistemological limits in engagement with the self and the other. Some of Levine's most important contributions to the field are reprinted, in revised and updated form, alongside previously unpublished material. Together, these essays cohere into an exploration both of Victorian literature and culture and of ethical, epistemological, and aesthetic problems fundamental to our own times.


The Moral Landscape

The Moral Landscape

Author: Sam Harris

Publisher: Simon and Schuster

Published: 2011-09-13

Total Pages: 322

ISBN-13: 143917122X

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Sam Harris dismantles the most common justification for religious faith--that a moral system cannot be based on science.


Essays in Quasi-realism

Essays in Quasi-realism

Author: Simon Blackburn

Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA

Published: 1993

Total Pages: 271

ISBN-13: 0195080416

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This volume collects together the author's pioneering essays on "quasi-realism", a philosophical position he first introduced in 1980 which has become a distinctive and much discussed option in metaphysics and ethics


A World Without Values

A World Without Values

Author: Richard Joyce

Publisher: Springer Science & Business Media

Published: 2009-12-01

Total Pages: 254

ISBN-13: 9048133394

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What kind of properties are moral qualities, such as rightness, badness, etc? Some ethicists doubt that there are any such properties; they maintain that thinking that something is morally wrong (for example) is comparable to thinking that something is a unicorn or a ghost. These "moral error theorists" argue that the world simply does not contain the kind of properties or objects necessary to render our moral judgments true. This radical form of moral skepticism was championed by the philosopher John Mackie (1917-1981). This anthology is a collection of philosophical essays critically examining Mackie’s view.