We use cookies to distinguish you from other users and to provide you with a better experience on our websites. Close this message to accept cookies or find out how to manage your cookie settings.
We use cookies to distinguish you from other users and to provide you with a better experience on our websites. Close this message to accept cookies or find out how to manage your cookie settings.
My own suspicion is that the universe is not only queerer than we suppose, but queerer than we can suppose.
(Haldane 1927: 208–9)In §5.2 we saw this definition of the position that I have been calling ethical subjectivism:
Ethical subjectivism. No ethical judgements are objectively true.
I contrasted this with the position that is the strict negation of ethical subjectivism – ethical objectivism:
Ethical objectivism. Some ethical judgements are objectively true.
As I noted, this objectivist position is not the most interesting one, since it is much too weak. This sort of ethical objectivism is true if there is only one completely inconsequential objective truth in ethics – say, that smiling at strangers is nice – and everything else is subjective. What we are really interested in (and what I shall be talking about from here on) is the far stronger position that Chapter 5 calls full ethical objectivism:
Full ethical objectivism. Very many important and interesting ethical judgements are objectively true.
In Chapter 5, in response to the last of the four key questions to which we were led by our initial definition of ethics as the use of reason to answer the question “How shall we live?”, I began a debate between (full) ethical objectivism and subjectivism. In Chapters 6 and 7 I take this debate further. In Chapter 6 I develop and assess some more sophisticated arguments for what I call ethical subjectivism.
To save this book to your Kindle, first ensure no-reply@cambridge.org is added to your Approved Personal Document E-mail List under your Personal Document Settings on the Manage Your Content and Devices page of your Amazon account. Then enter the ‘name’ part of your Kindle email address below. Find out more about saving to your Kindle.
Note you can select to save to either the @free.kindle.com or @kindle.com variations. ‘@free.kindle.com’ emails are free but can only be saved to your device when it is connected to wi-fi. ‘@kindle.com’ emails can be delivered even when you are not connected to wi-fi, but note that service fees apply.
Find out more about the Kindle Personal Document Service.
To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Dropbox.
To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Google Drive.
