Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgments
- Introduction
- 1 Moral and other realisms: Some initial difficulties
- 2 Abortion: Identity and loss
- 3 The right to threaten and the right to punish
- 4 Reply to Brook
- 5 Truth and explanation in ethics
- 6 Reflection and the loss of moral knowledge: Williams on objectivity
- 7 Actions, intentions, and consequences: The Doctrine of Doing and Allowing
- 8 Actions, intentions, and consequences: The Doctrine of Double Effect
- 9 Reply to Boyle's “Who is entitled to Double Effect?”
- 10 The puzzle of the self-torturer
- 11 Rationality and the human good
- 12 Putting rationality in its place
1 - Moral and other realisms: Some initial difficulties
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 June 2012
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgments
- Introduction
- 1 Moral and other realisms: Some initial difficulties
- 2 Abortion: Identity and loss
- 3 The right to threaten and the right to punish
- 4 Reply to Brook
- 5 Truth and explanation in ethics
- 6 Reflection and the loss of moral knowledge: Williams on objectivity
- 7 Actions, intentions, and consequences: The Doctrine of Doing and Allowing
- 8 Actions, intentions, and consequences: The Doctrine of Double Effect
- 9 Reply to Boyle's “Who is entitled to Double Effect?”
- 10 The puzzle of the self-torturer
- 11 Rationality and the human good
- 12 Putting rationality in its place
Summary
Some very similar problems and disputes arise in ethics, aesthetics, and the philosophy of perception. One of the most basic of these parallel controversies concerns the connection between certain features we attribute to objects and certain mental responses that somehow or other provide a basis for these attributions. Three examples of such feature-response pairs drawn from ethics, aesthetics, and philosophy of perception respectively are (a) moral goodness and moral approval, (b) funniness and amusement, and (c) something's being red and its looking red. What makes these and many other examples controversial is the fact that one kind of philosopher (the realist) finds it plausible to claim first that whether an object possesses one or another of these features is independent of and prior to the question whether it provokes the correlative response and second that the response itself is a genuinely cognitive state of mind in some way directed to the feature as part of its object. While another kind of philosopher (the mentalist) finds it plausible to deny both these claims and to assert instead that the response has conceptual priority over the feature and that what the realist takes in the response as cognitive of the feature is really some noncognitive attitude, disposition, sensation, or act of will. In other words, the realist regards the response as a response to the feature while the mentalist sees the feature as some sort of construction out of the response.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Morality and Action , pp. 1 - 19Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 1994