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Appendix A - The Plurality of Morality
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 03 May 2011
Summary
Perhaps because we are still under the spell of Plato in so many ways, we are apt to suppose there is some single, fairly coherent practice called “morality” about which there are competing accounts or “theories.” It is common to hear, for example, that according to “virtue ethics,” morality is about the evaluation of character and not – at least not directly and primarily – about the evaluation of acts. Or, as most of us have said in the classroom, deontological theories conceive of morality as centered on acts, not consequences. And it has been claimed that “morality ought to be understood primarily as a matter of what one does or does not do to oneself rather [than] what one does or does not do to others.” We assume that these different theories genuinely disagree because they are competing theories of the same thing. If the thing called “morality” is primarily about character, it cannot also be primarily about act evaluations. If the thing called “morality” is primarily a matter about what one does to oneself, it cannot also be primarily a matter about what one does to others. So we often understand our “theories of morality” as competing theories describing and explaining the same phenomenon. Indeed, moral philosophers often identify themselves in terms of the adherence to one or the other theory explaining what morality is all about.
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- The Order of Public ReasonA Theory of Freedom and Morality in a Diverse and Bounded World, pp. 551 - 557Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2010