Metaethics

By Finlay, Stephen

A tripartite distinction is often drawn in moral philosophy between (i) applied ethics, (ii) normative ethical theory, and (iii) metaethics. Applied ethics seeks answers to moral questions about ...

Aesthetics and ethics

By Tanner, Michael

The contrast between ethical and aesthetic judgments, which has provided a good deal of the subject-matter of aesthetics, stems largely from Immanuel Kant’s idiosyncratic view of morality as ...

Analytic ethics

By Railton, Peter

Moral philosophy has traditionally been divided into normative ethics and meta-ethics. Normative ethics concerns judgments about what is good and how we should act. Meta-ethics, with which ’analytic ...

Deontic modals

By Chrisman, Matthew

Modality, as it is usually understood in contemporary philosophy, has to do with necessities and possibilities. Deontic modality is a kind of modality which has to do with ...

Emotive meaning

By Phillips, David

Emotive meaning contrasts with descriptive meaning. Terms have descriptive meaning if they do the job of stating facts: they have emotive meaning if they do the job of ...

Emotivism

By Smith, Michael

Emotivists held that moral judgments express and arouse emotions, not beliefs. Saying that an act is right or wrong was thus supposed to be rather like saying ‘Boo!’ ...

Epistemology and ethics

By Feldman, Richard

Epistemology and ethics are both concerned with evaluations: ethics with evaluations of conduct, epistemology with evaluations of beliefs and other cognitive acts. Of considerable interest to philosophers are ...

Ethics and action

By King, Matt

Moral theories are theories of right action. Moral principles are meant to guide action. And, if moral rules exist, they apply to all agents. Theories of action and ...

Ethics and psychology

By Doris, John M.; Stich, Stephen P.

Psychological research promises substantive contributions to philosophical ethics. Arguments purporting to show that empirical considerations are of sharply limited relevance to ethical reflection, such as those commonly associated ...

Expressivism

By van Roojen, Mark

Expressivism is a kind of noncognitivism, usually about morality. And noncognitivism is a metaethical theory, that is a theory about the subject matter of morality, about the nature ...

Fact/value distinction

By Crisp, Roger

According to proponents of the fact/value distinction, no states of affairs in the world can be said to be values, and evaluative judgments are best understood not to ...

Frege–Geach problem

By Schroeder, Mark

The Frege–Geach problem is an important and well-known obstacle to metaethical theories belonging to the broadly noncognitivist tradition, including emotivism, prescriptivism and expressivism. It is also sometimes called ...

Intuitionism in ethics

By Frazier, Robert L.

To intuit something is to apprehend it directly, without recourse to reasoning processes such as deduction or induction. Intuitionism in ethics proposes that we have a capacity for ...

Logic of ethical discourse

By Timmons, Mark

Logic, as a discipline, is largely concerned with discovering principles and methods for evaluating the evidential strength between the premises and conclusions of arguments. Because the meanings of ...

Metaethical theories, hybrid

By Ridge, Michael; Köhler, Sebastian

Hybrid theories in metaethics hold at least one of the following theses: Moral claims express both belief-like and desire-like mental states. Moral judgments ...

Moral dilemmas

By Nair, Shyam

A moral dilemma is a situation where an agent’s obligations conflict. Debate in this area focuses on the question of whether genuine moral dilemmas exist. This question involves ...

Moral epistemology

By Wedgwood, Ralph

Epistemology is the study of knowledge and justified belief. So moral epistemology is the study of what would be involved in knowing, or being justified in believing, moral ...

Moral judgement

By Cullity, Garrett

The term ‘moral judgement’ can refer to an activity, a state, a state-content, a capacity or a virtue. The activity of moral judgement is that of thinking about ...

Moral judgement

The term ‘moral judgement’ can refer to an activity, a state, a state-content, a capacity or a virtue. The activity of moral judgement is that of thinking about ...

Moral knowledge

By Sayre-McCord, Geoffrey

One possesses moral knowledge when, but only when, one’s moral opinions are true and held justifiably. Whether anyone actually has moral knowledge is open to serious doubt, both ...

Moral motivation

By Wallace, R. Jay

Questions about the possibility and nature of moral motivation occupy a central place in the history of ethics. Philosophers disagree, however, about the role that motivational investigations should ...

Moral particularism

By Crisp, Roger

Moral particularism is a broad set of views which play down the role of general moral principles in moral philosophy and practice. Particularists stress the role of examples ...

Moral pluralism

By Weinstock, Daniel M.

Moral pluralism is the view that moral values, norms, ideals, duties and virtues are irreducibly diverse: morality serves many purposes relating to a wide range of human interests, ...

Moral psychology

By Slote, Michael

Moral psychology as a discipline is centrally concerned with psychological issues that arise in connection with the moral evaluation of actions. It deals with the psychological presuppositions of ...

Moral realism

By Dancy, Jonathan

Moral realism is the view that there are facts of the matter about which actions are right and which wrong, and about which things are good and which ...