Category: Ethics

Meta-ethics:

• What is Morality? - Outlines some competing analyses of the essential concept. See also two conceptions of morality.


• Moral Diversity and Skepticism - does the diversity of moral opinions in the world imply that we cannot know who is right?


• McNaughton vs. Non-Cognitivism - Comparing the theoretical virtues of internalist moral realism with constructivist non-cognitivism.


• Natural Teleology - Are some concepts inherently value-laden?


• Facts, Values, Apples - A tongue-in-cheek look at the "gap" between fact and value.


• Supervenience vs. Hume's Law - Does supervenience suggest that natural facts may entail moral facts after all?


• Evaluative Meaning - Does ethical language involve some special non-descriptive kind of meaning? (See also the follow-up.)


• Bridging the Is-Ought gap - Alonzo Fyfe's naturalistic reduction of (prudential) 'oughts'.


• The Fact/Value Gap - An essay defending the view that values are to be located within the realm of facts.


• God and Morality - Does morality depend upon God?


• Objective Moral Relativism - How subjective values can ground objective morality.


• Natural Foundations - Demonstrates how morality could be naturally grounded. Also offers a short but compelling argument for ethical naturalism.


• Ethical Naturalism - Clearing up a common confusion.

Reasons, Moral Motivation and Normative Force:

• "Why Be Moral?" essay (+ outline)


• Normativity - Do 'oughts' have any objective force behind them? If so, where does it come from? Examines a couple of non-absolute ways of grounding normativity, and asks whether these are sufficient. See also Big Force "Oughts".


• Morality as Means - Do we have any reason to care about morality?


• Reasons - Outlines a simple instrumentalist account of practical reason.


• A Taxonomy of Reasons


• Reason-Giving Frameworks


• The Amoralist Challenge to Internalism


• Motives and Reasons


• Is Pain Impersonally Bad?


• Incompletely Relative Rationality - the analogy between 'I' and 'now'.


• Rational Irrationality - Sometimes it's rational to make yourself irrational, and right to make yourself do wrong.


• Solving the Prisoner's Dilemma - and why common-sense morality is self-defeating.


• Collective Rationality - why morality is collectively rational.


• The Good Life - why self-interest requires one to become less self-interested


• Coherence and Rational Desires - how ultimate values may still be open to rational criticism.


• Convergence, Ethics, and the A Priori
- some strong analogies between values and a priori truths.

General:

• Inclination vs Duty contrasts an old ethical tradition (Judeo-Christian) with an ancient one (Greek), arguing that the ancient one is better. Have a look at the 'shopkeeper' problem and see where your intuitions lie.


• Ideal Agent Theories - Defending them from 'conflict of interest'-type criticisms, though eventually rejecting them anyway.


• Moral Emotions: the 'yuk factor' - On the difference between 'icky' and 'wrong', and (more generally) the relationship between ethics and emotions. See also: chocolate-flavoured poo.


• Observing Morality - Are moral properties open to direct observation, or are they more complicated than that? (See also the follow-up: Are Evolved Perceptions Reliable?)


• The Source of Morality - The genesis of our moral beliefs is a different matter from what grounds moral truths.


• Devil's Advocate: Subjectivism - Plays at defending subjectivism from some common objections.


• Human Nature - On the difference between "unnatural" and "immoral".


• Moral Equality - What does it mean to say that "all men are created equal"?


• Words & Meanings - when mere semantic quibbles masquerade as substantive disagreements (and how this applies to some moral arguments).


• Things Decided Not Discovered - Some concepts seem to be pragmatically defined by humans (in some sense), rather than 'discovered' as part of the natural fabric of the universe. Is morality like that?


• Freedom & Moral Responsibility - outlines a pragmatic approach to morality.


• Pleasurable Relations - An exploration of second-order affects, e.g. sympathetic or sadistic pleasure.


• Perfectionism and Egalitarianism - weighing competing values.


• Selfish Selflessness? - On the possibility of altruism.

Value and Well-Being:

• The Population Paradox - How can we avoid Parfit's "repugnant conclusion"?


• Methods for Analyzing Well-Being - Is there some procedure we can use to help us decide between rival theories of well-being?


• Desire Fulfillment - What is the good life? Where does value come from? What constitutes a harm?


• An Analysis of Value - Outlines Fyfe's four-dimensional analysis of value claims, but focusing on non-moral value.


• Flourishing - Do desire-fulfillment (DF) theories of welfare provide an adequate account of human flourishing? This post attempts to defend DF against various objections.


• Ideal Decisions - Would an ideal agent ever choose something undesired?


• The Origin of Ends - How do people adopt new ultimate ends? Does it matter?


• Third-Person Wellbeing - A thought experiment suggesting that our concept of wellbeing may vary depending on whether we judge from a first- or third-person perspective.


• 'Good To' and 'Good For' - The distinction between personal value and well-being in particular.


• Welfare and the Good Life - Can we distinguish a person from their life, and so judge a person's well-being independently from the success of their life?


• Veridical Enjoyment - A compromise between hedonistic and desire-fulfilment theories of well-being.


• Counterfactual Preferences and Elitism - Can desire theorists justify the claim that some preferences are better than others?


• Respecting Past Desires - Are past desires ever relevant to our well-being?


• Global Preferences - Why brute maximization of desire-fulfilment need not be what's best for us. Why the content of a desire may count for more than its strength.


• Well-Being Essay - What is the best conception of well-being?

Utilitarianism:

• 'Right' is Making the World Better - An argument for Utilitarianism, against the famous "organ-stealing"-type putative counterexamples.


• Consistency and Utilitarianism - Does consistency force one towards utilitarianism?


• Utilitarian Respect for Persons - Does utilitarianism treat anyone "as a means only"?


• Sacrifice and Separate Persons - Does utilitarianism ignore the "separateness of persons"? Can a benefit to one person outweigh a burden imposed on another?


• Utility and Just Deserts - Does utilitarianism treat people as they deserve?


• Indirect Utilitarianism - Why we shouldn't try to use utility calculations in our everyday lives.

Other ethics links:

• Alonzo Fyfe's Ethics Without God series - Desire Utilitarianism in full.


• Desire Utilitarianism overview - a summary I wrote earlier in the year.


• Letter to Prof. Macdonald - a detailed response to some criticisms of Desire Utilitarianism.


• Don't miss Jon Mandle's wonderfully lucid explanation of Kantian ethics.


• Another interesting alternative is offered by Social Contract theorists.

Related topics: for posts on applied ethics, see the Politics & Society category; for posts on religious ethics and the meaning of life, see the Religion category.