Nov 06, · It forbids the sale of various drugs deemed to be ineffective. It forbids the sale of various drugs believed to be harmful. It does not allow consent to certain forms of assault to be a defense against prosecution for that assault. A philosophy department may require a student to take logic courses. (see papers in Coons and Weber ) Metaethics. Metaethics is a branch of analytic philosophy that explores the status, foundations, and scope of moral values, properties, and words. Whereas the fields of applied ethics and normative theory focus on what is moral, metaethics focuses on what morality itself blogger.com as two people may disagree about the ethics of, for example, physician-assisted suicide, while nonetheless agreeing At Same Day Essay, all papers are always written from scratch, strictly following the customer’s instructions. Make an essay writing order now, and a professional academic writer with expertise and background in your subject will prepare % original work
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Metaethics is a branch of analytic philosophy that explores the status, foundations, and scope of moral values, properties, and words. Whereas the fields of applied ethics and normative theory focus on what is moralmetaethics focuses on what morality itself is. Just as two people may disagree about the ethics of, for example, physician-assisted suicide, while nonetheless agreeing at the more abstract level of a general normative theory such as Philosophy papers for saleso too may people who disagree at the level of a general normative theory nonetheless agree about the fundamental existence and status of morality itself, or vice philosophy papers for sale. In this way, metaethics may be thought of as a highly abstract way of thinking philosophically about morality.
Metaethical positions may be divided according to how they respond to questions such as the following:. Metaethical positions respond philosophy papers for sale such questions by examining the semantics of moral discourse, the ontology of moral properties, the significance of anthropological disagreement about moral values and practices, the psychology of how morality affects us as embodied human agents, and the epistemology of how we come to know moral values.
The sections below consider these different aspects of metaethics. Many Medieval accounts of morality that ground values in religious texts, commands, or emulation may also be understood as defending certain metaethical positions see Divine Command Theory.
In contrast, during the European Enlightenment, Immanuel Kant sought a foundation for ethics that was less prone to religious sectarian differences, by looking to what he believed to be universal capacities and requirements of human reason.
Since metaethics is the study of the foundations, if any, philosophy papers for sale, of morality, it has flourished especially during historical periods of cultural diversity and flux. For example, responding to the cross-cultural contact engendered by the Greco-Persian Wars, the ancient Greek historian Herodotus reflected on the apparent challenge to philosophy papers for sale superiority posed by the fact that different cultures have seemingly divergent moral practices.
A comparable interest in metaethics dominated seventeenth and eighteenth-century moral discourse in Western Europe, as theorists struggled to respond to the destabilization of traditional symbols of authority—for example, scientific revolutions, religious fragmentation, civil wars—and the grim pictures of human egoism that thinkers such as John Mandeville and Thomas Hobbes were presenting compare, Stephen Most famously, the eighteenth-century Scottish philosopher David Hume may be understood as a forerunner of contemporary metaethics when he questioned the extent to which moral judgments might ultimately rest on human passions rather than reason, and whether certain virtues are ultimately natural or artificial compare, Darwall Analytic metaethics in its modern form, however, is generally recognized as beginning with the moral writings of G.
See below for a more specific description of these different metaethical trends. Then, in the s, largely inspired by the work of philosophers such as John Rawls and Peter Singer, analytic moral philosophy began to refocus on questions of applied ethics and normative theories. Today, metaethics remains a thriving branch of moral philosophy and contemporary metaethicists frequently adopt an interdisciplinary approach to the study of moral values, drawing on disciplines as diverse as social psychology, cultural anthropology, philosophy papers for sale, comparative politics, as well as other fields within philosophy itself, such as metaphysicsepistemologyaction theory, and the philosophy of science.
Since philosophical ethics is often conceived of as a practical branch of philosophy—aiming at providing concrete moral guidance and justifications—metaethics sits awkwardly as a largely abstract enterprise that says little or nothing about real-life moral issues, philosophy papers for sale. Indeed, the pressing nature of such issues was part of the general migration back to applied and normative ethics in the politically-galvanized intellectual climate of the s described above.
And yet, moral experience seems to furnish myriad examples of disagreement concerning not merely specific applied issues, or even the interpretations or applications of particular theories, but sometimes about the very place of morality in general within multicultural, secular, and scientific accounts of the world. Thus, one of the issues inherent in metaethics concerns its status vis-à-vis other levels of moral philosophizing.
As a historical fact, metaethical positions have been combined with a variety of first-order moral positions, and vice versa: George BerkeleyJohn Stuart MillG. Mooreand R. Hare, for instance, were all committed to some form of Utilitarianism as a first-order moral framework, despite advocating radically different metaethical positions.
Likewise, philosophy papers for sale, in his influential book Ethics: Inventing Right and WrongPhilosophy papers for sale. Mackie defends a form of second-order metaethical skepticism or relativism in the first chapter, only to devote the rest of the book to the articulation of a substantive theory of first-order Utilitarianism. Metaethical positions would appear then to underdetermine normative theories, philosophy papers for sale, perhaps in the same way that normative theories themselves underdetermine applied ethical stances for example, two equally committed Utilitarians can nonetheless disagree about the moral permissibility of eating meat.
Notable exceptions to this tendency—that is, metaethical naturalists who are also first-order deontologists —include Alan Gewirth and Michael Boylan ; For critical responses to these positions, philosophy papers for sale, see BeyleveldSteiglederSpenceand Gordon Other philosophers envision the connection between metaethics and more concrete moral theorizing in much more intimate ways. Torbjörn Tännsjöby contrast, argues that, although metaethics is irrelevant to normative theorizing, it may still be significant philosophy papers for sale other psychological or pragmatic way, for example, by constraining other beliefs.
Nicholas Sturgeon has claimed that the first-order belief in moral fallibility must be grounded in some second-order metaethical view.
And David Wiggins has suggested that metaethical questions about the ultimate foundation and justification of basic moral beliefs may have deep existential implications for how humans view the question of the meaning of life.
The metaethical question of whether or not moral values are philosophy papers for sale universal would seem to have important implications for how foreign practices are morally evaluated at the first-order level. In particular, metaethical relativism the view that there are no universal or objective moral values has been viewed as highly loaded politically and psychologically.
Proponents of such relativism often appeal to the alleged open-mindedness and tolerance about first-order moral differences that their second-order metaethical view would seem to support. See sections five and eight below for a more detailed discussion of the psychological and political dimensions of metaethics, respectively. The metaethical view that moral statements similarly express truth-apt beliefs about the world is known as cognitivism.
Cognitivism would seem to be the default view of our moral discourse given the apparent structure that such discourse appears to have. Indeed, philosophy papers for sale, if cognitivism were not true— such that moral sentences were expressing something other than truth-apt propositions—then it would seem to be difficult to account for why we nonetheless are able to make logical inferences from one moral sentence to another.
For instance, philosophy papers for sale, consider the following argument:. This argument seems to be a valid application of the logical rule known as modus ponens. Yet, logical rules such as modus ponens operate only on truth-apt propositions, philosophy papers for sale.
Thus, because we seem to be able to legitimately apply such a rule in the example above, such moral sentences must be truth-apt. This argument in favor of metaethical cognitivism by appeal to the apparent logical structure of moral discourse is known as the Frege-Geach Problem in honor of the philosophers credited with its articulation compare, Geach ; Geach credits Frege as an ancestor of this problem; see also Schueler for an influential analysis of this problem vis-à-vis moral realism.
Since this homonymy would seem to threaten to undermine the grammatical structure of moral discourse, non-cognitivism must be rejected. Despite this argument about the surface appearance of cognitivism, however, numerous metaethicists have rejected the view that moral sentences ultimately express beliefs about the world, philosophy papers for sale. A historically influential forerunner of the alternate theory of non-cognitivism can be found in the moral writings of David Humephilosophy papers for sale, who famously argued that moral distinctions are not derived from reason, but instead represent emotional responses.
As such, moral sentences express not beliefs which may be true or false, but desires or feelings which are neither true nor false. This Humean position was renewed in twentieth-century metaethics by the observation that not only are moral disputes often heavily affect-laden in a way many other factual disputes are not, but also that the kind of facts which would apparently be necessary to accommodate true moral beliefs would have to be very strange sorts of entities.
Specifically, the worry is that, whereas we can appeal to standards of empirical verification or falsification to adjudicate when our non-moral beliefs are true or false, no such standards seem applicable in the moral sphere, since we cannot literally point to moral goodness in the way we can literally point to cats on mats.
In response to this apparent disanalogy between moral and non-moral statements, philosophy papers for sale metaethicists embraced a sort of neo-Humean non-cognitivism, according to which moral statements express non-truth-apt desires or feelings. Hare similarly analyzed moral utterances as containing both descriptive truth-apt as well as ineliminably prescriptive elements, such that genuinely asserting, for instance, that murder is wrong involves a concomitant emotional endorsement of not philosophy papers for sale. Drawing on the work of ordinary-language philosophers such as J.
Thus, Alan Gibbard defends norm-expressivismaccording to which moral statements express commitments not to idiosyncratic personal feelings, philosophy papers for sale, but instead to the particular and, for Gibbard, evolutionarily adaptive cultural mores that enable communication and social coordination. Non-cognitivists have also attempted to address the Frege-Geach Problem discussed above, by specifying how the expression of attitudes functions in moral discourse. Simon Blackburn philosophy papers for sale, for instance, has famously argued that non-cognitivism is a claim only about the moralnot the logical parts of discourse.
For an accessible survey of the history of the debate surrounding the Frege-Geach Problem, see Schroederand for attempts to articulate new hybrid theories that combine elements of both cognitivism as well as non-cognitivism, see Ridge and Boisvert One complication in the ongoing debate between cognitivist versus non-cognitivist accounts of moral language is the growing realization of the difficulty in conceptually distinguishing beliefs from desires in the first place.
Much contemporary metaethical debate between cognitivists and non-cognitivists thus concerns the extent to which beliefs alone, desires alone, or some compound of the two—what J.
The traditional philosophical account of truth called the correspondence theory of truth regards a proposition as true just in case it accurately describes the way the world really is independent of the proposition, philosophy papers for sale. However, philosophy papers for sale are several obvious challenges to this traditional correspondence account of moral truth.
As David Hume famously put it. Examine it in all lights, and see if you can find that matter of fact, or real existence, which you call vice. In which-ever way you take it, you find only certain passions, motives, volitions and thoughts. There is no other matter of fact in the case. Hume Many of these new theories of moral truth hearken to a suggestion by Ludwig Wittgenstein in the early twentieth-century that the meaning of any term is determined by how that term is actually used in discourse.
Building on this insight about meaning, philosophy papers for sale, Frank Ramsey extended the account to truth itself. Saying that truth is thus stripped of metaphysics is not to say that it is determined by usage in an arbitrary or unprincipled way. The grammar of a language thus constrains what can be properly expressed in that language, and therefore on the deflationary theory what can be true. Hilary Putnam has articulated an influential challenge to the deflationary account, philosophy papers for sale.
He argues that deflationary truth is unable to accommodate the fact that we normally think of truth as eternal and stable. Based on these problems, philosophers like Putnam refine the deflationary theory by substituting a condition of ideal warrant or justification, that is, where warranted assertibility is not relative to what specific information a speaker may have at a specific moment, but to what information would be accessible to an ideal epistemic agent.
What kind of information would such an ideal speaker have? Putnam characterizes the ideal epistemic situation as involving information that is both complete that is, involving everything relevant and consistent that is, not logically contradictory.
However, Wright disagrees with Putnam that truth is constrained by the convergence of information that would be available to an epistemically ideal agent. This is because Wright thinks that philosophy papers for sale is apparent to speakers of a language that something may be true even if it is not justified philosophy papers for sale ideal epistemic conditions. If moral truth is understood in the traditional sense of corresponding to reality, what sort of features of reality could suffice to accommodate this correspondence?
Proponents of the former view are called realists or objectivists ; proponents of the latter view are called relativists or subjectivists. Realist positions, however, disagree about what precisely moral values are if they are causally independent from human belief or culture. According to such realists, moral values are real without being reducible to any other kinds of properties or facts: moral values instead, according to these realists, are ontologically unique or sui generis and irreducible to other kinds of properties.
Proponents of this type of Platonist or sui generis version of moral realism include G. MooreW. RossW. HudsonIris Murdocharguablyphilosophy papers for sale, and Russ Shafer-Landau Tom Regan also discusses the effect of this metaethical position on the general intellectual climate of the fin de siècle movement known as the Bloomsbury Group.
Other moral realists, though, conceive of the ontology of moral properties in much more concrete terms. These moral realists often draw analogies between moral properties and scientific properties such as gravity, philosophy papers for sale, velocity, mass, and so forth, philosophy papers for sale.
These scientific concepts are commonly thought to exist independent of what we think about them, and yet they are not part of an ontologically distinct world of pure, abstract ideas in the way that Plato envisioned. So too might moral properties ultimately be reducible to scientific features of the world in a way that preserves their objectivity.
An early proponent of such a naturalistic view is arguably Aristotle himself, who anchored his ethics to an understanding of what biologically makes human life flourish. For a later Aristotelian moral realism, philosophy papers for sale, see Paul Bloomfield However, for questions about the extent to which Aristotelianism can truly pair with moral realism, see Robert Heinaman Note also that several other metaethicists who share broadly Aristotelian conceptions of human needs and human flourishing nonetheless reject realism, arguing that even a shared human nature still essentially locates moral values in human sensibility rather than in some trans-human moral reality.
For examples of such naturalistic moral relativism, see Philippa Foot and David B. Wong Other notable theorists who have advanced Wittgensteinian accounts of the constitutive role that language and context play in our understanding of morality include G.
Anscombe and Alasdair MacIntyrealthough both are explicitly agnostic about whether this commits them to moral realism or relativism.
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, time: 23:15Metaethics | Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy
Metaethics. Metaethics is a branch of analytic philosophy that explores the status, foundations, and scope of moral values, properties, and words. Whereas the fields of applied ethics and normative theory focus on what is moral, metaethics focuses on what morality itself blogger.com as two people may disagree about the ethics of, for example, physician-assisted suicide, while nonetheless agreeing The theme of the Law & Philosophy Workshop in will be "Political Realism, "covering both historical (e.g., Thucydides, Hobbes, Machiavelli) and contemporary figures and themes. AOS: Political philosophy, with knowledge of Workshop theme essential." When the ad is live, I will post again about it. Please email me with questions Sep 04, · The sections below provide a variety of more precise characterizations of the prisoner's dilemma, beginning with the narrowest, and survey some connections with similar games and some applications in philosophy and elsewhere. Particular attention is paid to iterated and evolutionary versions of the game
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