Moral Propositions Research Articles

Размышление о понятии совести: сравнительный анализ подходов в арабо-тюркской исламской философии

The concept of conscience is one of the main unsolved problems of moral philosophy. It is of great importance to reveal the discussions about this con­cept until today collectively on the philosophical level, in terms of clarifica­tion the questions related to the source of morality and moral propositions and the subjectivity or objectivity of ethical values. We can evaluate the ex­planations related to the concept of conscience in two categories as etymolo­gical and terminological. While explanations on the etymology of the con­cept are naturally based on classical dictionaries, conceptual explanations are based on classical, medieval and modern Western and Islamic moral philo­sophy texts. The main purpose of the study is to discuss the moral content of the concept of conscience in the light of Islamic philosophies compara­tively, based on the basic works related to the concept in Islamic thought. The main thesis of the study is that conscience is a deeply appealing power that has metaphysical, psychological and epistemological aspects. Conse­quently, we can define conscience as a spiritual force with cognitive, emo­tional, and voluntary aspects

Moral testimony and epistemic privilege

AbstractHow should we, as philosophers, respond to the pure moral testimony of people in marginalized positions? Some philosophers argue that marginalized people have an epistemic advantage concerning their experiences of marginalization, such that, if we are non‐marginalized, then we should defer to their moral testimony concerning these experiences. We might accept this as a requirement for ordinary conversation but doubt that any such requirement obtains when we do philosophy, since philosophy requires a critical stance. This paper argues that philosophers should also defer in such cases. It concludes that non‐marginalized philosophers can only properly address certain moral propositions concerning the experiences of marginalized people if they engage in ongoing philosophical discussions with such people, starting from a position of trust.

A semantics for moral error theory

Abstract Moral error theory has been criticized on formal grounds for lacking a coherent semantics of moral sentences. In this paper, I provide a truthmaker-based semantics of moral sentences that is compatible with moral error theory. The hyperintensional account draws attention to the exact truth- and falsemakers of moral propositions. Error theorists must assume that propositions that have only moral truthmakers have at least one non-moral falsemaker. A central consequence of the discussion is that moral error theory is compatible with a classical logic of moral notions.

Children deny that God could change morality

Can moral rules change? We tested 129 children from the United States to investigate their beliefs about whether God could change widely shared moral propositions (e.g., “it’s not okay to call someone a mean name”), controversial moral propositions (e.g., “it’s not okay to tell a small lie to help someone feel happy”), and physical propositions (e.g., “fire is hotter than snow”). We observed an emerging tendency to report that God's ability to change morality is limited, suggesting that children across development find some widely shared aspects of morality to be impossible to change. Some beliefs did shift over development, however: 4- to 6-year-olds did not distinguish among God’s ability to change widely shared moral, controversial moral, and physical propositions, whereas 7- to 9-year-olds became increasingly confident that God could change physical and controversial moral propositions. Critically, however, younger children and older children alike reported that widely shared aspects of morality could not be altered. According to participants, not even God could change fundamental moral principles.

Moral Disagreement and Moral Education: What’s the Problem?

Although initially plausible, the view that moral education should aim at the transmission of moral knowledge has been subject to severe criticism. In this context, one particularly prominent line of argumentation rests on the empirical observation that moral questions are subject to widespread and robust disagreement. In this paper, I would like to discuss the implications of moral disagreement for the goals of moral education in more detail. I will start by laying out the empirical and philosophical assumptions behind the idea that widespread and robust moral disagreement undermines the prospects of transmitting moral knowledge in educational settings. Having thus provided a specific interpretation of the epistemic dynamics behind this so-called ‘challenge of disagreement’, I will proceed by discussing its didactical implications. More specifically, I will defend two claims: first, I will argue that the challenge of disagreement is not an effective challenge, because it undermines the possibility of knowledge transfer only with respect to a limited set of moral propositions. Second, I will argue that the challenge of disagreement is not a specific challenge, because the epistemically destructive effects of moral disagreement also pose a challenge for other prominent accounts of moral education that were originally proposed as promising alternatives to knowledge transmission accounts. If convincing, my arguments show that knowledge transmission accounts of moral education are in a much better position than is usually expected to incorporate the fact that moral questions are notoriously controversial.

The Second Revolution of Moral Fictionalism

If our moral beliefs rest on a mistake, as moral error theorists claim, what should we do with them? According to Richard Joyce’s revolutionary moral fictionalism, error theorists should pretend to believe moral propositions in order to keep the benefits moral thinking has for their preference satisfaction. This, he claims, frees error theory from radical practical implications. In response, I argue that implementing fictionalism would not preserve our moral practices, but disrupt them. The change from moral belief to make-belief yields an unintended second revolution: a revolution in the content of morality. I show that fictionalism necessarily relies on a similar justification of moral practices as David Gauthier’s contractarianism, and consequently has similar implications for moral content. Because fictionalists engage in moral thinking purely for its instrumental value, they should only accept moral obligations that are useful to them into their fiction. This restriction is important: the most useful moral fiction departs substantially from conventional moral views. Revolutionary moral fictionalism is therefore more radical than it is promised to be.

Capitalism and Distributive Justice: Musings of a Mormon Economist

Capitalism and Distributive Justice: Musings of a Mormon Economist

Moral understanding, affect, and the imagination

ABSTRACT The aim of this paper is to defend the view that we need to conceive our moral understanding as in part constituted by our affective and imaginative abilities suitably related. The core argument is that in order to be able to understand and explain the truth of a given moral proposition, we need to understand what the relevant moral concepts refer to, that is, we need to understand the semantic value of the relevant moral concepts. In the moral domain, I argue, this involves appealing to our affective and imaginative abilities suitably related. My account provides a genuinely new alternative to current accounts of moral understanding because it brings in both affect and the imagination central stage. Moreover, my account is a defense of the view that our moral understanding is a distinctive kind of understanding not reducible to non-moral kinds of understanding. The upshot of my argument is a new position in questions about the nature of moral understanding that focuses on the peculiarities of understanding in the moral domain.

Ethics in Freud’s Theory and Its Comparison With Ethics From the Perspective of Islam

Background and Objectives: Psychology needs to study ethics as an important dimension of human personality. The present study aims to critique the moral foundations of Freud's theory based on Islamic ethics. Methods: This is a review study. We used library and internet studies, and the resources related to the subject were extracted and studied. Results: According to Freud, ethics results from internalizing parental and social values and relative, masculine, illogical, and irrational matters. A human being is morally neutral. The criterion for moral behavior is to follow the moral standards of parents or the community. On the contrary, according to Islam, man is not morally neutral but has a spiritual morality. Part of morality is introduced by nature and intellect, and the other is introduced by religious teachings. Islamic morality is absolute and is not subject to the tastes of individuals or social conventions, and its audience is a kind of human being. Proximity to God is the criterion for evaluating moral behaviors, and to achieve this goal, both the appearance of the behavior and the motivation of the doer must be good and divine. Conclusion: The most important critique of Freud’s moral view from the perspective of Islamic morality is to ignore the innate moral capacities of man, consider moral matters as irrational, relativize moral propositions, limit morality to masculinity, and pay attention to the appearance of moral behaviors and ignore the role of intention in the formation of moral behaviors.

Seeking Calmness and Self-cultivation -- The Thought Embodiment of Dietary Writing in Ji Shen Lu, a Novel of Strange Spirits in Song Dynasty

The song Dynasty developed agriculture, cooking techniques unprecedented development, food close to the people's life became a literary writing subject. The types, production methods and edible effects of diet became a popular concern of the public, which also led to the successful emergence of diet theme in song Dynasty literature, and a large number of works and poems related to diet appeared. Ji Shen Lu, a strange novel written by Xu Xuan in the Song Dynasty, recorded the supernatural and strange things in plain and simple words, in which the writing of diet occupies a certain length. The supernatural and supernatural features highlighted in daily diet in plain words highlight the human nature and moral proposition behind it, and the height of the prose of the novel and the story gradually rises from the diet life to the spiritual level of seeking calm and self-cultivation.

The Compatibility of the Widespread Popularity and Essentiality of “Goodness and Badness” Propositions with an emphasis on the Views of Avicenna and Muẓaffar

Logicians, such as Avicenna (or Ibn Sīnā), give moral propositions (like “injustice is bad” and “justice is good”) as examples of “popular” (mashhūrāt) propositions and praised opinions in the section of dialectics. However, Islamic theologians (those adhering to justice or ‘adliyya) cite these propositions in their discussion of rational goodness and badness. This can be discussed in different respects: Are goodness and badness propositions primitively self-evident propositions or just popular propositions? Are they rational or legislated propositions? Do they admit of truth and falsity? Are they realistic or irrealistic? If they are popular propositions, then can their goodness or badness still be essential? In this paper, we are concerned with this latter question. To begin with, according to passages from Avicenna, these propositions are admittedly popular, but then the question arises of whether this is compatible with their goodness and badness being essential. This is because the essentiality of goodness and badness implies their reality, whereas a merely popular proposition does not have a reality beyond an agreement among rational agents. In the first case, popularity or general interests are at stake, whereas essentiality amounts to being detached from general interests or popularity within the society, in the sense that an act is immediately described as good or bad, but this is at odds with what logicians have suggested. The question of this research is to reveal a conflict between essentiality and rationality of such propositions on the one hand, and their popularity, on the other. We begin with an introduction of epistemological and ontological dimensions of the problem, and then consider the problem in terms of logic, referring to passages from Avicenna in this regard, and after an elucidation of the conflict, we finally formulate Muẓaffar’s solution to the conflict. The idea is that although the popularity of such propositions is incompatible with essentiality or rationality of good and badness as widely understood by theologians, a more refined understanding of essentiality and rationality will help resolve the conflict.

Expressivism, Inferentialism and the Simulation Game

Expressivism, Inferentialism and the Simulation Game

Moral realism, quasi‐realism and moral steadfastness

AbstractSome moral propositions are so obviously true that we refuse to doubt them, even where we believe that many people disagree. Following Fritz and McPherson, I call our behaviour in such cases ‘moral steadfastness’. In this paper, I argue for two metaethical implications of moral steadfastness. I first argue that morally steadfast behaviour is sufficiently prevalent to present an important challenge for some prominent analogies between moral epistemology and non‐moral forms of epistemology. These analogies are often pressed by moral realists. I then argue that moral quasi‐realism, unlike realism, can explain and vindicate our presumption that moral steadfastness is frequently rational. On the assumption that we frequently act as it is rational to act, quasi‐realism is therefore well placed to explain why we are so frequently morally steadfast. I conclude that this is an important respect in which quasi‐realism is explanatorily preferable to realism.

Continuity in Morality and Law

Abstract According to an influential and intuitively appealing argument (the Continuity Argument), (1) morality is usually continuous, namely, a gradual change in one morally significant factor triggers a gradual change in another; (2) the law should usually track morality; (3) therefore, the law should often be continuous. This argument is illustrated by cases such as the following example: since the moral difference between a defensive action that is reasonable and one that is just short of being reasonable is small, the law should not impose a severe punishment when the action is almost reasonable and no punishment at all when the action is reasonable (as positive law sometimes does). In this Article, I consider two doubts regarding this argument. First, the premise that morality is continuous in such cases is incompatible with the common view that the moral status of actions is not continuous since there is an important difference between actions that are permissible and actions that are wrong— even if this difference is due to a difference that is very small, such as the one between an action whose consequences are the best and an action whose consequences are just slightly less good. This view extends also to the overall moral status of agents given the common assumption that it depends on the moral status of their actions. This is an important challenge that the Continuity Argument should confront. However, I argue that the best account of morality is more scalar than the common view in these respects. Therefore, I conclude that the first premise of the Continuity Argument is correct in this regard, although it is based on a minority view. The second doubt concerns the scope of the second premise: since there are reasons both in favor and against legal continuity, and the applicability and force of these reasons depend not only on various moral propositions but also on contingent non-moral facts, we often lack the evidence to determine the degree to which the law, at a certain place and time, should be continuous, and specifically that it should often be continuous.

The Concept of Moral Conscience in Ancient Greek Philosophy

The concept of consciousness in ancient Greek philosophy, concerns the internal autonomy and philosophical freedom from the condemnation of ignorance of both the foreign and the domestic world. The ancient Greek philosophers pointed out the value of the dialectic with the inner self to the problem of moral conscience and handed us a legacy of values and the primacy of reason. The concept of moral consciousness in ancient Greek philosophy. The article examines the concept of moral consciousness in ancient Greek philosophy. The purpose of the article is to investigate the moral question related to whether moral concepts have a subjective or an objective basis. In addition, the article demonstrates the unaffected by time significance of the concept of moral consciousness, as well as its connection with the reality of moral concepts, moral propositions, moral judgments, moral man, moral law, moral idealism, moral naturalism and moral relativism. Moral consciousness is the mirror of our self-knowledge.

Preskripsi Metodologis Pengembangan Teori Ekonomi Islam dalam Menangani Ketidakpastian (Kelemahan Bawaan dari Manusia Dewasa) dalam Menjalankan Ekonomi Praktis

Islam is a holistic religion that deals with every aspect of life according to human nature where it satisfies human preferences, needs, traits, desires, desires, feelings, souls and thoughts. Allah SWT created human beings who are present with a soul, emotion, care, and love for something beautiful. The purpose of this study is to identify and analyze the methodological prescriptions of the development of Islamic economic theory in dealing with innate human weaknesses. This study uses a qualitative-inductive approach. Data were collected using literature study techniques and documentation studies. Secondary data source used. Then, the data were analyzed using qualitative data analysis approaches and techniques. Based on the discussion, the results of the research can be concluded as follows: 1) The elimination of strong, centralized and integrated moral control over churches and institutions that oppress them, especially the paradigm of religious judgment in Western economic thought (such as human economic behavior) is incapable of understanding moral rules leading to the current crisis. Kahneman began studying psychology and behavioral economics. By showing that psychological motivation determines people's behavior, and this motivation is important for economic phenomena. The main point here is the discovery of law, which regulates human economic behavior through moral control imposed by primitive Islamic sources, and has become the main method dictated by the automatic control system of classical Islamic sources founded some 1400 years ago. Therefore, the essence of capitalism with moral control is adopting from Islam. 2) In Islam, all actions are based on the fact that the Qur'an and the Sunnah divide into two areas of rules and moral values, the first is to develop the rational ability to understand moral propositions and prescribed rules, and use them in negotiations. Ability to negotiate and face decisions. Second, from the depths of the individual (nafs) to the depths of the universe, organize and determine the area of ??human observation, intelligence, and reason.

Utilitarianism for the Error Theorist

The moral error theory has become increasingly popular in recent decades. So much so indeed that a new issue emerged, the so-called “now-what problem”: if all our moral beliefs are false, then what should we do with them? So far, philosophers who are interested in this problem have focused their attention on the mode of the attitudes we should have with respect to moral propositions. Some have argued that we should keep holding proper moral beliefs; others that we should replace our moral beliefs with fictional attitudes, beliefs in natural facts, or conative attitudes. But all these philosophers have set aside an important question about the content of these attitudes: which moral propositions, and more generally which moral theory, should we accept? The present paper addresses this neglected issue, arguing that moral error theorists should adopt a utilitarian moral fiction. In other words, they should accept the set of moral principles whose general acceptance would maximize overall well-being.

The egalitarianism and non-egalitarianism of Buddhist ethics

ABSTRACT This essay is to identify two views of Buddhist ethics: egalitarianism and non-egalitarianism. In the time of the Buddha, there was no conflict between the concept of equality and the Buddha’s teaching of śῑla/vinaya. However, as Buddhism develops, the meaning of equality has been expanded, which leads to a neglected inconsistency: “All life is equal” is incoherent with śῑla/vinaya, such as Dharmagupta-vinaya, which indicates that there are degrees of karmic result in taking life. Although it is significant to resolve the incoherence, this is not our concern. We are interested in two relevant things: (1) What “All life is equal” means for Buddhist ethics (an egalitarian view) (2) We evaluate the non-egalitarianism: there are degrees of seriousness in taking life. Finally, we explore a compelling question “Is egalitarianism or non-egalitarianism more suitable for Buddhist ethics?” We also analyze five moral propositions, including these two views, to understand Buddhist ethics better.

The Puzzle of Moral Memory

A largely overlooked and puzzling feature of morality is Moral Memory: apparent cases of directly memorising, remembering, and forgetting first-order moral propositions seem odd. To illustrate: consider someone apparently memorising that capital punishment is wrong, or acting as if they are remembering that euthanasia is permissible, or reporting that they have forgotten that torture is wrong. I here clarify Moral Memory and identify desiderata of good explanations. I then proceed to amend the only extant account, Bugeja’s (2016) Non-Cognitivist explanation, but show that it isn’t superior to a similar Cognitivist-friendly view, and that both explanations face a counterexample. Following this, I consider and reject a series of alternative Cognitivist-friendly explanations, suggesting that a Practicality-Character explanation that appeals to the connection between the practicality of moral attitude and character is superior. However, I conclude that support for this explanation should remain conditional and tentative.

Irresolvable Disagreement, Objectivist Antirealism and Logical Revision

Meta-ethical realism faces the serious epistemological problem of how to explain our epistemic access to moral reality. In the face of this challenge many are sceptical about non-naturalist realism. Nonetheless, there is good reason to acknowledge moral objectivity: morality shows all the signs of a truth-apt discourse but doesn’t exhibit the typical relativity inducing features. This suggests a middle-ground position, a theory that embraces the virtues of realism but does avoid its vices: objectivist antirealism. In this paper, I’ll discuss, mainly following Crispin Wright’s account of moral truth as superassertibility, a promising version of objectivist antirealism and show how to cope with notorious problems, notably those arising from the thought that moral disagreement might be possible in which nobody is guilty of a cognitive shortcoming, which contradicts the antirealist claim that moral truth is not beyond our epistemic reach. The solution is to deny the possibility of cognitively faultless moral disagreement by arguing that cognitively blameless thinkers either agree or stay agnostic and, therefore, never disagree about any moral proposition. Since assuming an agnostic stance on the part of such thinkers contradicts the antirealist’s conception of truth—even within the limits of intuitionistic logic—I’ll propose an alternative logical revision for the moral discourse: a three-valued logic with epistemically construed truth-values.