Moral Statements Research Articles

Deflationary Truth and the Problem of Relativistic Grounds of Emotivism

The article discusses the Frege-Geach problem, which is considered one of the most serious difficulties for emotive meta-ethics. The paper describes how recognition of an emotive content by moral statements in the form of attitudes leads to the emergence of the Frege-Geach problem. The essence of the problem is explained, which consists in the impossibility to make a logical conclusion in a situation of mixed contexts, when the antecedent has a value meaning, and the consequent is descriptive. The authors consider one way to solve this problem, which involves the use of a deflationary theory of truth. It is proved that the adoption of deflationism about the truth makes it possible to draw a logical conclusion in mixed contexts. They also raise the question of whether the application of deflationary truth concept is sufficient to avoid the relativistic effects of emotivism on normative ethics. The authors note that the synthesis of deflationism and emotivism is not able to explain the internalism of moral statements, which always have a hidden prescriptive modality. The conclusion is made that deflationism does not allow emotivism to avoid relativistic consequences in the field of normative ethics. Therefore, the authors conclude that emotivism should be called the nihilistic theory of the rationale for moral statements.

The (un)making of marine park subjects: Environmentality and everyday resistance in a coastal Tanzanian village

Abstract This paper focuses on local conflicts over marine conservation in southeastern Tanzania. It draws from ethnographic fieldwork conducted in 2014 and 2015 in a coastal village located inside the boundaries of a marine park. The paper first examines why villagers have come to contest the park, and subsequently outlines the various forms of resistance they employ to mobilize their opposition. Some people are willing to protest openly, as evidenced by the destruction of the park's gatehouse office and directory signs in 2013. However, an immediate violent response to such acts from state paramilitary forces has instilled fear in villagers. The swift crackdown, coupled with ongoing surveillance from ranger patrols, has engendered a degree of discipline in some people. Rather than risking further repercussions, many villagers engage in ‘everyday forms of resistance’ through subtle acts of noncompliance to the conservation regulations. These practices are entangled with material benefits and moral statements about customary rights to resources. They may also facilitate political mobility by destabilizing conservation management, while simultaneously avoiding open confrontation with governing authorities. I refer to this overall process as the (un)making of marine park subjects.

Emotywizm jako metaetyczny fundament pozytywizmu prawnego w ujęciu czystej teorii prawa Hansa Kelsena

Przedmiotem artykulu jest kwestia metaetycznych zalozen pozytywizmu prawnego w ujeciu czystej teorii prawa Hansa Kelsena. Zbadanie tego problemu pozwala odpowiedziec na pytanie, jaka wizja moralności lezy u podstaw tezy rozdzialu prawa i moralności, tj. niezalezności obowiązywania prawa od jego związkow z moralnością (normami sprawiedliwościowymi). Glownym argumentem Kelsena jest wskazanie na emotywny charakter wypowiedzi moralnych. Wyrazają one jedynie postawy i preferencje, a ich waznośc jest subiektywna. Dlatego nie mogą stanowic podstawy wazności norm prawnych, jezeli mają byc postrzegane jako obiektywnie obowiązujące. Sąd sprawiedliwościowy nie ma z punktu widzenia wazności prawa zadnego znaczenia obiektywnego.

THEORY OF JUDGMENT AND PHRONESIS IN PRACTICAL PHILOSOPHY OF HANNAH ARENDT

One of the crucial issues of modern universalistic theories of practical philosophy is the theoretical justification of normative principles and moral judgments that enables their universal validity. The problems these theories face are caused by separating rational theorizing from contexts of real life. That is the separation of theoretical justification and practice. The common for modern practical philosophy opposition between universalism and contextualism is reinterpreted today, new theories of post-metaphysical universalism appear that provide the developments of the last universalistic project of discourse ethics in the context of a critical theory of the “third generation”. The purpose of this article is to present the ethical philosophy of Hannah Arendt as the original conception where the Kantian theory of judgment and the Aristotelian notion of phronesis are brought together in order to clarify the nature of ethical and moral statements. This problem, as the article highlights, lies in the understanding of subsumption of particular under universal. Universal judgments according to Arendt are justified in the Kantian theory of “enlarged mentality” as the human capacity to interact in communication and activity. The sensitivity to situations is reflected in the Aristotelian notion of phronesis. As Arendt’s justification of normative and ethical judgments is analyzed, the hermeneutic character of her theory is revealed, which is appropriate for the theory of J. Habermas and modern followers of critical theory. The article provides additional insight into the concept of “public space” as the realm which enables the overlapping of theory and practice. As proved the “public space” in the practical philosophy of Hannah Arendt becomes the realm of mutual ethical and moral thinking where judgments are oriented to the level of the human condition in general. The paper concludes by arguing that Arendt’s conception may overcome the opposition between universalism and contextualism, which is relevant in current ethical discourse.

Legal Realism and Legal Reasoning: A Quasi-Realist Approach

Legal philosophers who espouse an expressivist (or non-cognitivist) meta-ethics may fairly be said to have adopted an anti-normativist position in law. This is so because they hold that moral statements do not aim to report (moral) facts or to describe the (moral) world, but aim instead to express the speaker’s attitudes, preferences, or emotions and thereby to influence the audience, and because they typically also hold that there simply is no normativity in the world. Scandinavian realist Karl Olivecrona, for example, maintains that legal rules are best conceived as independent imperatives, which cannot establish legal relations but which can cause human behavior, and that they can do this because the citizens respect the constitution and so are disposed to obey rules that can be traced back to the constitution. He also maintains that there is no such thing as the binding force of law, arguing that the reason why so many people nevertheless believe in the binding force of law is that they misunderstand the nature of legal statements and fail to see that they do nothing more than express the attitudes (preferences, emotions) of the speaker. One could, however, object to Olivecrona’s position, and to the expressivist position more generally, that it cannot account for our practice of discussing questions of legal interpretation and application. For it is clear that we often make use of fact-stating language and assume that in many cases there are right and wrong answers to legal questions. Although I accept moral anti-realism and am sympathetic to Olivecrona’s position, I agree with the critics that the expressivist position in general is a bit problematic in this sense; and I would therefore like to consider in this article Simon Blackburn’s quasi-realism, which aims to account, on the basis of expressivism, for any objectivist (or realist) features of moral (or legal) discourse and to earn in this way the right to discuss moral (or legal) questions using fact-stating language. I am going to argue (1) that in order to understand legal reasoning one needs to distinguish between first-order and second-order legal statements and between two types of first-order legal statements, namely, between committed statements and detached statements, and to be clear about which type of statement one is concerned with; and (2) that, on an expressivist analysis, first-order legal statements are not normative at all. I am also going to argue (3) that Scandinavian realist Karl Olivecrona’s anti-normativism is indeed problematic, (4) that expressivism in general is problematic, too, and (5) that Simon Blackburn’s quasi-realism can provide us with an interesting, and in many ways attractive, account of our practice(s) of legal reasoning, conceived as resting on an expressivist foundation. However, I am also going to argue (6) that the modest version of quasi-realism is problematic, because it assumes that clashing attitudes (which are assumed to lack truth-value) are inconsistent; and (7) that ambitious quasi-realism is even more problematic, primarily (i) because it assumes that there is such a thing as a best possible set of attitudes, but also (ii) because it might be self-defeating.

Structuri tematice în proza poetică a Magdei Isanos

According to Elizabeth Isanos, Magda Isanos has written many short prose texts but have scattered during the difficult journeys between Iasi, Costiujeni and Bucharest. Many of them stayed in Costiujeni, the first refuge in Bessarabia, when the family went hurriedly, without luggage and without the notebooks of Magda Isanos. Other sketches were lost in March 1944, due to an explosion that took place in the courtyard of the house. The existing texts show the poet's predisposition for the lyrical-epic presentation, which is left unattended in the given genre. Agitated by war, regime changes, and people's brutality, time was not enduring with Magda Isanos, throwing her from one place to another, leaving her the opportunity to write prose, asking for peace and quiet. The first works, Puzzles and Inseparable, reconstruct high school scenes from a moral-affective angle. The others, published after a few years in the Iaşi press, include impressions, fairy fragments and moral statements. The Magistrata text, published in 1938, is certainly a form of the woman's work in our literature with which Magda Isanos attended the conference in 1934. The poet promotes the emancipation of the woman, believing it to be natural. After her death, she was made known short short prose with common characters: Naiada, Miss Vanda, Toto and Man with red boots. There are essays that show Magda Isanos's preference for mystical subjects, with bizarre, lonely characters with situations in a small city. The mirror gate is an unpainted text, probably written during the Iasi period. Between 1934 and 1937, it is an exceptional essay about refuge in the unreal, about the force of attraction of fiction and the need to complete in the spiritual.

Sellars’ metaethical quasi-realism

In this article, I expound and defend an interpretation of Sellars as a metaethical quasi-realist. Sellars analyzes moral discourse in non-cognitivist terms: in particular, he analyzes “ought”-statements as expressions of collective intentions deriving from a collective commitment to provide for the general welfare. But he also endorses a functional-role theory of meaning, on which a statement’s meaning is grounded in its being governed by semantical rules concerning language entry, intra-linguistic, and language departure transitions, and a theory of truth as correct assertibility relative to such semantical rules. On these non-representationalist theories, even though moral statements are expressions of intentions and not fundamentally descriptive, they nevertheless count as assertorically meaningful, and some count as positively true. I further argue that this interpretation is capable not only of explaining Sellars’ explicitly metaethical writings, but also of unifying his scientific realism with his commitment to the ineliminable and indispensable role of the language of intentions: if this linguistic framework does not play an explanatory role, but only an expressive role, this explains both why Sellars’ commitment to it does not contravene his naturalism, as well as why, given the necessity of such language for our practical engagement with the world, the scientific image of humans in the world will only be completed once such language supplements it to enable us to relate practically to it.

Teoria do Erro: uma avaliação crítica

Entre as modernas teorias em Metaética a Teoria do Erro de John Mackie é uma das mais influentes. Isso não é acidental. A teoria de Mackie é nova, é interessante e está apoiada em argumentos claros e desafiadores. A despeito de tudo isso, aqui uma crítica às principais teses de Mackie será apresentada. Em primeiro lugar se sustentará que se o seu principal argumento, o argumento do caráter estranho, é tomado como aceitável, o que se segue não é a falsidade sistemática dos enunciados morais, como Mackie alega, mas algo diferente. Em segundo lugar, argumentar-se-á que o próprio argumento do caráter estranho não é aceitável. O resultado é uma rejeição dos pontos principais da teoria de Mackie.

Political Identity, Type of Victim, and Hate Crime‐Related Beliefs as Predictors of Views Concerning Hate Crime Penalty Enhancement Laws

AbstractLittle empirical work exists examining predictors of support or opposition of hate crime penalty enhancement laws despite such laws remaining a socially and politically contentious issue. Grounded in legal and philosophical arguments concerning hate crime laws, we tested political identity, victim minority status, and hate crime‐related beliefs as predictors of perceptions concerning penalty enhancement laws for bias‐motivated crime. Jury‐eligible Texas community members (n = 382) participating in a community survey of social and legal attitudes took part in the present study. Participants read a vignette of a hate‐motivated homicide that varied victim type (African American, gay, transgender) and answered questions regarding demographics, political identity, and hate crime penalty enhancement support. Qualitatively coded hate crime‐related beliefs yielded the following categories: legal arguments, moral statements, victim‐related beliefs, offender‐related beliefs, and an “other” category. Political identity, legal arguments, victim‐related and offender‐related beliefs all predicted views of penalty enhancement laws in logistic regression analyses. Exploratory mediation tests identified two pathways: (1) political conservatism–legal arguments–penalty enhancement opposition, and (2) political liberalism–offender beliefs–penalty enhancement support. Implications concerning social justice, public policy, trial consultation practice, and future research are discussed.

Šeima kaip privatinės teisės institutas ir esminis viešosios teisės integralumo veiksnys

Straipsnyje, pateikiant teorinį viešosios ir privatinės teisės santykio aiškinimą, siekiama pažvelgti į visuomenės moralines nuostatas dėl šeimos instituto teisinio reguliavimo. Kritikuojama nekorektiškai aiškinama valstybės teisinio neutralumo tezė, pagal kurią, šeimos kūrimas yra visiškai autonominis privačių subjektų reikalas, ir todėl valstybė negali piršti kokio nors šeimos idealo. Parodoma, kad tokia pozicija remiasi nekritišku teisės ir moralės skyrimu, teisei ir moralei bendrų universalių vertybių neigimu. Straipsnyje teigiama, kad liberaliojoje teisės doktrinoje, remiantis visuomenės kolektyvinėmis etinėmis nuostatomis, neišvengiamai preziumuojama kaip viešosios teisės imperatyvas individo unikali prigimtis, jo teisės į lygybę ir pasirinkimo laisvę. Tokiu būdu parodoma, kad privatinės teisės kompetenciją ginti individų laisvą susitarimą lemia ne jų individuali gamtinė, bet visuomeninė kolektyvinė būtis. Remiantis visuomenės narių laisvės ir lygybės bendruomenine kilme, nagrinėjama šeimos instituto pagrindinė prokreacinė funkcija, kurios reikalauja bendruomeninis identitetas (bendruomenės siekis išlikti istorijoje). Parodoma, kad, valstybei proteguojant skirtingų lyčių santuokas, ne paneigiama individų pasirinkimo laisvė, bet, atvirkščiai, pasirinkimo laisvei suteikiamas prasmingas turinys, kuris išplaukia iš universalių vertybių, bendrų teisei ir moralei. Straipsnyje teigiama, kad siekis sumenkinti tradicinės šeimos socialinę svarbą yra grėsmingas, nes pažeidžia pagrindinį socialinės integracijos modelių šaltinį – tradicinę šeimą.

РАЗМЫШЛЯЯ О ЛИЧНОСТИ И. БРОДСКОГО (НА МАТЕРИАЛЕ ВОСПОМИНАНИЙ КАРЛА ПРОФФЕРА)

The aim of the author is to emphasize in the life and personality of J. Brodsky some important moments based upon memories of K. Proffer. Analysis of poet’s moral statements is being made, as well as his attitude to the “red” socialist as a dominant evaluative criteria, manifested in his assessments of contemporary writers. The analysis reveals choked consciousness of Brodsky in exile as well as high importance of his history of love - “feeling incredibly strong and long”. All these points witnesses that Brodsky was a personality tragic destiny and unique originality.

Historicizing social inequality: A Victorian archive for contemporary moral discourse

Starting from the uniformity of moral statements about social inequality during the Obama presidency, this article historicizes those statements by analyzing an archive of discourse drawn from Victorian England. Despite its distance in time and place, the archive reveals striking commonalities with the terms and phrases that invariably populate debates about social inequality in the American political field today. Drawing on critical theories of the archive, this article leverages those commonalities for the hermeneutic purpose of historicizing moral discourse. As I argue, moral statements like “equality of opportunity” and “equality of reward/outcome” resulted from the application of civil ideas and oppositions to interpret phenomena like poverty and social inequality during the eventful history of the Victorian period. The findings challenge T.H. Marshall’s classic argument about the origin of social rights as descendent of civil rights. The article concludes by discussing the broader implications of historicizing moral discourse, demonstrating the reflexive use of the archive to engage in a politics of meaning about social inequality.

The neural correlates of moral decision-making: A systematic review and meta-analysis of moral evaluations and response decision judgements

The aims of this systematic review were to determine: (a) which brain areas are consistently more active when making (i) moral response decisions, defined as choosing a response to a moral dilemma, or deciding whether to accept a proposed solution, or (ii) moral evaluations, defined as judging the appropriateness of another’s actions in a moral dilemma, rating moral statements as right or wrong, or identifying important moral issues; and (b) shared and significantly different activation patterns for these two types of moral judgements. A systematic search of the literature returned 28 experiments. Activation likelihood estimate analysis identified the brain areas commonly more active for moral response decisions and for moral evaluations. Conjunction analysis revealed shared activation for both types of moral judgement in the left middle temporal gyrus, cingulate gyrus, and medial frontal gyrus. Contrast analyses found no significant clusters of increased activation for the moral evaluations-moral response decisions contrast, but found that moral response decisions additionally activated the left and right middle temporal gyrus and the right precuneus. Making one’s own moral decisions involves different brain areas compared to judging the moral actions of others, implying that these judgements may involve different processes.

Sprawiedliwość polityczna a neutralność. Kilka uwag o rozumnej naturze liberalizmu politycznego Johna Rawlsa i Charlesa Larmore’a

Two fundamental features of a liberal political community are usually identified in contemporary deliberations: (1) there is an inevitable pluralism of visions of good and worthy life, blended into a wide range of religious, philosophical and ethical positions; (2) those who are in power are under an obligation to set public matters in such a way as to avoid discrimination of any class of the ruled. In respect of (1) and (2), it is presumed that the process of enacting, implementing and executing public law shall be separated from any perfectionist moral position, because being impartial when making political decisions is a prerequisite for non-discriminatory politics. This kind of politics looks for proper, convincing and comprehensible reasons to establish a new legal standard of behaviour in the ‘public reason’ – a set of moral statements and political values commonly shared in an open, pluralistic and tolerant society, which does not provide decisive answers to any questions about the meaning of life and does not bring us closer to discover its ideal. This article tries to reproduce the main notions and ideas of leading, contemporary liberal philosophers – John Rawls and Charles Larmore – that deal with the very nature of impartiality of a liberal state and the ability of policymakers to be impartial. It also presents the critical views of Stephen Macedo and Nicholas Wolterstorff, who question the possibility of building a neutral state.

Reasons, inescapability and persuasion

This paper outlines a new metasemantic theory of moral reason statements, focused on explaining how the reasons thus stated can be inescapable. The motivation for the theory is in part that it can explain this and other phenomena concerning moral reasons. The account also suggests a general recipe for explanations of conceptual features of moral reason statements.

Human Rights and Cultural Identity

Abstract Universal human rights and particular cultural identities, which are relativistic by nature, seem to stand in conflict with each other. It is commonly suggested that the relativistic natures of cultural identities undermine universal human rights and that human rights might compromise particular cultural identities in a globalised world. This article examines this supposed clash and suggests that it is possible to frame a human rights approach in such a way that it becomes the starting point and constraining framework for all non-deficient cultural identities. In other words, it is possible to depict human rights in a culturally sensitive way so that universal human rights can meet the demands of a moderate version of meta-ethical relativism which acknowledges a small universal core of objectively true or false moral statements and avers that, beyond that small core, all other moral statements are neither objectively true nor false.

Natural Morality, Descriptivism, and Non-Cognitivism

I attempt to identify a problem running through the foundation of R. M. Hare’s ethical prescriptivism and the more recent sentimentalism/ethical expressivism of Simon Blackburn. The non-cognitivism to which Hare and Blackburn’s approaches are committed renders them unable to establish stable contents for basic moral principles and, thus, incapable of conducting a logical analysis of moral terms or statements. I argue that objective-descriptive-natural ethical theories are in a much better position to provide a satisfying account of the logical analysis of moral terms or statements. Such ethical theories can arrive at basic moral principles with stable contents, thus paving the way for the kind of descriptive approach that can accommodate stable truth conditions. This, in turn, provides stable grounds for the logical analysis of moral terms and statements.

An appraisal of moral realism

The objective of many ethical theories is to provide guidelines which will help human beings to make moral decisions. Some of these theories which attempt to provide norms of conduct include deontologism, consequentialism and virtue theories. But beyond the interest in good moral conduct is also an interest in knowing whether the moral decisions which we make are true or false. Surely, it makes sense to ask whether moral statements are true or false. Those who are interested in unraveling this issue must ask themselves whether moral concepts or issues can be regarded as “facts” in the sense that they can be shown to be either true or false when they occur in propositions. Moral realism is a meta-ethical theory which is not focused on providing rules of conduct but with the truth or falsity of moral statements. I shall argue that the concern with the truth-value of moral statements, as being objective in nature, is not without some problems. This is without prejudice to some of the benefits of the theory. Keywords : Moral; Realism; Deontologism, Virtue Consequentialism; Ethica, Objectivism

On Walter Dubislav

This paper outlines the intellectual biography of Walter Dubislav. Besides being a leading member of the Berlin Group headed by Hans Reichenbach, Dubislav played a defining role as well in the Society for Empirical/Scientific Philosophy in Berlin. A student of David Hilbert, Dubislav applied the method of axiomatic to produce original work in logic and formalist philosophy of mathematics. He also introduced the elements of a formalist philosophy of science and addressed more general problems concerning the substantiation of human knowledge. What set Dubislav apart from the other logical empiricists was his expertise in the history of logic and exact philosophy which enabled him to elucidate and advance the thinking in both disciplines. In the realm of logic proper, Dubislav is best known for his pioneering work in theory of definitions. What is more, he did original work on the so called ‘quasi truth-tables’ which aided Reichenbach in developing his logic of probability. Dubislav also elaborated an influential logic of moral statements.

A dilemma for wolterstorff’s theistic grounding of human dignity and rights

In a number of recent works, Nicholas Wolterstorff defends the claim that human rights inhere in the dignity of every human. He further contends that the explanation of this dignity cannot be found in the intrinsic features of humans; rather, the only plausible explanation for human dignity is that it is bestowed upon humans by God’s love. In this paper, I argue that Wolterstorff’s theory concerning the ground of human dignity falls prey to something quite similar to the classic Euthyphro dilemma: either God must love every existing human in a dignity-bestowing manner or he need not, and either option is problematic. If the former, then whatever it is about humans that ensures God’s love can reasonably be thought to be the independent source of human dignity and/or rights, thereby leaving us without cause to appeal to God’s love for the explanation of this dignity. If the latter, the implication is that moral statements which appear to be necessarily true are only contingently so. Wolterstorff’s theory will thus require substantial modification, or else abandonment.