Moral Words Research Articles

How Not to Refute Ethical Egoism

I wish here to consider a certain type of argument often produced as a refutation of ethical egoism. Such an argument asks us to consider a situation in which the interests of two people conflict. It is then pointed out that the consequence of applying both ethical egoism and some widely accepted conceptual truth concerning the moral words to this situation is in some way ‘absurd’. Ethical egoism is therefore to be rejected. My strategy, in trying to show that this kind of argument is unsound, is this: I will first produce a simple refutation of ethical egoism of my own; I will show why it is unsound; I will try to show that these other arguments fail in the same way.

Towards a phenomenology of morals

For some time now moral philosophy in the English‐speaking world has been largely confined to analysis and examination of moral terminology. Hare, for example, has described Ethics as a ‘theory which determines the meanings and functions of the moral words’. The present paper questions whether there can be some set of logical and semantic tests which can be devised for distinguishing moral from non‐moral discourse. The values of a society, and hence the language in which these values are expressed, cannot be identified and examined independently of the social, political, economic and cultural relations which characterize the given society. These relations themselves are subject to historic change — and with them the moral vocabulary. The search for some semantic characteristic that moral judgments have in common not only restricts the scope of Ethics to no good purpose, but ironically enough also fails to shed much light on certain English sentences which are genuinely problematic from the point of view o...

A Reply to Mr. Taylor

IN HIS recent article, The Normative Function of Metaethics,' Mr. Paul Taylor makes a number of criticisms of an earlier paper of mine that was addressed to the same subject.2 In that paper, I argued that, whatever merits the emotive theory may possess, it is not an accurate description of the way ordinarily use moral words; and I tried to show how the adoption of an emotivist metaethic would modify the style of the moral life although not necessarily its content. My arguments were not intended to show that the emotive theory must be rejected, but rather that its acceptance should not be urged on the ground that it is descriptively accurate. My primary interest was the general problem of the relation of analyses to first-order moral and I used the emotive theory simply as a specimen metaethic to suggest that, at least one case, the prevailing view of the relationship between these different levels of moral discourse might be mistaken. Taylor's criticism of my line of argument is twofold. First, he thinks I have confused the emotive theory with subjectivism. He agrees that there are genuine discrepancies between subjectivism and the precritical assumptions of common sense, but he is sure that this is not true of the emotive theory, at least in its more recent and sophisticated form. Second, even when subjectivism and the earlier, less sophisticated emotivism do run counter to the common sense view, they are not therefore, as Taylor says I tend to suppose, misdescribing the way actually use moral words but rather contradicting certain second-order beliefs, assumptions, or views about [one's] own and others' first-order moral discourse, which may very well be erroneous.3 Taylor thinks that, if I had observed this crucial distinction, I would not have been misled into the belief that must either reject the emotive theory or find a way of defending it that does not involve the claim that it is descriptively accurate. Taylor's own view is that we may accept the emotive theory (or whatever 'theory' would constitute a faithful explication of ordinarymoral discourse) both as a true descriptive account of ordinary moral discourse and at the same time as an acceptable guide for changing our moral life, including ultimately changing

Objectivity in Morals

It is remarkable that we have to-day a number of philosophers who call themselves subjectivists in moral philosophy. For, although the name “subjectivist” is by no means new, philosophers have reserved it hitherto for their opponents, and usually for imaginary opponents at that. Perhaps the chief cause of the change which has taken place in recent years is the discovery of a distinction between descriptive and emotive meaning. In the past the only form of subjectivism considered by writers on moral philosophy was the suggestion that moral sentences such as “You ought to do that” were statements about the speaker's own attitude; and it was easy to refute this by pointing out that we discuss questions of morals in a way which would be unintelligent, and even unintelligible, if moral judgments were only reports of introspection. But those who now call themselves subjectivists maintain that the peculiarity of moral words is their expressive and evocative power. According to their analysis, a speaker who uses one of these words in an indicative sentence may be stating nothing at all, but is undoubtedly trying to influence others (and perhaps also himself) to adopt a certain attitude. This, they say, explains how there can be genuine disagreement about questions of morals and why discussion may produce results. If A tries to evoke one attitude in his hearers and B tries to evoke an incompatible attitude, their utterances are opposed, not indeed like contradictory statements, but rather like the efforts of men engaged in a tug-of-war.