The Puzzle of Pure Moral Motivation

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Adam Lerner
Keyword(s):  
Moral Motivation ◽  
Moral Property ◽  
Moral Inquiry ◽  
Ordinary People ◽  
Moral Properties ◽  
State Of Affairs

People engage in pure moral inquiry whenever they inquire into the moral features of some act, agent, or state of affairs without inquiring into the non-moral features of that act, agent, or state of affairs. The first section of this chapter argues that ordinary people act rationally when they engage in pure moral inquiry, and so any adequate view in metaethics ought to be able to explain this fact. The Puzzle of Pure Moral Motivation is to provide such an explanation. The remaining sections of the chapter argue that each of the standard views in metaethics has trouble providing such an explanation. A metaethical view can provide such an explanation only if it meets two constraints: it allows ordinary moral inquirers to know the essences of moral properties, and the essence of each moral property makes it rational to care for its own sake whether that property is instantiated.

Dispositional Moral Properties and Moral Motivation

Theoria ◽  
2008 ◽  
Vol 65 (2-3) ◽  
pp. 171-192
Author(s):  
CAJ STRANDBERG
Keyword(s):  
Moral Motivation ◽  
Moral Properties

Conclusion

2013 ◽  
Author(s):  
Robert Audi
Keyword(s):  
Moral Judgment ◽  
Natural World ◽  
The Self ◽  
Moral Perception ◽  
Moral Property ◽  
Full Account ◽  
Natural Properties ◽  
Necessary Truth ◽  
Moral Properties ◽  
Perceptual Capacity

This concluding chapter explains how the theory of moral perception takes full account of the causal element in perception but does not require naturalizing moral properties. However, the theory does require that moral properties have a base in the natural world. They are anchored in the natural world in a way that makes possible moral knowledge and the ethical objectivity that goes with it. The bridge from their naturalistic base to moral judgment often has the intelligibility of the self-evident, and under some conditions it has the reliability of necessary truth. Seeing that an act or a person has a moral property may itself be a manifestation of an intuitive perceptual capacity that has considerable discriminative subtlety regarding descriptive natural properties.

Moral Status and the Consciousness Criterion

2021 ◽  
pp. 171-213
Author(s):  
L. Syd M Johnson
Keyword(s):  
Moral Status ◽  
Moral Agent ◽  
Necessary Condition ◽  
Moral Property ◽  
Special Value ◽  
Moral Properties

The Consciousness Criterion is the claim that moral status requires consciousness, or that being conscious is a necessary condition for being a person. The idea that consciousness imbues an entity with special value, or moral status, is widely accepted in Western cultures. So much so that it is hardly questioned. It should be questioned. This chapter shows that the Consciousness Criterion fails for two reasons: 1) consciousness is not a moral property, and consciousness alone is not sufficient to ground moral properties (like being autonomous, or being a moral agent), and 2) conscious creatures cannot be identified with certainty, so consciousness is not epistemically robust enough to undergird personhood or moral status. Thus consciousness cannot be a necessary condition for being a person. The moral status project of deciding who is and is not a person is rejected as uninformative concerning what is ethically permissible.

Romance, Satire, and the Exploitation of Disorder

2019 ◽  
pp. 319-335
Author(s):  
Jonathan Lamb
Keyword(s):  
The Novel ◽  
Ordinary People ◽  
Comic Novel ◽  
State Of Affairs

This chapter follows Swift’s hint that our best ideas are inevitably adjacent to, or productive of, the worst: goodness is girdled by corruption, wit by madness, novelty by repetition. In satire this state of affairs is a cause for alarm, indignation, and reproof; in romance it is proof of glory excessive to all norms. The potential frenzy of the satirist is controlled by irony; the moral and historical disorder of romance is tempered by ritual and mannerism. How is the novel, the inheritor of these two traditions of fiction, to accommodate such extreme alternatives, given that its mission is to render probable the lives of ordinary people possessed of usual portions of intelligence and virtue? The answer is to reassert the importance of Cervantes to the development of the comic novel, where the elliptical tension between a bright idea and its reverse is sustained by anarchic oscillations between too much and too little.

The faces of pessimism

2019 ◽  
Vol 42 ◽  
Author(s):  
John M. Doris
Keyword(s):  
Moral Inquiry

Abstract In this commentary on May's Regard for Reason in the Moral Mind, I argue that many of the interdisciplinary moral psychologists whom May terms “pessimists” are often considerably more optimistic about the prospects for progress in moral inquiry than he contends.

The Need for a Broad-Based Model of Phonological Disorders

1992 ◽  
Vol 23 (3) ◽  
pp. 261-268 ◽  
Author(s):  
Alan G. Kamhi
Keyword(s):  
Speech Production ◽  
Phonological Disorders ◽  
Production Processes ◽  
Assessment And Treatment ◽  
Speech Delays ◽  
Explanatory Adequacy ◽  
State Of Affairs ◽  
Assessment Procedures ◽  
Treatment Procedures

My response to Fey’s article (1985; reprinted 1992, this issue) focuses on the confusion caused by the application of simplistic phonological definitions and models to the assessment and treatment of children with speech delays. In addition to having no explanatory adequacy, such definitions/models lead either to assessment and treatment procedures that are similarly focused or to procedures that have no clear logical ties to the models with which they supposedly are linked. Narrowly focused models and definitions also usually include no mention of speech production processes. Bemoaning this state of affairs, I attempt to show why it is important for clinicians to embrace broad-based models of phonological disorders that have some explanatory value. Such models are consistent with assessment procedures that are comprehensive in nature and treatment procedures that focus on linguistic, as well as motoric, aspects of speech.

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