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The Status of Morality

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哲学导论

爱丁堡大学

4.6（3,648 個評分） | 290K 名學生已註冊

This course will introduce you to some of the main areas of research in contemporary philosophy. Each module a different philosopher will talk you through some of the most important questions and issues in their area of expertise. We’ll begin by trying to understand what philosophy is – what are its characteristic aims and methods, and how does it differ from other subjects? Then we’ll spend the rest of the course gaining an introductory overview of several different areas of philosophy. Topics you’ll learn about will include: Epistemology, where we’ll consider what our knowledge of the world and ourselves consists in, and how we come to have it; Philosophy of science, where we’ll investigate foundational conceptual issues in scientific research and practice; Philosophy of Mind, where we’ll ask questions about what it means for something to have a mind, and how minds should be understood and explained; Political Philosophy, where we'll investigate whether we have an obligation to obey the law; Moral Philosophy, where we’ll attempt to understand the nature of our moral judgements and reactions – whether they aim at some objective moral truth, or are mere personal or cultural preferences, and; Metaphysics, where we’ll think through some fundamental conceptual questions about free will and the nature of reality. The development of this MOOC has been led by the University of Edinburgh's Eidyn research centre. To accompany 'Introduction to Philosophy', we are pleased to announce a tie-in book from Routledge entitled 'Philosophy for Everyone'. This course companion to the 'Introduction to Philosophy' course was written by the Edinburgh Philosophy team expressly with the needs of MOOC students in mind. 'Philosophy for Everyone' contains clear and user-friendly chapters, chapter summaries, glossary, study questions, suggestions for further reading and guides to online resources. Please click "Start Here" and navigate to the "Optional Reading" page for more information.

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4.6（3,648 個評分）

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AR

Jul 06, 2017

I found this course incredibly stimulating. A wonderfully structured introduction to European philosophy. All modules well presented. How lucky we are to have learning like this at our fingertips.

SD

Jul 04, 2019

This course is my first ever serious attempt to know Philosophy and it has been an excellent opportunity to know about different facets of modern Philosophy. I am curious to know more now! Thanks!

從本節課中

Morality: Objective, Relative or Emotive?

(Dr. Matthew Chrisman) We all live with some sense of what is good or bad, some feelings about which ways of conducting ourselves are better or worse. But what is the status of these moral beliefs, senses, or feelings? Should we think of them as reflecting hard, objective facts about our world, of the sort that scientists could uncover and study? Or should we think of moral judgements as mere expressions of personal or cultural preferences? In this module we’ll survey some of the different options that are available when we’re thinking about these issues, and the problems and prospects for each.

The Status of Morality11:26

Objectivism, Relativism and Emotivism13:24

教學方

Dr. Dave Ward
Lecturer in Philosophy
Professor Duncan Pritchard
Professor of Philosophy
Professor Michela Massimi
Full Professor
Dr. Suilin Lavelle
Lecturer in Philosophy
Dr. Matthew Chrisman
Reader in Philosophy
Dr. Allan Hazlett
Dr. Alasdair Richmond
Dr.
Guy Fletcher
Lecturer
Elinor Mason
Senior Lecturer

腳本

Hello, and welcome back to the Introduction

to Philosophy course at the University of Edinburgh.

My name's Matthew Chrisman.

I'm a reader in philosophy here in

the School of Philosophy, Psychology & Language Sciences.

Today I want to talk to you about a topic

in moral philosophy that I call the status of morality.

What is morality? Well that's a really big question.

today what we'll focus on is

particular moral judgments and ask about their status.

What do I mean about particular moral judgments?

Well, I have in, in mind the everyday, day sort of judgments that we make

when we think something like what Pol

Pot did and the genocide was morally abhorrent.

Or giving to charity is a good thing to do.

but also the kind of moral judgments that ethical philosophers make.

They make judgments that are a little bit more abstract.

They say things

like, an action is right insofar as it

maximizes overall happiness, or one ought to always

act in a way that one could will one's reason to be reasons for everyone else.

these are very abstract moral judgments made in ethical theory.

we have the particular moral judgments made in every day life.

Today, we won't be asking whether these are correct.

whether specific moral judgments or abstract moral

judgments are correct or incorrect.

Rather, we will be asking the status of these judgments.

What are we doing when we make such judgments?

Are we representing objective facts of matter?

Or are we describing our personal or cultural practices?

Are we depicting some element of the universe out there?

The moral facts.

Are we expressing our emotions toward things?

these are the types of questions

that we ask, when we ask about the status of morality.

So what I want to do today is, delve into that question a little bit more.

Try to understand the nature of the question.

What exactly are we asking, when we ask about the status of morality?

and then move on to three very general types

of approaches that philosophers have taken to this question.

So, one of these approaches, I'll call objectivism.

The idea that we are representing objective facts when we make

moral judgments.

Another approach is relativism, the idea that we're describing some kind

of cultural or personal relative practices when we make these judgments.

And the third idea is emotivism, that we're expressing

our emotions towards the world when we make these judgments.

So those will be the three general types of theories we'll talk about today after I

introduce the topic and we'll, and then we'll

think a little bit about objections and replies to

those theories.

One more comment before we get into the issues.

I'll be using examples of particular moral judgements as

we go along and I've chosen controversial examples on purpose.

I want you to see through the controversy why

it's important to think about the status of morality.

so some of the examples will be controversial

and some of them you might disagree with.

That's

fine.

today's question is not whether these particular judgments are right

or wrong but what we're doing when we make these judgments.

What is their status?

So at a later point in the lecture, I'll ask you to

come up with some examples of your own and controversial examples are good.

They help us to think about the status of morality.

So

today we're talking about the status of morality.

The status of moral judgements.

What are we doing when we judge that something's good or bad?

Right or wrong?

Virtuous or vicious?

One way to get your heads around that question is

to generate two lists and compare and contrast these lists.

So what I want to do now is generate a

list of empirical judgments, judgments about the empirically discoverable world.

And a list of moral judgments, judgments about

what's right and wrong, good and bad, etc.

so one way to think about an empirical

judgment is to think about something that was discovered.

A scientific discovery.

Here's a really famous scientific discovery.

The earth rotates around the sun.

Of course, for many, much of human history, people didn't believe that.

They thought that the sun rotated around the

earth, or they had some other cosmological theory.

But Copernicus, Kepler, and Galileo discovered

that the earth rotates around sun and

developed our contemporary cosmological theory, how

we understand the orbits of the planets.

The judgement, the earth rotates around the sun, that's an empirical judgement.

or the judgement that electricity has positive and negative charges.

Discovered by Benjamin Franklin explains

the flow of electricity.

That judgement is the judgement about the empirical world.

or consider Mendel's discovery that plants inherit some of

their traits genetically based on certain laws of inheritance.

that, that judgement, that plants inherit some of the traits

genetically, is an empirical judgement, judgement about the empirical world.

Or here's the final more contemporary example.

recently it was discovered that the so-called

God particle predicted by Edinburgh's own professor Peter Higgs exists.

That seems to be an empirical discovery about

a fundamental piece of the universe, but in order

to get empirical judgments on our list we

don't have to have these very impressive scientific discoveries.

We could also just think of more everyday judgments

like the judgment that lead is heavier than iron.

or the judgment, quite simply, that it was sunny today in Edinburgh.

or even the judgment that I, Matthew Chrisman, am less than six feet tall.

All of these are empirical judgements.

Judgements that we can verify by empirical observation.

Okay, now for our second list; Moral Judgements.

to generalize some examples of moral judgements, we can think about positive

moral things like giving to charity is good,

or taking care of your children is morally obligatory.

these are examples of positive moral judgements.

we can to that list something like, protesting something

you take to be a gross injustice is morally right.

That would be a moral judgement.

Of course more often actually I think we make negative moral judgements.

So we say things like Cain's

killing Abel out of jealousy was morally bad, was wrong

or Oedipus sleeping with his mother Jakasta was morally bad.

That would be a moral judgement. or, something like Pol Pot's genocidal

actions during the Khmer Rouge regime in Cambodia was morally abhorrent.

Genocide's morally abhorrent. Those would be moral judgments.

Or finally, a much more controversial one. Polygamy, the practice of one man having

multiple wives, or one woman having multiple husbands is morally dubious.

These are the types of judgements that we could put on our list as moral judgements.

Okay, so we've come up with two lists.

A list of empirical judgements and a list of moral judgements.

some of the items on our list are quite controversial.

so what I want you to do now is try to come up with some examples of your own.

They can be controversial examples or examples that you take to

be obvious, but come up with two examples of each type.

Two examples of empirical judgments about the

empirically discoverable world, and examples of moral

judgments about things like, what's right and

wrong, good and bad, virtuous, vicious, etc.

we'll take a second here and,

and let you come up with these examples.

It'd be helpful to write them down on a piece of paper

so that you can refer to them in the rest of this lecture.

Okay, hopefully you have, you have your own examples.

Two examples of empirical judgements and two examples of moral judgements.

Or if you want some more time, or time to

think about it, you can press pause in the video now.

For the rest of the lecture, I'm going to focus on examples

from my list.

Two examples of empirical judgements and two examples of moral judgements.

So here are the two examples of empirical judgements I'll use.

The sun rotates around the earth, and it was sunny in Edinburgh today.

And here are two examples of moral judgements that I'll use.

Genocide is morally wrong, or morally abhorrent.

and polygamy is morally dubious.

So focus on those as examples of moral judgements.

but you can also think about your own examples and ask the

same sorts of questions we're going to ask about these about your examples.

So now, what we've been doing is coming up with

these examples in order to better understand the question about

the status of morality.

I think the best way into that is to

think, to now ask some questions about these two lists.

So, many philosophers, and I think many ordinary people, have

felt that there's an important difference between the types of

judgements that go under the heading, empirical judgements, and the

types of judgements that go under the heading, moral judgements.

they feel like there's some, something

importantly different between these two things.

So one we could ask,

the first question I'll ask is are these judgements

the source of things that can be true or false?

So in the case of empirical judgements, it's quite natural to say, yes, of course.

Whereas some philosophers have thought, in the case of moral judgement, that

they're not the sort of thing that can be true or false.

They're mere opinions or mere expressions of our emotions.

now, other philosophers and other people have thought,

no, that's not right.

There's still a difference but, that's not the difference.

So we ask a second question.

If these are, if moral judgments are like empirical judgments, in that, in

that they can be true or false, what makes them true or false?

In the, in the empirical case, you might

think it's something about the objective human-independent facts.

what is it in, in the moral case?

and now we can ask a third question.

Are they objectively true or false?

So you might think the difference between those

two is, no they're not objectively true or false.

there are more judgements that are not

objectively true or false, they're only true or

false relative to a culture or a person or a sensibility or something like that.

now that's the kind of second group of true or false that I'll talk about.

The third group of false that I'll talk about deny

both of these initial ideas and say, moral judgements are

the sorts of things that can be true or false.

And there are also the sorts of things that can be made

true or false by objective facts, they are objectively true or false.

they aspire to objectivity just like comparable judgements.

So what I want to do in the rest of this lecture

is talk about these three philosophical approaches to the status of morality.

we'll talk about the objectivist idea that moral

judgments are just as objective as empirical judgments.

And then we'll talk about the relativist idea that moral judgments are importantly

different than empirical judgements in that they're relativised somehow.

And finally we'll talk about that motivist

idea that moral judgements aren't the sorts of

things that can be true or false, they

are mere opinions or expressions of our emotions.

We'll explore some of the advantages and

disadvantages of each of these theories and consider

some of the objections that proponents of one

or another theory levy against the other theories.

That's the plan for the rest of the lecture.

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