What Can Philosophy Contribute To Ethics?
James Griffin
Abstract
Ethics appears early in the life of a culture. It is not the creation of philosophers. Many philosophers today think that their job is to take the ethics of their society in hand, analyse it into parts, purge the bad ideas, and organize the good into a systematic moral theory. The philosophers’ ethics that results is likely to be very different from the culture’s raw ethics and, they think, being better, should replace it. But few of us, even among philosophers, settle real-life moral questions by consulting the Categorical Imperative or the Principle of Utility, largely because, if we do, we ... More
Ethics appears early in the life of a culture. It is not the creation of philosophers. Many philosophers today think that their job is to take the ethics of their society in hand, analyse it into parts, purge the bad ideas, and organize the good into a systematic moral theory. The philosophers’ ethics that results is likely to be very different from the culture’s raw ethics and, they think, being better, should replace it. But few of us, even among philosophers, settle real-life moral questions by consulting the Categorical Imperative or the Principle of Utility, largely because, if we do, we often do not trust the outcome or cannot even reliably enough decide what it is. By contrast, this book explores the question of what philosophers can reasonably expect to contribute to normative ethics or to the ethics of a culture. The book argues that moral philosophers must tailor their work to ordinary humans’ motivational capabilities, and it offers a new account of moral deliberation.
Keywords:
ethics,
moral theory,
moral philosophers,
Categorical Imperative,
Principle of Utility,
normative ethics,
culture
Bibliographic Information
| Print publication date: 2015 |
Print ISBN-13: 9780198748090 |
| Published to Oxford Scholarship Online: December 2015 |
DOI:10.1093/acprof:oso/9780198748090.001.0001 |
