Moral Aims: Essays on the Importance of Getting It Right and Practicing Morality with Others
Cheshire Calhoun
Abstract
We have two moral aims connected to two different conceptions of morality. From a critical, reflective point of view, we aim to get it right—to identify the Morality that would be operative in a hypothetical social world whose participants could access the correct moral norms. From a participant point of view, we aim to practice morality with others—to enact Morality as an actual scheme of social cooperation whose shared moral understandings enable us to effectively make demands, offer excuses, justify choices, express moral attitudes, and the like. If misguided social practices of morality se ... More
We have two moral aims connected to two different conceptions of morality. From a critical, reflective point of view, we aim to get it right—to identify the Morality that would be operative in a hypothetical social world whose participants could access the correct moral norms. From a participant point of view, we aim to practice morality with others—to enact Morality as an actual scheme of social cooperation whose shared moral understandings enable us to effectively make demands, offer excuses, justify choices, express moral attitudes, and the like. If misguided social practices of morality seem not to be genuine Morality under the first conception, merely hypothetical practices of morality seem not to be the genuine article under the second conception. This book views both conceptions as indispensable. But exactly how do we simultaneously work with two different conceptions of morality? The goal is not to construct an overarching methodology for handling the two conceptions, but to provide case studies of that work being done.
Keywords:
morality,
social practice,
moral aims
Bibliographic Information
| Print publication date: 2016 |
Print ISBN-13: 9780199328796 |
| Published to Oxford Scholarship Online: November 2015 |
DOI:10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199328796.001.0001 |
