metaethics after moore mar 2006

[...]... doctrine in Moore s metaethics is his view that goodness is a non-natural property Many have found this hard to accept, partly because the claim itself is so obscure In his paper ‘Was Moore a Moorean?’, Jamie Dreier traces Moore s attempts, beginning in PE up though his 1922 ‘The Conception of Intrinsic Value’,⁴ to characterize the difference between ⁴ This paper appeared originally in chapter VII of Moore s... property for Moore Based on certain textual clues, Dreier proposes that Moore misdescribed the distinction he sought to capture in his natural/non-natural properties distinction What Moore was after, claims Dreier, is more aptly put as a distinction between description and evaluation—a distinction central to expressivist views So why wasn’t Moore an expressivist? Expressivists generally agree with Moore that... to Smith, Moore s conception of right action represents an appropriate idealization of a plausible account of rational decision making Moral semantics Moore famously began the 100 years of metaethics with his open question argument—which he thought exposed the fallaciousness of all ‘reductive’ accounts of moral terms and concepts On the basis of this argument, Moore concluded that the primary concept... appear, and well over 350 with Moore and ‘ethics’ (subtracting those concerned with other Moores, like A W Moore, Asher Moore, etc.) How Should Ethics Relate to Philosophy? 19 experience’ (a claim to which we shall return in due course).⁶ Clear as he was about this, however, Sidgwick did not give analysis of ethical terms and ideas the methodological emphasis that Moore would The methodological priority... good reason to accept Moore s definition and thus good reason to resist tying our primary notion of right action to the concept of what we can hold an agent responsible for But adopting Moore s conception of right action might seem to be in tension with his modified ² ‘Decision-Theoretic Consequentialism and the Nearest and Dearest Objection’, Ethics, 101 (1991) 6 Terry Horgan and Mark Timmons Jackson-style... This page intentionally left blank Introduction Terry Horgan and Mark Timmons Metaethics, understood as a distinct branch of ethics, is often traced to G E Moore s 1903 classic Principia Ethica (PE) Whereas normative ethics is concerned to answer first-order moral questions about what is good and bad, right and wrong, virtuous and vicious, metaethics is concerned to answer second-order non-moral questions,... that reflects the rich philosophical heritage of Moore s PE They are organized in relation to central metaethical claims defended by Moore claims that can be put into four main groups: the subject matter of ethics, moral semantics, moral metaphysics, and moral epistemology In what immediately follows we will briefly summarize the papers, relating them to Moore s metaethical views The subject matter of... papers by Audi and Rosati concern aspects of Moore s theory of intrinsic value In ‘Intrinsic Value and Reasons for Action’, Audi sketches a theory of intrinsic value that aims to incorporate certain elements of Moore s theory, but which goes beyond it in important ways while also avoiding commitment to many of Moore s controversial normative and metaethical views Moore held that experiences and non-experiential... philosophical Conclusion: expanding metaethics If we stand back far enough from the metaethical fray of the past one hundred or so years to see if we can view general trends or developments with this field, we notice some basic contrasts between metaethics as practiced throughout much of the twentieth century and metaethics now In at least three ways Introduction 15 metaethics has expanded: in its methodology,... and Gibbard.⁷ Metaethics, appropriately expanded, continues to flourish ⁷ For a recent attempt to wed expressivist themes to moral realism, see David Copp, ‘RealistExpressivism: A Neglected Option for Moral Realism’, Social Philosophy & Policy, 18 (2001) This page intentionally left blank 1 How Should Ethics Relate to (the Rest of ) Philosophy? Moore s Legacy Stephen Darwall 1 Moore and metaethics From .