文档介绍：: Problems of Philosophy
Prof. Sally Haslanger
December 10, 2001
(Meta-)Ethical Subjectivism (or Non-cognitivism)
For the past couple of weeks we have been focusing on the following questions:
i) Which acts are right and which are wrong? Which acts ought we to perform?
ii) What makes an action right or wrong? What about the action determines its moral status?
Our third question has received less attention:
iii) How do we know what is right and wrong?
This last question is especially pressing for those who maintain that morality is an objective matter, that there are objective
moral facts that serve as a basis for moral evaluation. Several questions immediately emerge for such a view: if there are
objective moral facts, why is there so much moral disagreement? What sort of things are these moral facts supposed to be?
Unlike ordinary physical facts, moral facts are not knowable by observation: we don't see or taste that lying is wrong, and
such facts are not part of our physical theories. But then where are such facts supposed to reside and how do we gain
access to them?
The moral relativist might seem to have a strategy for responding to these concerns: moral facts are just facts about what
societies approve/disapprove of. One version of cultural relativism is:
An action is morally right iff it is permitted by the ultimate mores of the soc