Objectivity and truth: You'd better believe it

Philosophy and Public Affairs

Volumn 25, Issue 2, 1996, Pages 87-139

  Dworkin, Ronald ^a  

^a NONE

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[No Author keywords available]

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EID: 0010915611     PISSN: 00483915     EISSN: 10884963     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1111/j.1088-4963.1996.tb00036.x     Document Type: Article

References (23)

1. "Skepticism" is used in different ways. I use it in the sense not of agnosticism but of rejection. I emphasize that different skeptics, even about morality, have different targets. The skeptics I mainly discuss claim to reject not morality but only certain philosophical opinions about it.
2. Whether a form of skepticism is properly understood as internal or selectively external to the domain it criticizes is often a complex interpretive question. Science-based skepticism about religion is internal, for example, if religion is understood to be itself part of the domain of science, as it should be if it includes causal claims about the origin of the universe that are competitive with other cosmological theories.
3. I have discussed this distinction before. See my Law's Empire (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1986), pp. 78-86.
4. Richard Rorty, Contingency, Irony and Solidarity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989).
5. Richard Rorty, "Does Academic Freedom Have Philosophical Presuppositions?," in The Future of Academic Freedom, ed. Louis Menand (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996), pp. 29-30.
6. Not, that is, if they are sensible. I am not considering here the patently false view that it is part of the very meaning of "correct" that right actions are those that maximize happiness. If that were right, only utilitarians could avoid linguistic error.
7. See Hilary Putnam, "On Properties," in his Philosophical Papers, Volume I, Mathematics, Matter, and Method (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1975), p. 305.
8. Compare the discussion of "subjective naturalism" in M. Davies and L. Humberstone, "Two Notions of Necessity," Philosophical Studies 38, no. 1 (1980): 22-25. The subjectivism discussed there is personal - something being wrong is taken to be a matter of the speaker disliking it. The argument in the text, which addresses the less implausible example of intersubjective subjectivism, would of course also apply to the personal version.
9. That is the sense of "represents" that Crispin Wright uses in exploring the question whether moral beliefs can represent reality. See Wright, Truth and Objectivity (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1992). I return to Wright's discussion later.
10. Wright, Truth and Objectivity 1992 Ibid.
11. Allan Gibbard, Wise Choices, Apt Feelings: A Theory of Normative Judgment (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1990), p. 154.
12. Simon Blackburn, Essays in Quasi-Realism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992), pp. 172-73.
13. Simon Blackburn, Essays in Quasi-Realism Ibid., p. 174.
14. Mackie, Ethics: Inventing Right and Wrong (New York: Penguin Books, 1977), p. 40.
15. That is a crude statement of a prominent and influential account of interpretation. See Donald Davidson, Inquiries into Truth and Interpretation (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1984).
16. See Gilbert Harman, The Nature of Morality (New York: Oxford University Press, 1977).
17. See, for example, the literature described in Robert Wright, The Moral Animal (New York: Pantheon Books, 1994).
18. Derek Parfit, Reasons and Persons (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1984), p. 431.
19. I say "all" sides to include the possibility that I see no good reason for thinking the issue indeterminate either.
20. I defend a different but in some ways similar view about ethics in "Foundations of Liberal Equality," in Tanner Lectures on Human Values, Volume XI, ed. Grethe Peterson (Salt Lake City: University of Utah, 1990).
21. For a fuller exposition of the argument of this paragraph, see "No Right Answer?" in my book, A Matter of Principle (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1985).
22. John Mackie argued that a legal theory that made moral argument relevant would characteristically produce indeterminacy. See his "The Third Theory of Law," Philosophy & Public Affairs 7, no. 1 (Fall 1977): 3-16.
23. See the discussion of "Critical Legal Studies" in my Law's Empire, pp. 271-74.