Objectivity in ethics; two difficulties, two responses

Ratio

Volumn 18, Issue 1, 2005, Pages 1-26

  Wiggins, David ^a  

^a NEW COLLEGE   (United Kingdom)

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[No Author keywords available]

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EID: 26644433295     PISSN: 00340006     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1111/j.1467-9329.2005.00267.x     Document Type: Article

References (10)

1. Compare, from the other side of the argument, Hilary Putnam in The Collapse of the Fact/Value Dichotomy (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2003): 'The positions that are still defended by the proponents of a fact/value dichotomy are variants of noncognitivism and of relativism' (p. 42)
2. G. J. Warnock, The Object of Morality (London: Macmillan, 1971)
3. For the case of Darwin, compare Mackie's p. 113
4. and Darwin's The Descent of Man (1871), p. 166
5. a position whose reputability is refurbished by Mackie himself in 'The Law of the Jungle', Philosophy, vol. 53, 1978
6. and further by E. Sober and D. W. Wilson, Unto Others (Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 1998)
7. Michel de Montaigne, The Complete Essays, trans. and ed. M.A. Screech (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1991), pp. 231 ff
8. 'Nous les pouvons donc bien appeler barbares, eu égard aux règles de la raison, mais non pas eu égard a nous, qui les surpassons en toute sorte de barbarie'
9. Downwind from Aristotle's famous discussion of natural justice (contrast customary or legal justice) in Nicomachean Ethics V.7, there are countless further expressions of the thought. For a modern exposition of it, see Aurel Kolnai, 'Moral Consensus', Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, vol. 70, 1969-70, to which I am indebted in my account of the third kind of relativism
10. See R. M. Hare, Freedom and Reason (Oxford 1963), page 39. As I should see it, this is a distinction between something that concerns the content of the sentence used to make a judgment and something that concerns the success or unsuccess of that judgment with respect to all pertinent cases. In so far as content is analogous to sense and valuation is analogous to reference, the confusion is analogous to a sense-reference confusion