Axiological realism

Philosophy

Volumn 71, Issue 276, 1996, Pages 185-203

  Kupperman, Joel J ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY OF CONNECTICUT   (United States)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 60949177966     PISSN: 00318191     EISSN: 1469817X     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1017/S0031819100041437     Document Type: Article

References (27)

1. A good entry into the first stages of this debate is afforded by Essays on Moral Realism, Geoffrey Sayre-McCord (ed.) (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1988)
2. See also Morality, Reason, and Truth, David Copp and David Zimmerman (eds) (Totowa, NJ: Rowman and Allanheld, 1985)
3. Allan Gibbard's, Wise Choices, Apt Feelings (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1990) is an exceptionally sophisticated naturalistic account of morality that can be read as creating a case for anti-realism, and many of the comments in this essay will be addressed to Gibbard's book
4. Cf. Stephen Hawking, A Brief History of Time (New York: Bantam Books, 1990), 56
5. See also J. N. Findlay, Axiological Ethics (London: Macmillan, 1970), and Chapter 6 of my Character (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991)
6. For a dividing line between morality and other forms of normative judgment, see Mill's Utilitarianism, Chapter 5, para. 14
7. Allan Gibbard echoes Mill's division; see Wise Choices, Apt Feelings, p. 293
8. and also 'Moral Concepts: Substance and Sentiment', Philosophical Perspectives 6, James E. Tomberlin (ed.) (Atascadero, CA: Ridgeview, 1992). A lengthy discussion of the boundaries of morality is found in my Foundations of Morality (London: Geo. Allen & Unwin, 1983), Chapter 1
9. A Treatise of Human Nature, L. A. Selby Bigge (ed.), second edition revised by P. H. Nidditch (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1978), 475 ff
10. Cf. P. F. Strawson, 'Social Morality and Individual Ideals', Philosophy 36, No. 136 (January 1961)
11. 'Do We Desire Only Pleasure?', Philosophical Studies, 34, No. 4, (November 1978)
12. For cognitive psychotherapy, see Richard Brandt, A Theory of the Good and the Right (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1984)
13. See my 'Suffering, Joy, and Social Choice', Public Affairs Quarterly, 8, No. 1 (January 1994)
14. See Arnold Isenberg, 'Critical Communication', in Aesthetics and Language, William Elton (ed.) (Oxford: Blackwell, 1953)
15. See Norman Malcolm, Ludwig Wittgenstein. A Memoir (London: Oxford University Press, 1962), 100
16. P. F. Strawson, 'Truth', Truth, George Pitcher (ed.) (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall, 1964), 37
17. Bede Rundle has pursued this point, arguing that if facts were in the world, it should be possible to say where; 'yet there appears to be no answer to such a question as "Where is the fact that inflation has fallen?"' Facts are 'undetectable by the senses or by any scientific instrument'. See Bede Rundle, Facts (London: Duckworth, 1993), 10
18. Cf. Robert Solomon, The Passions (New York: Doubleday Anchor, 1977)
19. Ronald de Sousa, The Rationality of Emotion (Cambridge, Mass.: M.I.T. Press, 1987)
20. and Claire Armon-Jones, Varieties of Affect (Hemel Hempstead: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1991). Armon-Jones does not place as much emphasis as Solomon and de Sousa on a cognitive element of emotion; but her book is eminently compatible with the reflection that moral emotions can involve construing (seeing) something as impermissible and disturbing, and that this could be given high or low marks as a cognitive performance
21. See John McDowell, 'Virtue and Reason', Monist 62 No. 3 (July 1979) for a consonant line of thought
22. Two good recent books that connect emotions and ethical judgments are Gerald Gaus, Value and Justification (Cambridge University Press, 1990)
23. and Justin Oakley, Morality and the Emotions (London: Routledge, 1992)
24. There is a circularity problem in Gibbard's analysis of moral emotions if something like Robert Solomon's analysis is correct. See Justin D'Arms and Daniel Jacobson, 'Expressivism, Morality, and the Emotions', Ethics, 104, no. 4 (July 1994)
25. See 'The Limits of Objectivity' in Sterling McMurrin, (ed.), The Tanner Lectures (Cambridge University Press, 1980), p. 114n. Of interest also is McDowell's gambit, which offers a carefully qualified analogy between ethical and secondary qualities
26. See 'Values and Secondary Qualities', in Ted Honderich, (ed.), Morality and Objectivity (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1985)
27. Michael Rosen, 'Must We Return to Moral Realism?', Inquiry, 34, 1991, p. 194