Contemporary Metaethics

Week 1: Modern Moral Philosophy

Week 2: Virtue and Moral Perception

In her ground-breaking The Sovereignty of Good (1970), Iris Murdoch suggests that the central task of the moral agent involves a true and loving perception of another individual, who is seen as a particular reality external to the agent. Writing in the 1960s she claimed that this dimension of morality had been "theorized away" in modern moral philosophy. Our task this week will be to examine whether, and if so in what sense, this charge still holds true of much contemporary ethical theory.

Week 3: Virtue and Moral Character

Are virtuous people better at recognizing the facts that bear on moral matters? Is the nature of one’s moral character revealed by what is perceived as morally relevant in practical deliberation? This week we explore John MacDowell’s argument for this claim in his seminal article ‘Virtue and Reason’.

Week 4: Moral Dilemmas

The experience of life suggests that we often find ourselves torn between two or more conflicting courses of action that we seem morally required to do, each of which we can do, although we cannot do both (or more) of the available actions. What are the conditions of a genuine moral dilemma? Does the implication of a moral theory that it does not help us resolve (apparent) moral dilemma speak against it? What is the proper response to a moral dilemma (should it be possible)?

Week 5: Guilt and Moral Regret

Is moral regret distinct from moral guilt and bad conscience? What, if any, are the conditions of ‘rational’ regret? In what sense, if any, can regret be distinctively first personal? To what extent, if any, is the moral understanding shown in regret distinct from the understanding revealed prior to acting?

Week 6: Forgiveness

What is the so-called “paradox” of forgiveness? Must the person who forgives also condone that which is forgiven? Does forgiveness require a shared understanding of between the forgiver and the forgiven?

Week 7: Thick Evaluative Concepts

What are thick evaluative concepts? What is the contemporary significance for moral realism of Bernard Williams’s historical claim that thick moral concepts are both “world guided” and “characteristically related to reasons for action”? Is the non-reductive cognitivist conception of such concepts as non-evaluatively shapeless plausible?

Week 8: Moral Particularism and Generalism

Are moral reasons universal or particular in nature? What, if anything, is wrong with the dominant “generalist” view that in order to determine the moral relevance and evaluative “direction” of a given consideration we must consider it in isolation from everything else, as is if it was the only relevant factor to take into account?

Week 9: Moral Particularism II: Holism about Reasons

Previously we examined the central motivations in favour and against moral generalism, and addressed the particularist challenge to this received picture of morality. Today we continue our discussion of moral particularism by addressing the argument from reasons holism in detail.

Week 10: Defeasible Generalisation

What is the significance of the concept of a ‘default’ reason on moderate moral particularism? Can the particularist preserve the pre-theoretic moral difference between cruelty and shoelace colour? Must the concept of a moral ‘default’ be tied to that of a defeasible moral generalisation?