Moral Differences and Distances: Some Questions

Abstract

Moral philosophy is concerned with the character of moral concepts; but which moral concepts? A picture of the nature of moral thought may dictate, or seem to, which moral concepts should be considered. There are the big general ones: right and wrong, good and bad, duties, rights and obligations. Recently the focus of moral philosophy has included also the notions of virtue, and of particular virtues. The underlying picture here is roughly this: moral thinking is a kind of evaluative thinking, and in evaluative thought we have in mind something or other — act, person, character trait (say) — and we consider the application to it of some evaluative term. The picture supports a certain philosophical conception of a dispute about fact and value. That is, we take moral thinking to be ascribing value, moral value, to this or that; and then the philosophical question about such thinking will be whether the thing’s having the value is a genuine fact about it, and our judgment a genuine recognition of something out there to be known. The picture also supports a philosophical conception of moral disagreement: moral disagreement will be disagreement about whether a term of moral evaluation applies to such-and-such; and we may also recognize a further possible kind of disagreement, over the acceptance or rejection of an evaluative concept (blasphemous, say, or chaste), or a set of such concepts.

The theorizing mind tends always to the oversimplification of its materials. (William James, The Varieties of Religious Experience)