Abstract
Absolutism and literal adherence to ethical theories – which have been a major source of the problem of application – have been largely because of the supposition that moral values and moral principles must be objective and absolutely inviolable, not to be affected by peculiarities and perspectives of individuals. The chapter analyses and reconstructs this supposed objectivity required for ethical theories. Alluding to contentions of both Indian and western scholars, this chapter comes up with the theory that objectivity in moral matters is a special sort of objectivity suited to my argument from defeasibility and justified violation. This reveals the significant fact that moral values are objective but defeasible under appropriately demanding situations: they instantiate those important kinds of principles and relations which hold necessarily but, on occasions, are defeasible if a competing value demands preference in the interest of morality. The focus here is to show that our argument from defeasibility and justified violation can help bridging the gap between ethics and its application. This also reveals the crucial trait of rational morality.
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- 1.
Also in Chap. 8. Note especially his statement that ‘objectivity need not be all-or-nothing’ (p. 148) which virtually tones down his scepticism expressed earlier (p. 68): ‘However often we may try to step outside ourselves, something will have to stay behind the lens, something in us will determine the resulting puicture …’.
- 2.
It is odd that Williams does not see this, for he goes on to say that Mackie’s error theory meant ‘very roughly to be that of taking moral values to be objective’, ibid, p. 204.
- 3.
I am almost in entire agreement with Hare’s argument to this effect (Honderich 1985, p. 53), though I sharply differ from his attribution, because of this, to Mackie the view that moral judgments are all false, for besides being a gross misrepresentation of Mackie’s scepticism, such attribution clearly does not follow from his posing the issue in the ontological mode.
- 4.
Jonathan Dancy (1993) makes the distinction between primary and secondary objectivity that is virtually the same as what I mean by literal and liberal sense of objectivity.
- 5.
If Kant and P.F. Strawson are of any guidance, “understanding maketh nature” albeit out of given materials, but the given materials cannot be incorruptibly given; and the view of the world, paradoxically, cannot be a view of the world but a view of the world – as knowable, i.e. identifiable and reidentifiable.
- 6.
This is where lies an essential difference between values and secondary properties, like colour, despite both being dispositions to cause typical responses in the observer. For, as McDowell points out, value as a disposition elicits merited responses in us. This is also explained by the fact that wrongness or rightness of actions causes an attitude of disapproval and approval and the corresponding response of condemnation or commendation, which is not the case with observation of secondary qualities. So even if the analogy between moral qualities and secondary qualities is quite ‘tempting’, R.M. Hare cautions against pressing the analogy too far, for it would obliterate this important difference between the two. ‘The reaction which, according to this sort of phenomenalist view of morality, ‘produce” the moral quality’, says Hare, ‘are attitudes such as approval and disapproval. But these, unlike the perception of something red, are subject to our reasoned choices’. (Honderich, 1985, p. 47) Emphasis added.
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Mohapatra, P.K. (2019). Morality and Objectivity. In: An Applied Perspective on Indian Ethics. Springer, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-13-7503-3_3
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