Abstract
During a school camp on a remote island several years ago some schoolboys from Queensland clubbed to death hundreds of noddy terns. The birds were nesting near the boys’ tents, made a lot of noise and left droppings on the tents and occasionally on the boys. It appears that the first clubbing was done in frustration by one of the boys. Others followed suit, soon it became sport, and then a competition between some of them to see who could kill the most. Many people were moved to describe what the boys did as brutal and callous. (Sometimes people said it was wrong, but terms like brutal and callous pretty soon followed in articulation of their sense of the boys’ deeds.)
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Notes
Thus Simon Blackburn: ‘…it is not our enjoyments or approvals which you should look to in discovering whether bear-baiting is wrong (it is at least mainly the effect on the bear)’. ‘Errors and the Phenomenology of Value’, in T. Honderich ed., Morality and Objectivity (London: Routledge, 1985) p. 6. Blackburn says ‘mainly’ the effect on the bear: the context makes it pretty clear that the qualification is there to let in such things as the effect on the baiters, and perhaps the effect on public morals. It is not there to accommodate what I go on to characterize in the text.
S. Hampshire, Morality and Conflict (Oxford: Blackwell, 1983), p. 89.
G. Warnock, The Object of Morality (London: Methuen, 1971), p. 26.
For different versions of this view see J. L. Mackie, Ethics (New York: Penguin, 1977), Ch. 1;
and S. Blackburn, Essays in Quasi-realism (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993).
J.-P. Sartre, Being and Nothingness, trans. Hazel Barnes (London and New York: Routledge, 1989), Part Three.
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© 2002 Christopher Cordner
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Cordner, C. (2002). Introduction. In: Ethical Encounter. Swansea Studies in Philosophy. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230509177_1
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