Value Judgement: Improving Our Ethical Beliefs
James Griffin
Language: English
Pages: 192
ISBN: 0198752318
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
In this elegantly written book James Griffin offers a fresh examination of the fundamental questions of ethics. At the heart of the book lies the question of how we can improve our ethical judgements and beliefs. In addressing this central dilemma, Griffin discusses such key issues of moral philosophy as defining a good life, locating the boundaries of the natural world, how values relate to the world, judging the limits human capacity, and where moral norms originate. Beyond these considerations, he gives a critical assessment of the aims of such prominent philosophical traditions as utilitarianism, deontology, and virtue ethics. Value Judgement gives a clear and compelling depiction of moral philosophy which will interest readers of all levels.
here is whether judgements about prudential values can be too. 4. Expanding the list of especially reliable beliefs May we, then, add some prudential judgements to the list of especially reliable beliefs? Not simply because prudential values are (at least in the modest sense that I have just sketched) real. Realism sometimes positively invites scepticism--for instance, when the belief-independence that realism incorporates puts reality so far into the background that the human mind has trouble
to produce someone emotionally detached to that extreme degree, yet sane. We are incapable of such fine-tuning. We should be too likely simply to produce an emotional wreck. 12 Many will think that I am overstating my case. For instance-and this is a common view--one could see impartiality as an admittedly unattainable, yet not pointless, ideal, an ideal that would have the good effect of making us stretch further than we otherwise would. When Jesus said, 'Be ye therefore perfect', he must have
promotion should take, however, needs to be settled, not least because respect and promotion can conflict. The judgement, 'That's cruel', resting as it does on a claim about pain and an agent's intentions, is especially reliable; it is a judgement about a core value and fairly accessible facts about persons. Life, too, is a core value, so there must be a parallel, equally reliable judgement about it. The judgement, 'That's murder', must sometimes also be -121- especially reliable: it will be
be? How simple and firm should dispositions be? I have said that we must make agents more lifelike. But how much more? If we describe them in great detail, we shall lose the distance, the abstraction, needed for rational criticism. The spare conception of agents that I am objecting to is part of what is now called modernism: the world picture that emerged from the seventeenth century's scientific revolution and the eighteenth century's optimistic rationalism. The major project now facing critics
used it to explore: viz. what is subjective in value judgement, and what objective, and how the subjectivity can be compatible with the objectivity. 4. 'Soothing' is not what John Locke would call a primary quality of the ointment or the tone of voice that is soothing; the ointment and the tone of voice have that effect, but there is nothing in either that resembles, in the rather obscure sense of that term that Locke intends, the physical or psychological response it produces in us. It is not