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Value Judgement: Improving Our Ethical Beliefs

Online ISBN:
9780191597541
Print ISBN:
9780198752318
Publisher:
Oxford University Press
Book

Value Judgement: Improving Our Ethical Beliefs

James Griffin
James Griffin

White's Professor of Moral Philosophy

University of Oxford
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Published online:
1 November 2003
Published in print:
22 January 1998
Online ISBN:
9780191597541
Print ISBN:
9780198752318
Publisher:
Oxford University Press

Abstract

The book asks how, and how much, we can improve our ethical standards—not lift our behaviour closer to our standards but refine the standards themselves. To answer this question requires answering most of the major questions of ethics. So the book includes a discussion of what a good life is like, where the bounds of the natural world come, how values relate to that world (e.g. naturalism, realism), how great human capacities—the ones important to ethics—are, and where moral norms come from. Throughout the book, the question of what philosophy can contribute to ethics arises. Philosophical traditions, such as most forms of utilitarianism, deontology, and virtue ethics, are, the book contends, too ambitious. Ethics cannot be what philosophers in those traditions expect it to be because agents cannot be what these philosophies require them to be. The book starts by questioning the adequacy of both appeals to intuition and the coherence method of justification in ethics (e.g. wide reflective equilibrium) and ends with a description of the sort of justification available to us.

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