Conclusion
In this chapter, I have only scratched the surface of ethics. But I have tried to give an overview both of the main areas of metaethics—the question of the meaning of moral judgments and the problem of moral epistemology—and of some philosophical approaches to first-order moral questions.
I argued that these questions were not independent, that the main themes of metaethics interact with some issues in first-order morality. Thus, for example, the basic difference between factual and evaluative beliefs—that the latter but not the former are action-guiding—seems to raise the issue of relativism, the possibility that the truth of a moral belief depends essentially on whose it is.I have suggested that the route to relativism depends on confusing two different issues. One is the moral-content issue, which divides emotivists and prescriptivists, on one hand, from moral realists, on the other. On this question I sided with the prescriptivists. I argued that people who do not share our basic moral attitudes cannot be offered reasons and evidence that are bound to lead them to agree with us.
But the other issue is not an issue about moral content but a substantive moral dispute: a dispute between those—relativists—who think that we cannot say that people who disagree with us about basic moral questions are just wrong, and those—nonrelativists— who hold that we can. And here I sided with the nonrelativists. To argue from prescriptivism to moral relativism, I suggested, is to confuse two different senses in which moral judgments could be said to be subjective.
I then turned to a debate about first-order morals between con- sequentialists, who think that whether an act is right or wrong should be decided by looking only to its results, and absolutists, who believe that the fact that something has consequences that are good overall does not always mean that it is right. As I said a little while ago, I shall follow up this question in the next two chapters.
style='font-size:10.0pt;line-height: 112%'>Most recently, I suggested that it was important for our moral thinking that we should reflect not only on how we should treat others but also on what it is to lead a successful life.
Self-regarding considerations can be as universalizable as other-regarding considerations: we owe things to ourselves as well as to others.But I have not discussed some of the central concepts of our moral thought: freedom and responsibility, for example, or praise and blame. (I will, however, say something about these in 9.10.) What I have tried to do is to give you a sense of a range of views on what moral judgments mean and on how we should decide which judgments to accept. Clarity about these questions is an important first step in making up your mind about morality. But, as we have seen in discussing utilitarianism, rights, and what we owe ourselves, it is only the first step.
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