Does moral philosophy rest on a mistake?

I have expropriated the title of Prichard's 1912 paperl because, I too answer his question affinnatively. But the mistake I detect is not the one Prichard thought he had uncovered, and his article is a classic example of the mistake I propose to discuss. It is to believe, as some moral philosophers still appear to do, that moral philosophy has a special domain or special method that distinguishes it in some important way from sociology, anthropology, psychology and economics. I shall argue that these moral philosophers are misled by the "philosophical" vocabulary they use

What is Moral Application? Towards a Philosophical Theory of Applied Ethics

The aim of this paper is to offer some philosophical remarks concerning the concept of moral application in applied ethics. In doing so, I argue in favour of a philosophical approach towards applied ethics as a unitary form of moral experience. In fact every form of applied ethics, no matter how specific, moves from a problem of application and tries to fill a gap between moral theory and practice. This essential unity of applied ethics as a moral phenomenon is of great philosophical interest, since it belongs to the core problem from which moral thinking itself originates. For this reason, what applied ethics may reveal to a philosophical inquiry could provide valuable insight into the nature of moral experience itself. This is why it is important to reflect on what applied ethics is and whether the way in which application is usually framed be ts the properties of moral experience or not. In the first section I submit some preliminary remarks concerning the theoretical requirements to any philosophical approach to applied ethics. In the second section I present how application is commonly understood in the applied ethics debate by discussing the deductive and the procedural models of application. Both models, however, draw upon a technological conception of application which fails to t the structure of moral experience. Finally, I brie y sketch out the main features and the future tasks of what seems to me to be the most promising approach to the issue, i.e., the hermeneutic concept of application

Virtues of historiography

In this paper, I take up Herman Paul's suggestion to analyze the process of writing history in terms of virtues. In contrast to Paul, however, I argue that the concept of virtue used here should not be based on virtue epistemology, but rather on virtue ethics. The reason is that virtue epistemology is discriminative towards non-cognitive virtues and incompatible with the Ankersmitian/Whitean view of historiography as a multivocal path from historical reality to historical representation. Virtue ethics on the other hand, more specif.ically those forms of virtue ethics which emphasize the uncodifiability thesis, is very capable of providing such an account. In order to make this somewhat more concrete, I distinguish four important traits of virtue ethics, and I try to make clear how these can be interpreted with respect to the writing of history

Practice-based conundrums and existentialist quandaries of a professional code of ethics

Ethical codes have long been considered indispensable tools in defining the proper conduct of counseling professionals. Revisions reflect the ideals of the industry to accommodate the evolving needs of clients and trends in treatment models, but the essence of the code is to convert principles befitting of the profession into concrete actions or considerations that abet professional decision-making. Acculturation into the profession involves ethics training intended to improve professionals’ ability to apply the code to situations that might arise in their practices, resulting in the most ethically appropriate action. However, such assumptions may be problematic. The idea of ethical competency and improvement in the code itself should be qualified to reflect the uncertainty of moral truths, including counselor training tailored to test competency, both before and during professional practice. In this article, the consideration that morals and ethics are distinct is spelled out and then challenged by drawing on Jean Paul Sartre’s existentialist critique of moral decision-making reality. In light of this critique and John Stuart Mill’s argument regarding the value of vigorous debate over philosophical ideas, suggestions are made regarding a potential approach to ethics competency education

Logical and Moral Dilemmas of Postmodernism

This is a preprint (author's original) version of the article published in Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 3:747-60. The final version of the article can be found at http://www.jstor.org/stable/3034037. The version made available in Digital Common was supplied by the author.Author's Origina

The Sorites Paradox in Practical Philosophy

The first part of the chapter surveys some of the main ways in which the Sorites Paradox has figured in arguments in practical philosophy in recent decades, with special attention to arguments where the paradox is used as a basis for criticism. Not coincidentally, the relevant arguments all involve the transitivity of value in some way. The second part of the chapter is more probative, focusing on two main themes. First, I further address the relationship between the Sorites Paradox and the main arguments discussed in the first part, by elucidating in what sense they rely on (something like) tolerance principles. Second, I briefly discuss the prospect of rejecting the respective principles, aiming to show that we can do so for some of the arguments but not for others. The reason is that in the latter cases the principles do not function as independent premises in the reasoning but, rather, follow from certain fundamental features of the relevant scenarios. I also argue that not even adopting what is arguably the most radical way to block the Sorites Paradox – that of weakening the consequence relation – suffices to invalidate these arguments

Moral Dilemmas and Consistency in Ethics

Recently it has been argued that there are genuine moral dilemmas and that any theory which does not account for this fact is an unrealistic one. This represents a challenge to an assumption that most moral theorists have held: an adequate ethical theory must not allow for genuine moral quandaries. John Stuart Mill, for example, in the last paragraph of the second chapter of Utilitarianism, seems to be committed to such an assumption. Many others have also assented to this view. The consensus among those who hold this view seems to be that if a theory allows for moral dilemmas then there is some sense in which it is incoherent or inconsistent. Yet, oddly enough, the sense in which such a view would be incoherent is rarely, if ever, spelled out. Put another way, there seem to be no arguments for the belief that genuine moral dilemmas must be ruled out. W. D. Ross does suggest that if the same action were both morally required and forbidden, then "this would be to put an end to all ethical judgment."3 But how this would put an end to all ethical judgment, Ross does not explain. Once one sees that few, if any, arguments have been advanced to support the commonly held assumption, one realizes that the recent challenges must be taken seriously. Thus the main questions to which this paper is addressed are these: Must an adequate ethical theory allow for genuine moral dilemmas? Or must an adequate theory rule out such cases in order to avoid incoherence? I shall approach these questions by first spelling out two different senses in which our ethical reasoning might be thought to be inconsistent if there are genuine moral dilemmas. Discussing these two senses of inconsistency will cast light on the original questions. The conclusion that I shall eventually argue for is that we have good grounds for supposing that an adequate moral theory must rule out genuine dilemmas

An Argumentation Interface for Expert Opinion Evidence

Tribunals have come to depend increasingly on expertise for determining the facts in cases. However, current legal methods have proved problematic to work with. This paper argues that, as a special model of public understanding of science, assessing expertise should consider source credibility of expertise from internal aspects, including scientific validity and reliability, and external aspects involving the credibility of experts. Using the Carneades Argumentation System we show that the internal and the external aspects are mediated by the structure of the argument from expert opinion with its matching set of critical questions