University of Notre Dame Press eBooks· 2017· Book chapter
MODERN MORAL PHILOSOPHY
- 1,138citations
- 2017year
Short summary
It is currently unprofitable to engage in moral philosophy due to a lack of adequate psychology, and concepts like 'obligation' and 'duty' should be abandoned as they are harmful survivals from an outdated ethical framework.
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Key points
- Moral philosophy is currently unprofitable due to a lack of adequate psychology.
- Concepts of obligation, duty, and moral 'ought' should be abandoned as they are harmful survivals.
- Differences among recent English moral philosophers (e.g., Sidgwick) are of little importance.
AI-generated from the title and abstract; the full text is not read.
Abstract
I will begin by stating three theses which I present in this paper. The first is that it is not profitable for us at present to do moral philosophy; that should be laid aside at any rate until we have an adequate philosophy of psychology, in which we are conspicuously lacking. The second is that the concepts of obligation, and duty— moral obligation and moral duty, that is to say—and of what is morally right and wrong, and of the moral sense of “ought,” ought to be jettisoned if this is psychologically possible; because they are survivals, or derivatives from survivals, from an earlier conception of ethics which no longer generally survives, and are only harmful without it. My third thesis is that the differences between the wellknown English writers on moral philosophy from Sidgwick to the present day are of little importance.
The authors' abstract, as published at the source. University of Notre Dame Press eBooks, 2017 · DOI ↗
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Field: Philosophy
PhilosophyArts and Humanities