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Sturgeon's Defence of Moral Realism

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  13 April 2010

Evan K. Jobe
Evan K. Jobe
Affiliation:
Texas Tech University
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Extract

Can a moral principle be tested and confirmed empirically? Can the fact that an event exhibits a moral quality play a role in explaining why a person observes the event as having that quality? Gilbert Harman, in attempting to point to a radical difference between scientific and moral facts, has endorsed a negative answer to these questions. With Harman's discussion in mind, Nicholas Sturgeon takes the affirmative side in his “Moral Explanations,” a potentially influential essay that is now beginning to appear in the textbook anthologies. Sturgeon rounds out his defence of moral realism by further arguing that moral qualities of persons can play an essential role in the scientific explanation of human conduct. Finally, he attempts to enhance the appeal of moral realism by arguing for the plausibility of its compatibility with physicalism. While granting that Sturgeon's discussion is challenging and instructive I shall try to show that on all points mentioned here Sturgeon has failed to make a good case.

Type
Articles
Information
Dialogue: Canadian Philosophical Review / Revue canadienne de philosophie , Volume 29 , Issue 2 , Spring 1990 , pp. 267 - 276
Copyright
Copyright © Canadian Philosophical Association 1990

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References

Notes

1 Harman, Gilbert, The Nature of Morality: An Introduction to Ethics (London: Oxford University Press, 1977), chap. 1.Google Scholar

2 Sturgeon, Nicholas, “Moral Explanations,” in Morality, Reason, and Truth: New Essays on the Foundations of Ethics, edited by Copp, David and Zimmerman, David (Totowa, NJ: Rowman and Allanheld, 1984), p. 49–78Google Scholar. Reprinted (without notes) in Ethical Theory: Classical and Contemporary Readings, edited by Louis Pojman (Belmont, CA: Wadsworth, 1989), p. 437–448.

3 Ibid., p. 51.

4 Ibid., p. 52.

5 Harman, The Nature of Morality, p. 3.

6 Ibid., p. 68–69.

7 Ibid., p. 7–9.

8 Sturgeon, “Moral Explanations,” p. 68.

9 Ibid., p. 68–69.

10 Ibid., p. 69.

11 Ibid., p. 63–64.

12 Ibid., p. 68.

13 Ibid., p. 59–60.

14 Ibid., p. 60.