Download of the Week
This week, the Download of the Week is Moral Positivism by Roger Crisp. Here is a taste from early in the paper:
- Philosophical ethics is like the philosophy of religion or jurisprudence, in that it emerges out of a set of social practices with their own particular place in our lives. Without religion or law, there would be no philosophy of religion or jurisprudence; and without morality, there would be no ethics. Nearly every human society that we know of has possessed some form of morality or other – what I shall call a ‘positive morality’:
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Positive Morality: An internalized set of cognitive and conative states, socially engendered and including beliefs, desires, and feelings, which leads its possessor among other things to (a) view certain actions as wrong (that is, forbidden by morality) and hence to be avoided, (b) feel guilt and/or shame as a result of performing such actions, and (c) blame others who perform such actions. Note that this definition is intended to capture the ‘core’ of positive morality as we understand it. We might imagine a set of action-guiding states consisting only in beliefs about ideals, and involving as sanctions only ‘carrots’ rather than ‘sticks’ – what Hume calls in the conclusion to his Enquiry ‘the peaceful reflection on one’s own conduct’, for example, and praise rather than blame. Our own positive morality of course contains such elements, but for the purposes of my discussion I shall take them as inessential. A positive morality may lack them, and on their own they are too distant from our conception of a morality to be thought of as essential. The central elements of a positive morality are attributions of wrongness, and the sanctions of guilt, shame, and blame.
