Naturalism in ethics

By Sturgeon, Nicholas L.

Ethical naturalism is the project of fitting an account of ethics into a naturalistic worldview. It includes nihilistic theories, which see no place for real values and no ...

Kemp Smith, Norman (1872–1958)

By Calder, Robert R.; Davie, George

Norman Kemp Smith is now most widely known for his translation of Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason. This was begun in 1913 while Kemp Smith was completing his ...

Open question argument

By McPherson, Tristram

The open question argument is the heart of G.E. Moore’s case against ethical naturalism. Ethical naturalism is the view that goodness, rightness, etc. are natural properties; roughly, the ...

Foot, Philippa (1920–2010)

By Lillehammer, Hallvard

Philippa Foot was a British moral philosopher based primarily at Oxford University, where she was a Fellow of Somerville College from 1950; and at University of California, Los ...

Sociobiology

By Rosenberg, Alex

Following Darwin, biologists and social scientists have periodically been drawn to the theory of natural selection as the source of explanatory insights about human behaviour and social institutions. ...

Moral realism

By Dancy, Jonathan

Moral realism is the view that there are facts of the matter about which actions are right and which wrong, and about which things are good and which ...

Moral realism

Moral realism is the view that there are facts of the matter about which actions are right and which wrong, and about which things are good and which ...

Constructivism in ethics

By O'Neill, Onora

There have been many forms of the idea that there are no distinctively ethical properties, and that ethical claims are composed or constructed out of other considerations. In ...

Moral sentimentalism

By Gert, Joshua

‘Sentimentalism’ is a name for a wide class of views in value theory. Sentimentalist views are unified by their commitment to the idea that normative or evaluative properties ...

Fact/value distinction

By Crisp, Roger

According to proponents of the fact/value distinction, no states of affairs in the world can be said to be values, and evaluative judgments are best understood not to ...

Antiphon (late 5th century BC)

By Hobbs, Angela

Antiphon was a Greek Sophist. His most famous work, On Truth, partially survives in two substantial papyrus fragments, plus a number of purported quotations. It sets up a ...

Schleiermacher, Friedrich Daniel Ernst (1768–1834)

By Meckenstock, Gunter
Translated by Finlayson, J.G.

Friedrich Daniel Ernst Schleiermacher was the most notable German-speaking protestant theologian of the nineteenth century. He gave significant impetus to the re-orientation of theology after the Age of ...

Expressivism

By van Roojen, Mark

Expressivism is a kind of noncognitivism, usually about morality. And noncognitivism is a metaethical theory, that is a theory about the subject matter of morality, about the nature ...

Intuitionism in ethics

By Frazier, Robert L.

To intuit something is to apprehend it directly, without recourse to reasoning processes such as deduction or induction. Intuitionism in ethics proposes that we have a capacity for ...

Epistemology and ethics

By Feldman, Richard

Epistemology and ethics are both concerned with evaluations: ethics with evaluations of conduct, epistemology with evaluations of beliefs and other cognitive acts. Of considerable interest to philosophers are ...

Wittgensteinian ethics

By Lovibond, Sabina

Although the strict ‘fact-value distinction’ of Wittgenstein’s early period has shaped much subsequent work on ethics, his most profound influence on the subject stems from the later Philosophical ...

Callicles (late 5th century BC)

By Hobbs, Angela

Callicles, although known only as a character in Plato’s Gorgias (the dramatic date of which is somewhere between 430 and 405 bc), was probably an actual historical ...

Moral scepticism

By Nelson, Mark T.

Scepticism in general is the view that we can have little or no knowledge; thus moral scepticism is the view that we can have little or no moral ...

Physis and nomos

By Hobbs, Angela

In the fifth and fourth centuries bc a vigorous debate arose in Greece centred on the terms physis (nature) and nomos (law or custom). It ...

Moore, George Edward (1873–1958)

By Baldwin, Thomas

G.E. Moore was one of the most influential British philosophers of the twentieth century. His early writings are renowned for his rejection of idealist metaphysics and his insistence ...

Bioethics

By Frey, R.G.

While bioethics, a part of applied ethics, is usually identified with medical ethics, in its broadest sense it is the study of the moral, social and political problems ...

Applied ethics

By Almond, Brenda

Applied ethics is marked out from ethics in general by its special focus on issues of practical concern. It therefore includes medical ethics, environmental ethics, and evaluation of ...

Applied ethics

Applied ethics is marked out from ethics in general by its special focus on issues of practical concern. It is concerned with ethical issues in various fields of ...

Axiology

By Smith, Barry; Thomas, Alan

Axiology is the branch of practical philosophy which studies the nature of value. Axiologists study value in general rather than moral values in particular and frequently emphasize the ...

Good, theories of the

By Korsgaard, Christine M.

‘Good’ is the most general term of positive evaluation, used to recommend or express approval in a wide range of contexts. It indicates that a thing is desirable ...