PHIL101 Lecture Notes - White Supremacy, Good Music
28 Jul 2013
School
Department
Course
Professor
Document Summary
To call something right in the abstract tells us little. To tell what the criteria are for making that assessment, we need a context. Otherwise we simply don"t know what it means. There are, for example, right and wrong ways to hold a violin, bake a cake, or throw a football. But they have nothing to do with morality; they have to do, rather, with mastering the violin, making good desserts, or passing a football well, and even more broadly, with the aims and purposes of music, cooking, and athletics. These activities in turn, of course, are always susceptible to moral assessment, as are any activities we engage in. But our use of normative language in teaching those activities does not normally constitute the making of moral judgments. Thus if i say, you ought to hold the violin this way , my judgment is prescriptive; i am trying to guide your conduct.
