PHL275H1 Lecture Notes - Lecture 10: Moral Nihilism, Easy A, Consequentialism
Document Summary
Mackie"s other argument: the argument from relativity. People have fundamental disagreements, especially between cultures. Uses this for his twist on expressivism or error theory. If there are moral properties that we can just see to be present, should be intuitive for everyone. No significant disagreement about mathematics, yet lots of disagreements about morality, so the analogy between mathematics and disagreements breaks down: however, if moral judgements simply express attitudes, moral disagreement is easily explainable. However, in ethics, there aren"t agreed on ways to settle moral disputes: disagreements in morality and disagreements in science aren"t the same. For science, you can agree on how to settle the dispute (if we could only do this experiment, we would be able to determine who"s right). Maybe they are just very hard to come to. And because of bias, you shouldn"t expect there to be agreement. We can make progress in matters of right and wrong, but don"t think it will be easy.
