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False Dichotomies: Right and Good

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  30 January 2009

Elizabeth M. Pybus
Elizabeth M. Pybus
Affiliation:
University of Glasgow
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Extract

A misleading and apparently addictive practice is now prevalent in discussions of philosophy in general, and moral philosophy in particular. This is the habit of dichotomizing. We are led to believe that we have to choose between reason and sentiment as the basis of morality, that facts and values are to be found on either side of an unbridgeable gulf, and so on. This practice is harmful because it leads philosophers to take sides in unnecessary conflicts which cannot be won by either side, and thus prevents progress in the discussion of extremely important issues.

Type
Articles
Information
Philosophy , Volume 58 , Issue 223 , January 1983 , pp. 19 - 27
Copyright
Copyright © The Royal Institute of Philosophy 1983

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References

1 For instance, Frankena, in Ethics (Englewood Cliffs: Prentice Hall, 1973), 25, speaking of one variety of deontology says, ‘The best example of this monistic kind of rule deontology is presented by Kant’.

2 In the Editor's Introduction to Price's Review of Morals, D. D. Raphael refers (p. ix) to the ‘typically “deontological” or “Kantian” approach’ of Price's system of ethics.

3 So, in his Ethics (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1954), Nowell-Smith says (p. 133), ‘ intuitionist theories are almost always deontologkaF.

4 Nowell-Smith, Ethics, 13.

5 Ibid. 133.

6 Ibid. 133.

7 Ibid. 318.

8 See A. Broadie and Elizabeth M. Pybus, ‘Kant's Concept of Respect’ in Kant-Studien 1975.