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Moral Scepticism and Moral Conduct

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  30 January 2009

J. C. MacKenzie
J. C. MacKenzie
Affiliation:
University of Alberta
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Extract

For a period in the middle of the present century moral philosophy was dominated by the debate between prescriptivists and descriptivists. Prescriptivists proclaimed a gap between ‘is’ and ‘ought’, between facts and values, and cheerfully accepted the sceptical consequence that morals, and values generally, could not be objects of knowledge.

Type
Research Article
Information
Philosophy , Volume 59 , Issue 230 , October 1984 , pp. 473 - 479
Copyright
Copyright © The Royal Institute of Philosophy 1984

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References

1 The labels are taken from Hare, R. M.. See Freedom and Reason (Oxford University Press, 1963Google Scholar), 84, and ‘Descriptivism’, The Is/Ought Question, Hudson, W. D. (ed.) (London: Macmillan, 1969), 240–258. By ‘prescriptivists’ I mean to include those writers usually called ‘emotivists’.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

2 Stevenson, C. L., Ethics and Language (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1943)Google Scholar; Hare, R. M., The Language of Morals (Oxford University Press, 1952).Google Scholar

3 Searle, John R., ‘How to Derive “Ought” from “Is” ’, The Philosophical Review 73 (January 1964), 43–58.Google Scholar

4 Philippa, Foot, ‘Moral Arguments’, Mind 67, No. 268 (October 1958), 502–513.Google Scholar

5 Philippa, Foot, ‘Goodness and Choice’, Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, Supplementary Volume 35 (1961).Google Scholar

6 Stevenson, C. L., ‘The Emotive Meaning of Ethical Terms’, Mind 46, No. 181 (January 1937), 16.Google Scholar

7 The Philosophical Review 81, No. 3 (July 1972), 305–316.

8 Ibid. 311.

9 Ibid. 315.

10 Popper, K. R., The Open Society and its Enemies, Vol. I (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1945), Ch. 5.Google Scholar

11 For an expression of worries along these lines see Paton's, H. J. contribution to the symposium ‘The Emotive Theory of Ethics’, Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, Supplementary Volume 22 (1948), 119–122.Google Scholar

12 Whether I will do A is, of course, another matter.