JH9 Moral Philosophy
Ethics can be thought of as divided into two areas. First, there is normative ethics, which is concerned with articulating and justifying moral principles governing how we should live, and (hopefully!) providing agents with moral guidance. Second, there is metaethics, which is concerned with understanding the psychological, semantic, metaphysical, and epistemological presuppositions and commitments of moral discourse and thought. Although these areas are connected in many interesting ways, in this course we will be focused exclusively on core issues in metaethics. Specifically, we will engage with the following questions: What are moral judgments? What is the meaning of moral judgments? Are there moral facts? If so, are they mind-independent? Is there moral knowledge? If so, how do we get it?
Course lecturer: Dr Joe Slater
Semester: 2
Lecture hour & venue: see Honours timetable
Preliminary reading:The Metaethics entry in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy
Teaching resources for this course will be made available on the Philosophy Moodle site.