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    Moral properties such as goodness cannot be defined in wh... — Carmelics
    Home/Virtue Ethics
    HistoryEditSee Inverse

    Moral properties such as goodness cannot be defined in wholly psychological, biological, or sociological terms.

    Truth & KnowledgeVirtue Ethics
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    2 reasons for
    1 reason against

    Reasons For

    2 perspectives
    Reason for 1 of 2
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    • 1.Any proposed reduction of 'good' to a natural property N permits coherent assertion of 'x is N but is x good?' without logical contradiction.
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    • 2.G.E. Moore's isolation test shows that if goodness were identical to pleasure, 'a world with only pleasure but no goodness' would be incoherent — yet it is not.
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    • 3.Logical non-contradiction under substitution is a necessary condition for genuine definitional identity, so goodness and any natural property remain distinct.
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    Reason for 2 of 2
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    • 1.Normative authority — the capacity of moral facts to genuinely bind agents — cannot be derived from descriptive facts about psychology or biology alone without illicit ought-from-is inference.
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    • 2.Hume's is-ought gap establishes that no set of purely empirical premises entails a normative conclusion without a suppressed normative premise.
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    • 3.If goodness were wholly empirical, moral obligations would reduce to statistical or causal regularities, which lack the categorical binding force Kant and intuitionists alike recognize as constitutive of morality.
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    Reasons Against

    1 perspective
    Reason against
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    • 1.If goodness could be defined in empirical terms, then moral truths would be psychological, biological, or sociological truths discoverable by empirical research.
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    • 2.For any proposed empirical definition of goodness, it remains an open question whether the thing possessing that empirical property is actually good.
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    • 3.If a definition were correct, it would not be an open question whether the defined property applies — the question would be settled by the definition itself.
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    Topics

    Virtue EthicsTruth & Knowledge

    Connections

    2 topics

    Skepticism2 linkedPhilosophy of Language1 linked

    Related

    Any proposed reduction of 'good' to a natural property N permits coherent assert...For any proposed empirical definition of goodness, it remains an open question w...G.E. Moore's isolation test shows that if goodness were identical to pleasure, '...Hume's is-ought gap establishes that no set of purely empirical premises entails...
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    If a definition were correct, it would not be an open question whether the defin...If goodness could be defined in empirical terms, then moral truths would be psyc...If goodness were wholly empirical, moral obligations would reduce to statistical...

    Similar

    There is a property of goodness that is not identical to any naturalis...85%There are no such properties as goodness or badness84%Moore only considers a few crude naturalistic definitions of goodness84%If goodness cannot be defined wholly with reference to concepts from t...84%

    Source

    AI-extracted1/3 agreementValid
    SEP: intuitionism-ethics
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    Moore’s open question argument can be regarded as giving form to this intuition. If the moral property of being good, for instance, could be defined in wholly psychological, biological, or sociological terms, then moral truths would turn out to be either psychological, biological or sociological truths, which could then be discovered by empirical research by the appropriate science. But, Moore argues, all such definitions must fail, for it is always an open question whether the thing that has th
    Extraction notes

    Validity: Extracted via Max plan + API grounding/validity checks

    Details

    Logical non-contradiction under substitution is a necessary condition for genuin...
    Normative authority — the capacity of moral facts to genuinely bind agents — can...
    Type
    claim
    Perspectives
    3 (2 for, 1 against)
    Edits
    1 edit