Phil 355/455            Contemporary Moral Problems     Darwall 	Fall 1999

INTRODUCTION

I  What is a moral problem?  What is morality?
A. Moral concepts: right and wrong
B. Moral responsibility and accountability
C. Morality and equality (But equal treatment of whom or what?  What makes us 
morally count the same?  Who is us?  Which differences make a moral 
difference?
D. Moral emotions: guilt
E. Moral conviction vs. mere taste or preference.
1. Moral convictions seem to be a kind of belief: they purport to be true.
2. When two people have conflicting moral convictions, it seems that no 
more than one of them can be correct.

II  But what can make moral convictions true or false? 
A. A fundamental philosophical issue we can’t consider.  (See Philosophy 361.)
B. From the perspective of someone holding a moral conviction, it seems there 
are objective moral truths.
C. From the perspective of someone trying to solve a moral problem, it also 
seems to be a guiding assumption that there are objective moral truths.
D. Therefore, we will have to assume that there are objective moral truths.

III. But what about ethical relativism, the idea that ethical truth is somehow relative 
to the person who views or judges it?  Various forms of “relativity” don’t threaten 
the idea of objective moral truth.

A.  Relativity to the facts of the case.
B.  Relativity to the moral norms accepted by the culture, or even by the actors 
(agents), involved in the case.
C. The only form that threatens the idea of objective moral truth is the view that 
two different evaluators could make genuinely conflicting moral judgments 
about the same case (kind of case) and be equally correct, because equally 
correct, relative to their differing moral standards.
D. N.B.  This is different from the claim that two different evaluators can be 
equally justified (have equally good grounds) for their respective conflicting 
judgments.  That can also be true in science, for example.


IV. Why do people espouse relativism?
A. Confusion with toleration.
B. Social difficulty of disagreement about matters people care so much about:  
Relativism of Avoidance.


V. In any case, we will have to assume that relativism is false.  We will also have to 
make various other assumptions:
A. Moral problems can be approached in a thoughtful, reasonable way.
B. Solutions to moral problems must be supportable by reasons and, ultimately, 
by principles.

VI	Next time: Moral Argument and Moral Theory