Philosophy 361 Ethics Darwall Fall 1997 INTRODUCTION I. The focus of this course will be philosophical ethics or moral philosophy; it is not primarily a course for raising consciousness about ethical issues or a course about how to be ethical. Nor will we focus on specific, concrete ethical issues. II. We all do philosophical ethics, if only implicitly. A. Ethical convictions are implicit in our feelings, choices, thought, and discourse. B. Unlike mere tastes and preferences, ethical conviction commit us to their objectivity or truth. If you think something is morally wrong, and another person thinks it is not, it would seem that your convictions cannot both be correct. C. However, if an ethical opinion is true, it also seems that there must be reasons that make it true. Specifically, if some particular thing has value, it must be because there are things about it (features or properties of it) that make it valuable. It must have value-making properties. D. Since we are concerned to have sound ethical convictions, we are committed to asking whether there are reasons or principles that support our ethical views. The search for such reasons and principles is what drives normative ethics (or: normative ethical theory). III. So far, we are thinking within ethics, asking ethical questions like, what has value? What is right and wrong? And why? We can, however, step back from our ethical thought and ask questions about it. What is ethics all about anyway? What is value or moral obligation? Can ethical judgments be literally true or false? If so, in virtue of what? If not, why do we speak and think as though they can? These are questions of metaethics--philosophical questions about the metaphysical and epistemological status of ethics, and questions in the philosophy of language and mind about ethical thought and discourse. IV. An example to show that we engage, if only implicitly, in both normative ethics and metaethics. V. Philosophical ethics aims to pursue normative ethics and metaethics in a unified way--for example, to discover what is valuable by better understanding the nature of value, or what is morally obligatory by understanding the nature of moral obligation. VI. Our plan of study--the syllabus. VII. The Text Analysis Project. VIII. Course Web Page: www.umich.edu/~sdarwall Text Analysis Project for 9/ 10: Mill, Utilitarianism, Chapter IV, paragraphs 3- 5,10.