Philosophy 361		Darwall		Ethics			Fall 
1997

SUMMING UP

I  Recall the distinction between metaethics and normative ethics.  Normative 
ethics deals with substantial ethical issues, such as, What is intrinsically good?  
What are our moral obligations?  Metaethics deals with philosophical issues about 
ethics:  What is value or moral obligation?  Are there ethical facts?  What sort of 
objectivity is possible in ethics?  How can we have ethical knowledge?
	Recall, also, the fundamental dilemma of metaethics.  Either there are 
ethical facts or there aren’t.  If they are, what sort of facts are they?  In what do 
they consist?  If there are not, why do we think, talk, and feel as though there are?

II  Philosophical ethics is the integration of metaethics and normative ethics—the 
attempt to come to an integrated understanding of both.  Given our current 
perspective, how can we view the philosophical ethics of Mill, Kant, Aristotle, 
Nietzsche, and the ethics of care?

III  For Mill, the question is what is the relation between his (metaethical) 
empirical naturalism and his (normative) qualitatively hedonist value theory 
and his utilitarian moral theory?  One place we can see Mill’s empiricism is his 
treatment, in Chapter III, of the question of why the principle of utility is 
“binding”, how it can generate a moral obligation.  Compare Mill’s treatment of 
this question with Kant’s treatment of the question of why the CI is binding in 
Chapter III of the Groundwork.  

IV  What is Kant’s metaethics?  Since he holds that morality is both necessary and 
a priori, Kant must be some kind of rationalist.  But, unlike Plato, he is not the 
kind of rationalist who holds that there are metaphysically independent ethics facts 
that reason grasps through a kind of perception or rational ethical insight.  For 
Kant, morality is a construction of practical reason.  But that doesn’t make it 
arbitrary, since Kant argues that its construction (“legislation”) is essential to the 
practical reasoning of any free rational agent.  
	Mill’s value theory is a version of the ideal judgment theory.  So is 
Kant’s, but note the differences.  Mill’s theory is empiricist, Kant’s rationalist.  
Kant grounds morality in structures that, he argues, are necessary to free, rational 
practical judgment.
	But how do Kant’s metaethics relate to his normative ethics.  Pursuing the 
comparison with Mill, how is Kant’s anti-consequentialist (deontological) claim 
that it is wrong to treat persons in certain ways even if that maximizes happiness 
grounded in his metaethics, in particular, in his metaphysics of ethics?

V  With Nietzsche, we get a critique of any theory of morality, Millian or Kantian, 
on broadly empiricist and naturalist grounds.  As against Kant, Nietzsche argues 
both that there is no free will of the kind Kant says we must presuppose, and that 
what underlies the Categorical Imperative is no construction of free practical 
reason, but ressentiment and cruelty.  And against, Mill’s claims that morality has 
an adequate empirical basis in natural conscience (the salience of the “moral point 
of view”), sympathy, and the desire to be in unity with others, Nietzsche argues 
that its genesis depends on particular historical circumstances and continued 
ignorance of its real causes.
	But while Nietzsche is a “moral nihilist”, he is not an “ethical nihilist.”  
And while he doesn’t confront metaethical issues in a systematic way, it seems 
clear enough that he thinks that however the metaphysics of ethics are to be 
understood, they had better be compatible with a general naturalist orientation.  
What, then, are the possibilities available to him?  Noncognitivism?  Relativism?  
Some version of ethical naturalism?  An ideal judge theory?  Note, again, that the 
relevant theory will be one of ethical judgments and beliefs that are nonmoral.  
Nietzsche evidently believes that all moral beliefs are false.

VI  Like Nietzsche, Aristotle offers us a philosophical ethics that is not a 
philosophical account of morality, at least, not in the same sense that Kant and 
Mill are trying to vindicate.  What is Aristotle's metaethics?  Aristotle 
distinguishes his approach from Plato’s, which he thinks mistakenly treats ethics 
as a transcendent phenomenon.  Rather, ethics is concerned with something 
immanent, with what is good for human beings.  Here Aristotle’s ethics fit with his 
general teleological metaphysics.  Every natural species has a good or telos 
essential to its nature.  Homo sapiens are no different from any other. 
	But how are Aristotle’s normative ethical views supported by his 
metaphysics?  Here we need to understand his views about the distinctive 
character of human rationality, the role of ideals of the noble and base, the role of 
emotion and a kind of “sense” or judgment that can arise only through experience, 
maturation, and upbringing.  
	One question that is particularly salient is what modern life would be like 
were we to live with Aristotle’s conception of ethics in place of the idea of 
morality that Mill and Kant are trying to defend.

VII What is most distinctive about the ethics of care is the idea of responsibilities 
to particular individuals.  According to Kant and Mill, moral obligations are not 
fundamentally particularistic in this way, they are rooted in universal moral 
principles.  What philosophical conception might underlie the ethics of care?  
Think about how we experience our relationships to others.  Don’t we experience 
particular others as making claims on us?  Personal relationships are probably the 
best examples, but aren't relationships with strangers quite similar.  Think, for 
example, of fundamental forms of human exchange like gift-giving, promise, and 
contract.  Indeed, the original root meaning of ‘obligation’ refers to bond created 
between individuals by such exchanges.  As in, “much obliged.”

VIII  Of course, in this course we have only been able to pursue some of the many 
different ways in which philosophers have tried to think through the ethical and 
philosophical questions about value and obligation that any thoughtful human 
being faces.  In the end, it is up to each of us to decide what answers to these 
questions we find most convincing.