Accueil
"To provide [...] the phenomenological, metaphysical, and epistemological foundations of an ethical theory that can withstand the challenge of skepticism [...] a theory that indeed resembles in some important respects Moore's (as well as Hasting Rashdall's and, less so, also H. A. Prichard's and W. D. Ross's), but in others is closer to ethical theories of the major twentieth-century continental moral philosophers Max Scheler and Nicolai Hartmann, and in still others to the mainstream of classical Greek and medieval ethics." (p.2)
"By skepticism in ethics i shall mean the general view that we have no knowledge of ethical facts, of facts that may be the subject matter of ethical judgments and statements, of the goodness of some things or the rightness of some actions, of or virtue, or of duty. The more familiar versions of the view rest on the claim the we have no such knowledge because there are no such facts, that so-called ethical judgments and statements are neither true ou false, have no cognitive content, and therefore, stricly speaking, are not judgments or statements at all. These versions may be said to be opposed to ethical realism. But the skeptic may also rest his case on a very different claim: that while there are ethical facts and therefore genuine ethical judgments and statements, possessing determinate truth-value, we do not, perhaps cannot, have knowledge of those facts, of the truth-value of those judgments and statements. In this book i shall explore the extent to which both kinds of ethical skepticism are justified, and indeed will concede that there is a respect in which each is justified. I believe that the second kind, which is the one opposed to cognitivism proper, is much more serious than the first. But it is the first, which is opposed to realism, that has received most attention, and i shall devote the first six chapters to it." (p.2)
-Panayot Butchvarov, Skepticism in ethics, Indiana University Press, 1989, 225 pages.
"By skepticism in ethics i shall mean the general view that we have no knowledge of ethical facts, of facts that may be the subject matter of ethical judgments and statements, of the goodness of some things or the rightness of some actions, of or virtue, or of duty. The more familiar versions of the view rest on the claim the we have no such knowledge because there are no such facts, that so-called ethical judgments and statements are neither true ou false, have no cognitive content, and therefore, stricly speaking, are not judgments or statements at all. These versions may be said to be opposed to ethical realism. But the skeptic may also rest his case on a very different claim: that while there are ethical facts and therefore genuine ethical judgments and statements, possessing determinate truth-value, we do not, perhaps cannot, have knowledge of those facts, of the truth-value of those judgments and statements. In this book i shall explore the extent to which both kinds of ethical skepticism are justified, and indeed will concede that there is a respect in which each is justified. I believe that the second kind, which is the one opposed to cognitivism proper, is much more serious than the first. But it is the first, which is opposed to realism, that has received most attention, and i shall devote the first six chapters to it." (p.2)
-Panayot Butchvarov, Skepticism in ethics, Indiana University Press, 1989, 225 pages.
