People also have the ability to think morally for themselves so morality is relative to someone’s point of view. The main point favoring the cultural relativism argument is that if there are no moral principles, then the principles can only be relative to culture. If someone were to express their opinion about the morals of a culture that they didn’t agree with, including what the culture already believed to be right, then that person would lose the argument without any question. This can be easily disproved because in one culture, not every person is going to have the same moral judgments about what is right or wrong and people can establish objective moral principles. A culture also can’t think of them as having the power to decide which is right and
The answer to this question will vary. Some people are moral realists and hold that moral facts are objective facts that are out there in the world, these people believe that things are good or bad independently of us. Moral values such as goodness and badness are real properties of people in the same way that rough and smooth are properties of physical objects. This view is often referred to as cognitive language. Those who oppose cognitivists are called non cognitivists and they believe that when someone makes a moral statement they are not describing the world, but they are merely expressing their feelings and opinions, they believe that moral statements are not objective therefore they cannot be verified as true or false.
The traditional account of weakness of will is as follows: an agent is weak-willed on an occasion if and only if the agent does not do that which she believes is best. The agent thinks she knows what the best course of action to take is, and knowingly acts against it. However, Holton disagrees, he argues that weakness of the will involves revising one’s resolutions too easily. By this, Holton means it is possible to act against one’s better judgement (that is, being Akratic) but without being weak-willed. Holton, on the other hand, argues that the traditional akratic account is flawed.
The wise Immanuel Kant in his quote said that humans should be treated as an “end in itself.” One might read this and wonder exactly what Kant try’s to portray in these words. One will never Frist r truly get what he was trying to convey in his thesis. It is important to note first that the term ends is in reference to ends and means. This is important because we must understand the context of what Kant t meant by “end in itself.” Ends refer to people or much better a rational person that is capable of judiciously thinking in the progress of their wellbeing. This said the term “means” is in reference to things, “things” such as objects.
Virtue ethics is agent-centred ethics rather than act-centred; it asks ‘What sort of person ought I to be?’ rather than ‘How ought I to act?’ The Aristotelian approach shows to give an account of the structure of morality and explained that the point of enrolling in ethics is to become good: ‘For we are enquiring not in order to know what virtue is but in order to become good since otherwise our enquiry would be of no use.’ (Nichomachean Ethics, Book 1, ch. 2) Quite importantly, Aristotle’s distinguishes between things which are good as means (for the sake of something else) and things which are good as ends (for their own sake only), Aristotle seeks for one final and overriding end of human action, one final good – eudaimonia (or final happiness). Philosophers of the 20th century brought about a revival of virtue ethics as many were concerned with the act-centered ethical theories. Virtue ethics is able to do something very different to other ethical theories – rather than focus on the act of a person, virtue ethics will focus on the person itself. The modern development of virtue ethics is often linked back to a paper by G. E. M. Anscombe entitled ‘Modern Moral Philosophy’.
In the hard determinist’s judgement, this feeling of freedom is an illusion. (Pereboom, 2009:324). Another argument against hard determinism would be if it were true we could not be accounted for when it comes to our actions, therefore we could do a morally wrong act and if it was determined then we would could not to blame, we did not have the free will to do that act it was determined to be done anyway. Also if we do a morally good act should we be praised for this? Hard determinists would say that it was not our free will that chose us to do this good act we were determined to do it anyway.
What is Psychological Egoism? Are we selfish as humans or not? This is the question to ponder. I believe that Psychological Egoism is morally wrong in relation to other theories like Utilitarianism, Kantian, and Divine Command Morality. Psychological Egoism as a moral theory describes self-centeredness.
From this Moore claimed that it is impossible to derive an ‘is from an ought’. This criticism became known as the naturalistic fallacy. In addition to this G.E Moore claimed that naturalism was not able to stand up to the open question argument. ethical naturalism claims to be based on moral facts, it would therefore seem logical that these facts should stand up to scrutiny. Yet, if we observe that pleasure is good, we should be able to ask is good pleasure.
Ethical statements are not just about observable facts, but are often statements about what we believe should happen and so are not very easy to establish as true or false, as they are expressions of points of view not shared be everyone. In ethics then, do we know something is good, or do we believe it is good and recognise that our belief is subjective? This is the question philosopher of meta-ethics are trying to answer – can ethical statements have any meaning? There are two schools of thought to do with ethical language, which are cognitive and non-cognitive theories. Cognitivism is the view that we can have moral knowledge.
Of the remaining criteria we might consider, only sentience―the capacity of a being to experience things like pleasure and pain―is a plausible criterion of moral importance. Singer argues for this in two ways. First, he argues, by example, that the other criteria are bad, because (again) they will exclude people who we think ought not be excluded. For instance, we don't really think that it would be permissible to disregard the well-being of someone who has much lower intelligence than average, so we can't possibly think that intelligence is a suitable criterion for moral consideration. Second, he argues that it is only by virtue of something being sentient that it can be said to have interests at all, so this places sentience in a different category than the other criteria: "The capacity for suffering and enjoying things is a prerequisite for having interests at all, a condition that must be satisfied before we can speak of interests in any meaningful way" (175).