Abstract

Both the view that moral judgments are cognitive judgments, and the view that moral judgments are intrinsically motivating are appealing. However, the two views seem incompatible. Because of this ethicists have split into two camps: the non-cognitivists who reject the first view, and the moral realists who reject the second view. My dissertation diagnoses the problem ethicists have run into and offers a solution. My thesis is that the view that moral judgments are both cognitive and intrinsically action-guiding, a view I call moral cognitivism, can best be supported in a virtue theory. ;I start with Gary Watson's distinction between consequentialist, deontological, and virtue theories. Consequentialist theories use a grounding conception of the good. Deontological theories use a grounding conception of the right. Virtue theories, on the other hand, ground both the right and the good in a conception of virtue, or how it's best to live. Contemporary ethicists have tended to focus only on developing consequentialist and deontological theories. I argue that this has led to the difficulty in supporting moral cognitivism because both deontological and consequentialist theories are structurally unsuited for supporting moral cognitivism. Both types of theory rely on a view of moral facts as accessible from a wide range of viewpoints, including the viewpoint of a non-virtuous person. Once moral facts are pictured this way, it is difficult to support the view that knowledge of them is intrinsically action-guiding. ;I trace this problem to a deeper problem in the conception of "the world of facts" that modern ethical theorists implicitly endorse. I develop arguments by John McDowell to argue that a virtue theory that starts with a different conception of "the world" can support a view of moral facts as both genuine facts and guides for action. I also examine one of the strongest contemporary defenses of moral cognitivism: neo-Kantianism. I argue that neo-Kantians have been able to move toward a plausible defense of cognitivism precisely insofar as they've moved toward reading Kant as a virtue theorist