Doubts about moral principles

Inquiry: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Philosophy 18 (3):289 – 308 (1975)
  Copy   BIBTEX

Abstract

Modern moral philosophy in the British analytic tradition has, with very few exceptions, failed to produce work of any moral significance. There are two main reasons for this. There is first a characteristic failure or refusal to do justice to the complexity and specificity of moral problems and second, a tendency to present the nature and goals of morality in highly general, abstract terms. The paper attempts to establish this by concentrating on the work of R. M. Hare and G. J. Warnock which may be taken as fairly representative of purely formal moral theories and substantive moral theories respectively. The paper argues for a return to the concrete and specific, and ends with a short fiction which, it is hoped, will give some support to the main points

Links

PhilArchive



    Upload a copy of this work     Papers currently archived: 90,593

External links

Setup an account with your affiliations in order to access resources via your University's proxy server

Through your library

Similar books and articles

Moral particularism.Brad Hooker & Margaret Olivia Little (eds.) - 2000 - New York: Oxford University Press.
Variability and moral phenomenology.Michael B. Gill - 2008 - Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences 7 (1):99-113.
Moral Principles As Moral Dispositions.Luke Robinson - 2011 - Philosophical Studies 156 (2):289-309.
Normative contexts and moral decision.Michael Philips - 1985 - Journal of Business Ethics 4 (4):233 - 237.
Moral Principles Are Not Moral Laws.Luke Robinson - 2007 - Journal of Ethics and Social Philosophy 2 (3):1-22.

Analytics

Added to PP
2009-02-04

Downloads
16 (#774,541)

6 months
2 (#668,348)

Historical graph of downloads
How can I increase my downloads?

Citations of this work

No citations found.

Add more citations

References found in this work

The trivializability of universalizability.Don Locke - 1968 - Philosophical Review 77 (1):25-44.

Add more references