School of Historical and Philosophical Studies - Theses

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Type: Masters Research thesis × Subject: Ethics × Subject: Moral and ethical aspects ×

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    Moral reasoning
    Mitchell, Dorothy Joy ( 1962)
    My problem begins with the 'is' and the 'ought'. Most philosophers since Hume have considered it to be a fundamental fact about ethics that an 'ought' may not be deduced from an 'is'. Many philosophers have used this alleged fact to support the view that one cannot move from a fact to an evaluation of it, from the non-moral to the moral, from the descriptive to the prescriptive, and from theoretical to practical knowledge, without proceeding via a moral principle. But does Hume's canon support these claims? What does the point about the 'ought' and the 'is' amount to?
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    On moral diversity
    Wong, Yih Jiun ( 1996)
    On one level, the notion of moral diversity is unproblematic, it is simply an acknowledgement that there exists in our world, usually because of differences in religion or culture or ideology, a number of different moral perspectives -this is simply an observable fact. The difficulty with moral diversity appears under a different consideration, that is when there is a dispute over a particular moral issue with the different sides apparently holding different opinions as a result of their having different moral perspectives. In such cases, one may adopt any of several attitudes, two of which are important to my discussion. One attitude is to maintain that there is a final solution to the dispute and that one or more of the sides must ultimately be mistaken, i.e. there is a unique moral solution to a moral issue and there is a possibility of agreement amongst the disputants -unless the people involved are stubborn, or confused, or simply refuse to see the truth of the matter. The assumption here is that there is a unique, ascertainable and communicable moral truth to any moral issue; there is no such thing as moral diversity, there are only moral disagreements. This position would maintain that there are apparently diverse moral positions in the world only because some are mistaken and others though look different are actually the same; if we all work at it, some day we shall have universal moral agreement.