Moral Principles are Not Moral Laws

Moral Principles Are Not Moral Laws

Moral requirements are still not rational requirements

Moral requirements apply to rational agents as such. But it is a conceptual truth that if agents are morally required to act in a certain way then we expect them to act in that way. Being rational, as such, must therefore suffice to ground our expectation that rational agents will do what they are morally required to do. But how could this be so? It could only be so if we think of the moral req...

Moral Emotions, Principles, and the Locus of Moral Perception

I vindicate the thrust of the particularist position in moral deliberation. to this purpose, I focus on some elements that seem to play a crucial role in first-person moral deliberation and argue that they cannot be incorporated into a more sophisticated system of moral principles. More specifically, I emphasize some peculiarities of moral perception in the light of which I defend the irreducib...

Moral dilemmas and moral principles: when emotion and cognition unite.

Traditional studies on moral judgement used resolutions of moral dilemmas that were framed in terms of acceptability of the consequentialist action promoting a greater good, thus overlooking the deontological implications (choices cannot be justified by their consequences). Recently, some authors have suggested a parallelism between automatic, unreflective emotional responses and deontological ...

Permissive abortion laws, religion, and moral compromise.

Article: In the 1984 elections in the United States some of the candidates were criticized for advocating public policies that conflicted with the teachings of their churches. Chief among such targets of this criticism were Catholics, such as Geraldine Ferraro and Mario Cuomo, who defended permissive abortion laws while maintaining that in private they regard abortion as morally wrong. The purp...