Practical Principles, Moral Truth, and Ultimate Ends

Ultimate Truth vis-à-vis stable Truth

We show that the set of ultimately true sentences in Hartry Field’s Revenge-immune solution model to the semantic paradoxes is recursively isomorphic to the set of stably true sentences obtained in Hans Herzberger’s revision sequence starting from the null hypothesis. We further remark that this shows that a substantial subsystem of second order number theory is needed to establish the semantic...

Moral Intuition, Moral Theory, and Practical Ethics

AUTONOMY, MORAL WORTH, AND RIGHT: Kant on Obligatory Ends, Respect for Law, and Original Acquisition Prospectus of the Argument PART I: OBLIGATORY ENDS, MATERIAL PRACTICAL PRINCIPLES, AND PRACTICAL LAW IN KANT’S DOCTRINE OF MORALS

Chapter 1: Beginning with the Metaphysics of Morals’ systematic portrayal of reason’s universally legislative role with respect to duties of right and duties of virtue, I explain why Kant requires the concept of an end that is also a duty if the distinction that he draws between juridical and ethical lawgiving is to ground the basic architectonic setup of his overall doctrine of morals, i.e., i...

Moral Principles Are Not Moral Laws

Practical Reasons and Moral ‘Ought’

Morality is a source of reasons for action, what philosophers call practical reasons. Kantians say that it ‘gives’ reasons to everyone. We can even think of moral requirements as amounting to particularly strong or stringent reasons, in an effort to demystify deontological views like Kant’s, with its insistence on inescapable or ‘binding’ moral requirements or ‘oughts.’1 When we say that someon...