Moral Relativism
نویسندگان
چکیده
There is a general philosophical problem with the status of non-objective judgements, such as evaluative or aesthetic judgements. On the one hand, even judgements in these areas seem to answer to some standard of correctness. They are not arbitrary. We often call them " true " or " false ". One can err in making them. We argue about them. On the other hand, there are reasons to say these judgements do not answer to, or describe, anything in objective reality. For if there were, a huge epistemological puzzle would arise as to how we access these evaluative aspects of the world. The general problem is to make room for non-arbitrariness, correctness and error, truth and falsity without positing epistemologically dubious objects of knowledge, such as non-natural facts etc. Let's call this the general problem of non-objectivity. One answer to it is to say that these apparently non-objective judgements do, after all, answer to an absolute standard of correctness, and the challenge is then to come up with an epistemologically plausible story about that standard. Another answer is to insist that these judgements do not, after all, answer to an absolute standard of correctness, and here the challenge is to explain away the impression that our judgements aim at absolute correctness. Mackie's exotic answer is that even though there is no such absolute standard, the fiction that there is is nevertheless useful (Mackie 1977). The general problem of non-objective judgement consists in a tension between (a) the inclination to regard these judgements as answerable to
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