In contrast to other articles in this series on the history of moral philosophy the present essay is not devoted to expounding the views of a single author, or to examining a particular moral theory. Instead it discusses an important dispute between two medieval accounts of the relation between theological and moral propositions. In addition to its historical interest this debate is important b...

G. E. Moore’s diatribe against the naturalistic fallacy in 1903 set the stage for most of twentieth-century moral philosophy. The main protagonists over the next sixty years were intuitionists and emotivists, both of whom were convinced by Moore that empirical science is irrelevant to moral philosophy and common moral beliefs. Even in the 1970s and 1980s, when a wider array of moral theories en...

When philosophers participate in the interdisciplinary ethical, environmental, economic, legal, and social analysis of nanotechnologies, what is their specific contribution? At first glance, the contribution of philosophy appears to be a clarification of the various moral and ethical arguments that are commonly presented in philosophical discussion. But if this is the only contribution of philo...

Students’ moral reasoning was assessed at a religiously affiliated liberal arts university. Cohort data were collected from undergraduate students who had entered the university as freshmen: 364 students in 2007 and 264 students in 2009. The results indicated that there was a significant increase in students’ post-conventional moral reasoning scores between freshmen and seniors and a significan...

the main purpose in this essay is investigation avicenna`s ethical philosophy with explain the nature of social and how to build social ethics. the method of this study is content analysis of avicenna’s ethical works. in this research analyze ethical works of avicenna and it is suggested that avicenna’s view on philosophy of ethics be called moderate relativism/realism. the results indicate tha...

ontemporary ethical theory begins with G. E. Moore (1873–1958). Moore opened up new issues for consideration and altered the focus of ethical discussion. Much of twentieth-century analytic ethics, at least until recently, treated issues that were raised by Moore or by philosophers responding either to him or to other respondents. Although analytic ethical philosophers discussed many questions t...

Let me begin with a bit of autobiography. I am, by profession, a teacher of philosophy. Year in and year out, for the last fifteen or twenty years, I have taught a large undergraduate course on contemporary moral issues issues like abortion, euthanasia, reverse discrimination, genetic engineering, and animal rights. Over the years, I have written a handful of papers on some of these topics. How...

Maimonides (1135-1204) wrote extensively on moral philosophical matters. In his three main works, the Commentary on the Mishnah, the Mishneh Torah, and the Guide of the Perplexed, he developed a far-reaching ethical system which is Aristotelian and yet is also greatly dependent upon the Rabbinic tradition. In this paper it is argued that Maimonides presents an effective synthesis of these appar...

In a passage in A Theory of Justice, which has become increasingly influential in recent years, John Rawls (1971) noted an analogy between moral philosophy and grammar. Moral philosophy, or at least the first stage of moral philosophy, Rawls maintained, can be thought of as the attempt to describe our moral capacity – the capacity which underlies “the potentially infinite number and variety of ...