7 - Morality and convention

Summary

1. The philosophical dispute about the objectivity of morals has been four, or more, disputes rolled into one. First, there is the argument about predicates standing for moral qualities: are they to be construed as instrinsic qualities of actions or situations? Secondly, there is the quite different dispute as to whether to attribute a moral quality to a person or to an action is properly to be taken as describing that person or action, or to be taken as another kind of performance, e.g. as expressing an attitude, or as recommending conduct, or both. Thirdly, there is the question of whether two persons expressing disagreement about the answer to a moral problem are properly described as contradicting each other, which is usually interpreted as a question about the conditions of applicability of ‘true’ and ‘false’ to moral judgements. Fourthly, there is the related, but different, question of whether there is a respectable procedure, recognised in other contexts, for establishing the acceptability of moral judgements of various kinds, or whether moral judgement is in this respect suigeneris and for this reason problematic.

These four are some, certainly not all, of the clearly distinguishable questions that are to be found in the literature.