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Desire's Desire for Moral Realism: A Phenomenological Objection to Non-Cognitivism

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  13 April 2010

James Lindemann Nelson
James Lindemann Nelson
Affiliation:
Michigan State University
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Extract

Roughly thirty years ago, R. M. Hare told an Anglo-French philosophy conference about a young Swiss student who came to stay with his family in Oxford. It seems that the student was doing very nicely, until, in a burst of misguided hospitality, the Hares provided him with one of their few French books, Camus's L'Etranger. Reading Camus had the effect of changing the student from an affable, altogether attractive young man into a chain-smoking recluse for whom “rien, rien n'avait d'importance”.

Type
Articles
Information
Dialogue: Canadian Philosophical Review / Revue canadienne de philosophie , Volume 28 , Issue 3 , Summer 1989 , pp. 449 - 460
Copyright
Copyright © Canadian Philosophical Association 1989

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References

1 Hare, R. M., “Nothing Matters”, in his Applications of Moral Philosophy (London: Macmillan, 1972).CrossRefGoogle Scholar

2 In this essay, I use the term “antirealist” to refer to noncognitivist and subjectivist views. The philosophers I am studying refer to their target as “noncognitivism”, but as their argument really criticizes any view which either denies that moral locutions have truth value or places their truth conditions within the psychology of the speaker, it seems plainer to use a term less likely to cause confusion.

3 Wiggins, D., “Truth, Invention and the Meaning of Life”, Proceedings of the British Academy (1976)Google Scholar. Reprinted in his Needs, Values, Truth (Oxford: Blackwell and The Aristotelian Society, 1987).Google Scholar

4 Platts, M., “Moral Realism and the End of Desire”, in Platts, M., ed., Reference, Truth and Reality (London and Boston: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1979).Google Scholar

5 Lovibond, S., Realism and Imagination in Ethics (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1983).Google Scholar

6 Wiggins, , “Truth, Invention”, 341.Google Scholar

7 Lovibond, , Realism and Imagination, 9.Google Scholar

8 Platts, . “Moral Realism”, 79.Google Scholar

9 A la Mackie, J. L., Ethics: Inventing Right and Wrong (Harmondsworth, England: Penguin, 1977)Google Scholar. See especially section 7 of Chapter 1, “The Claim to Objectivity”.

10 Mackie, , EthicsGoogle Scholar, Chapter 1, especially sections 8 and 9.

11 See especially sections 6, 9, 10, and 34–36 of Lovibond, Realism and Imagination.

12 Hare, R. M., Freedom and Reason (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1963), 2Google Scholar, as cited in Lovibond, , Realism and Imagination, 1–2.Google Scholar

13 Lovibond, , Realism and Imagination, 26Google Scholar. Cf. Wittgenstein, , Philosophical Investigations (Oxford: Blackwell, 1967)Google Scholar, section 402.

14 Wiggins, , “Truth, Invention”, 361–362.Google Scholar

15 Lovibond, , Realism and Imagination, 42.Google Scholar

16 Ayer, A. J., Language, Truth and Logic (New York: Dover, n.d.), 111.Google Scholar

17 Hare, , “Nothing Matters”, 38–39.Google Scholar

18 Mackie, , Ethics, 34.Google Scholar

19 I am particularly indebted to Sabina Lovibond for her philosophical and personal generosity while I was starting work on this essay in Oxford during Michaelmas term of 1987.