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Ethics and Science

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  30 January 2009

J. J. C. Smart
J. J. C. Smart
Affiliation:
The Australian National University
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Extract

It has frequently been lamented that while the human species has made immense progress in science it is nevertheless ethically backward. This ethical backwardness is all the more dangerous because the advanced state of scientific knowledge has made available a technology with which we are able to destroy ourselves—indeed a technology which may have got so much out of hand that we may not even have the capacity to prevent it from destroying us.

Type
Articles
Information
Philosophy , Volume 56 , Issue 218 , October 1981 , pp. 449 - 465
Copyright
Copyright © The Royal Institute of Philosophy 1981

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References

1 Singer, Peter, Animal Liberation: A New Ethics for Our Treatment of Animals (New York: Random House, 1975).Google Scholar

2 Even St Francis has a not too clear record on this question. One of his disciples cut a trotter off a living pig, to give to St Francis who was ill. St Francis told the disciple to apologize to the owner of the pig, not for his cruelty but for having damaged the property. See Passmore, John, ‘The Treatment of Animals’, Journal of the History of Ideas 36 (1975), 195–218, especially p. 200.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed

3 See the long footnote to paragraph 4 of Section 1 of Chapter XVII of Jeremy Bentham's Principles of Morals and Legislation.

4 Moore, G. E., Principia Ethica (London: Cambridge University Press, 1903).Google Scholar The term ‘naturalistic fallacy’ is Moore's, but the general idea goes back to earlier writers. For anticipations of Moore in eighteenth and nineteenth century British Philosophy see Prior, A. N., logic and the Basis of Ethics (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1949).Google Scholar

5 See Frankena, W. K., ‘The Naturalistic Fallacy’, Mind 48 (1939), 464–477.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

6 It is hard to think of any influential philosopher who holds the imperativist theory as I have crudely stated it. R. M. Hare makes a more subtle comparison between ethical sentences and imperatives and holds that ethical sentences are essentially prescriptive. See Hare, R. M., The Language of Morals (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1952).Google Scholar For the emotive theory, see Stevenson, C. L., Ethics and Language (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1944).Google Scholar

7 See, for example, Quine, W. V., Word and Object (Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press, 1960)Google Scholar, and Davidson, Donald, ‘Radical Interpretation’, Dialectica 27 (1973), 313–328.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

8 For a philosophical discussion of Galileo's argument see my paper ‘Excogitation and Induction’, Australasian Journal of Philosophy 28 (1950), 191–199.

9 James, William, The Will to Believe (New York: Longmans Green, 1897), 188.Google Scholar

10 Sidgwick, H., The Methods of Ethics, 7th edn (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1962), 418–419.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

11 Parfit, Derek, ‘Later Selves and Moral Principles’, in Philosophy and Personal Relations: an Anglo-French Study, Montefiore, Alan (ed.) (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1973), 137–169.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

12 See my paper ‘Utilitarianism and Justice’, Chinese Journal of Philosophy 5 (1978), 287–299, especially p. 293, and my paper ‘Distributive Justice and Utilitarianism’, in Justice and Economic Distribution, Arthur, John and Shaw, William H. (eds) (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1978), 103–115Google Scholar, especially p. 108.

13 Wittgenstein, Ludwig, Tractatus Logico–Philosophicus, translated by Pears, D. F. and McGuinness, B. F., with an Introduction by Bertrand Russell (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1961).Google Scholar

14 But see Davidson, Donald, ‘True to the Facts’, Journal of Philosophy 66 (1969), 748–764.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

15 Or in the form of commands but expressed in the indicative mood, as in the Ten Commandments: ‘Thou shalt…’

16 On this point see Zimmerman's, M. brilliant article ‘The “Is–Ought” Question: An Unnecessary Dualism’, Mind 71 (1962), 53–61CrossRefGoogle Scholar, reprinted in W. D. Hudson (ed.) The Is–Ought Question (London: Macmillan, 1969).

17 See the remarks on pp. 18–19 of Bambrough's, RenfordMoral Scepticism and Moral Knowledge (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1979). This book contains interesting comparisons between theoretical thinking and practical thinking.Google Scholar

18 This paper was given as a Martineau Memorial Lecture, University of Tasmania, at Hobart and Launceston, April 1980.