ETHICAL THEORY

Catalog description

This course surveys issues and controversies in meta-ethics, that is, in the theoretical understanding of ethics. A central organizing question is whether or not there are objective ethical facts that we use ethical language to report and discuss. If there are ethical facts, what kind of facts are they and how could we know them? There seems to be no scientific experiment or mathematical proof which could demonstrate an ethical claim. If there are no ethical facts, is ethics simply a matter of emotional self-expression, arbitrary cultural norms, or the like? If so, can there be significant ethical truth and substantive ethical knowledge? All in all, students will survey a variety of proposals on the fundamental nature of ethics and develop an understanding of their relative strengths and weaknesses.