Reality and Morality

Reality and Morality PDF Author: Billy Dunaway
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0191899070
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 224

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Book Description
Reality and Morality develops and defends a framework for moral realism. It defends the idea that moral properties are metaphysically elite, or privileged parts of reality, and argues that realists can hold that this makes them highly eligible as the referents for our moral terms (an application of a thesis sometimes called reference magnetism). Billy Dunaway elaborates on these theses by introducing some natural claims about how we can know about morality, by having beliefs that are free from a kind of risk of error. This package of theses in metaphysics, meta-semantics, and epistemology is motivated with a view to explaining possible moral disagreements. Many writers have emphasized the scope of moral disagreement, and have given compelling examples of possible users of moral language who appear to be genuinely disagreeing, rather than talking past one another, with their use of moral language. What has gone unnoticed is that there are limits to these possible disagreements, and not all possible users of moral language are naturally interpreted as capable of genuine disagreement. The realist view developed in Reality and Morality can explain both the extent of, and the limits to, moral disagreement, and thereby has explanatory power that counts significantly in its favour.

Reality and Morality

Reality and Morality PDF Author: Billy Dunaway
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0191899070
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 224

Get Book

Book Description
Reality and Morality develops and defends a framework for moral realism. It defends the idea that moral properties are metaphysically elite, or privileged parts of reality, and argues that realists can hold that this makes them highly eligible as the referents for our moral terms (an application of a thesis sometimes called reference magnetism). Billy Dunaway elaborates on these theses by introducing some natural claims about how we can know about morality, by having beliefs that are free from a kind of risk of error. This package of theses in metaphysics, meta-semantics, and epistemology is motivated with a view to explaining possible moral disagreements. Many writers have emphasized the scope of moral disagreement, and have given compelling examples of possible users of moral language who appear to be genuinely disagreeing, rather than talking past one another, with their use of moral language. What has gone unnoticed is that there are limits to these possible disagreements, and not all possible users of moral language are naturally interpreted as capable of genuine disagreement. The realist view developed in Reality and Morality can explain both the extent of, and the limits to, moral disagreement, and thereby has explanatory power that counts significantly in its favour.

Moral Reality and the Empirical Sciences

Moral Reality and the Empirical Sciences PDF Author: Thomas Pölzler
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1351383337
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 238

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Book Description
Are there objective moral truths (things that are morally right or wrong independently of what anybody thinks about them)? To answer this question more and more scholars have recently begun to appeal to evidence from scientific disciplines such as psychology, neuroscience, biology, and anthropology. This book investigates this novel scientific approach in a comprehensive, empirically focused, partly clarificatory, and partly metatheoretical way. It argues for two main theses. First, it is possible for the empirical sciences to contribute to the moral realism/anti-realism debate. And second, most appeals to science that have so far been proposed are insufficiently empirically substantiated. The book’s main chapters address four prominent science-based arguments for or against the existence of objective moral truths: the presumptive argument, the argument from moral disagreement, the sentimentalist argument, and the evolutionary debunking argument. For each of these arguments Thomas Pölzler first identifies the sense in which its underlying empirical hypothesis would have to be true in order for the argument to work. Then he shows that the available scientific evidence fails to support this hypothesis. Finally, he also makes suggestions as to how to test the hypothesis more validly in future scientific research. Moral Reality and the Empirical Sciences is an important contribution to the moral realism/anti-realism debate that will appeal both to philosophers and scientists interested in moral psychology and metaethics.

Moral Reality

Moral Reality PDF Author: Paul Bloomfield
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
ISBN: 0195172396
Category : Health & Fitness
Languages : en
Pages : 230

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Book Description
Paul Bloomfield offers a rigorous defense of moral realism, developing an ontology for morality that models the property of being morally good on the property of being physically healthy. The model is assembled systematically; it first presents the metaphysics of healthiness and goodness, then explains our epistemic access to properties such as these, adds a complementary analysis of the semantics and syntax of moral discourse, and finishes with a discussion of how we become motivated to act morally. Bloomfield closely attends to the traditional challenges facing moral realism, and the discussion ranges from modern medical theory to ancient theories of virtue, and from animal navigation to the nature of normativity.

Explaining Morality

Explaining Morality PDF Author: Steve Ash
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1000568377
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 175

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Book Description
Adopting a critical realist approach to morality, this book considers morality as an aspect of social reality, enquiring into the nature of moral agency and asking whether we can legitimately argue for a specific moral position and whether moral positions can be understood to apply universally. Drawing on the thought of Bhaskar, Collier and Sayer, it explores a series of ontological questions about morality, shedding light on the ways in which critical realism can be used to address them, ultimately responding to the question of whether critical realism and the moral theories that have been produced through its use can provide an explanation of morality as a feature of reality. Through a synthesis of realist thought, the author develops a comprehensive theoretical understanding of morality that can be tested for its explanatory power through subsequent practical research. As such, it will appeal to scholars of philosophy and social science with interests in critical realism, ontology and meta-ethics.

The Nature of Morality

The Nature of Morality PDF Author: Gilbert Harman
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 165

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Book Description


Morality Vs. Reality

Morality Vs. Reality PDF Author: Farooq Tareen
Publisher:
ISBN: 9781082072437
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 244

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Book Description
The history of civilisation is strewn with conflict between science and religion. A battle has always raged between people, ideologies, and power, with those looking to shape the very nature of our own reality in a way that reaffirms the accepted flow of power and leadership. The stunning new work from Farooq Tareen, Morality vs. Reality, investigates this difficult dichotomy, analysing how kings, emperors and powerful leaders used religion to gain power and control over their subjects, and how the moral values of good and evil were carved into what they are today. Through extensive research and compelling studies, Tareen dives into the origins of the major religions and studies how their core values were often fundamentally the same. While their morals are rooted in upholding the order of things, their leaders had been using their followers as a tool with which peace was eroded and in turn, atrocities were committed. Whilst these practices are rooted in history, they're still rife across the globe, and the media appears to have taken much of this control. With the advent of social media, fake news and targeted advertising, along with controlled corporations of banking systems and the IMF, media has perhaps become the single most powerful entity to cause conflict, pain and poverty. Morally, many governments claim allegiance to democracy, freedom of speech and peace through the media. However, in reality, we uncover their lust for control and wealth. In the thought-provoking pages of Morality vs. Reality, author Farooq Tareen lays bares the clear hypocrisies that have control over our world, in much the same way as they were thousands of years ago.

The Ethics of Virtual and Augmented Reality

The Ethics of Virtual and Augmented Reality PDF Author: Erick Jose Ramirez
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1000517357
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 267

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Book Description
This book offers new ways of thinking about and assessing the impact of virtual reality on its users. It argues that we must go beyond traditional psychological concepts of VR "presence" to better understand the many varieties of virtual experiences. The author provides compelling evidence that VR simulations are capable of producing "virtually real" experiences in people. He also provides a framework for understanding when and how simulations induce virtually real experiences. From these insights, the book shows that virtually real experiences are responsible for several unaddressed ethical issues in VR research and design. Experimental philosophers, moral psychologists, and institutional review boards must become sensitive to the ethical issues involved between designing "realistic" virtual dilemmas, for good data collection, and avoiding virtually real trauma. Ethicists and game designers must do more to ensure that their simulations don’t inculcate harmful character traits. Virtually real experiences, the author claims, can make virtual relationships meaningful, productive, and conducive to welfare but they can also be used to systematically mislead and manipulate users about the nature of their experiences. The Ethics of Virtual and Augmented Reality will appeal to philosophers working in applied ethics, philosophy of technology, and aesthetics, as well as researchers and students interested in game studies and game design.

Reality and Morality

Reality and Morality PDF Author: Billy Dunaway
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
ISBN: 0198858256
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 242

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Book Description
Reality and Morality develops and defends a framework for moral realism. It defends the idea that moral properties are metaphysically elite, or privileged parts of reality, and argues that realists can hold that this makes them highly eligible as the referents for our moral terms (an application of a thesis sometimes called reference magnetism). Billy Dunaway elaborates on these theses by introducing some natural claims about how we can know about morality, by having beliefs that are free from a kind of risk of error. This package of theses in metaphysics, meta-semantics, and epistemology is motivated with a view to explaining possible moral disagreements. Many writers have emphasized the scope of moral disagreement, and have given compelling examples of possible users of moral language who appear to be genuinely disagreeing, rather than talking past one another, with their use of moral language. What has gone unnoticed is that there are limits to these possible disagreements, and not all possible users of moral language are naturally interpreted as capable of genuine disagreement. The realist view developed in Reality and Morality can explain both the extent of, and the limits to, moral disagreement, and thereby has explanatory power that counts significantly in its favour.

Moral Development and Reality

Moral Development and Reality PDF Author: John C. Gibbs
Publisher: SAGE
ISBN: 9780761923893
Category : Psychology
Languages : en
Pages : 320

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Book Description
A supplementary textbook for a graduate or advanced undergraduate course dealing with moral psychology. It looks at implications of and problems with theories of moral development put forward by Lawrence Kohlberg and Martin L. Hoffman. Annotation (c) Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com).

The Evolution of Morality

The Evolution of Morality PDF Author: Richard Joyce
Publisher: MIT Press
ISBN: 0262263254
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 285

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Book Description
Moral thinking pervades our practical lives, but where did this way of thinking come from, and what purpose does it serve? Is it to be explained by environmental pressures on our ancestors a million years ago, or is it a cultural invention of more recent origin? In The Evolution of Morality, Richard Joyce takes up these controversial questions, finding that the evidence supports an innate basis to human morality. As a moral philosopher, Joyce is interested in whether any implications follow from this hypothesis. Might the fact that the human brain has been biologically prepared by natural selection to engage in moral judgment serve in some sense to vindicate this way of thinking—staving off the threat of moral skepticism, or even undergirding some version of moral realism? Or if morality has an adaptive explanation in genetic terms—if it is, as Joyce writes, "just something that helped our ancestors make more babies"—might such an explanation actually undermine morality's central role in our lives? He carefully examines both the evolutionary "vindication of morality" and the evolutionary "debunking of morality," considering the skeptical view more seriously than have others who have treated the subject. Interdisciplinary and combining the latest results from the empirical sciences with philosophical discussion, The Evolution of Morality is one of the few books in this area written from the perspective of moral philosophy. Concise and without technical jargon, the arguments are rigorous but accessible to readers from different academic backgrounds. Joyce discusses complex issues in plain language while advocating subtle and sometimes radical views. The Evolution of Morality lays the philosophical foundations for further research into the biological understanding of human morality.