Moral Supervenience
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Moral Supervenience
The principle of moral supervenience states that moral predicates (e.g., permissible, obligatory, forbidden, etc.) supervene upon non-moral predicates, and hence that moral facts involving these predicates (like ''stealing is wrong'') supervene upon non-moral facts. The moral facts are hence said to be ''supervenient facts'', and the non-moral facts the ''supervenience base'' of the former. In additional to actions, moral facts could also be about character traits or situations, e.g., ''Alice is virtuous'', or ''Shane's suffering was morally bad''. Clarification and examples Another way to put this is to say that moral facts are a function of, depend upon, or are constrained or constituted by, some non-moral facts, and that the latter are a sufficient condition for making the moral facts true. It follows that any change in moral facts must be accompanied by a change in the non-moral facts (i.e., those on which it supervenes), but that the reverse is not the case. A moral fact can ...
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Supervenience
In philosophy, supervenience refers to a relation between sets of properties or sets of facts. X is said to supervene on Y if and only if some difference in Y is necessary for any difference in X to be possible. Some examples include: * Whether there is a table in the living room supervenes on the positions of molecules in the living room. * The truth value of (A) supervenes on the truth value of (¬A). For the same reason, the truth value of (¬A) supervenes on that of (A). * Properties of individual molecules supervene on the properties of individual atoms. * One's moral character supervenes on one's action(s). These are examples of supervenience because in each case the truth values of some propositions cannot vary unless the truth values of some other propositions vary. Supervenience is of interest to philosophers because it differs from other nearby relations, for example entailment. Some philosophers believe it possible for some A to supervene on some B without being entai ...
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Multiple Realizability
Multiple realizability, in the philosophy of mind, is the thesis that the same mental property, state, or event can be implemented by different physical properties, states, or events. Philosophers of mind have used multiple realizability to argue that mental states are not the same as — and cannot be reduced to — physical states. They have also used it to defend many versions of functionalism, especially '' machine-state functionalism''. In recent years, however, multiple realizability has been used to attack functionalism, the theory that it was originally used to defend. As a result, functionalism has fallen out of favor in the philosophy of mind. The notion of multiple realizability The multiple realizability thesis in the philosophy of mind is the thesis that the same mental state can be realized by different physical states; another way of putting it is that there is a many-to-one mapping from physical states to mental states. Multiple realizability in general is not ...
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Proper Name
A proper noun is a noun that identifies a single entity and is used to refer to that entity (''Africa'', ''Jupiter'', '' Sarah'', ''Microsoft)'' as distinguished from a common noun, which is a noun that refers to a class of entities (''continent, planet, person, corporation'') and may be used when referring to instances of a specific class (a ''continent'', another ''planet'', these ''persons'', our ''corporation''). Some proper nouns occur in plural form (optionally or exclusively), and then they refer to ''groups'' of entities considered as unique (the ''Hendersons'', the ''Everglades'', ''the Azores'', the ''Pleiades''). Proper nouns can also occur in secondary applications, for example modifying nouns (the ''Mozart'' experience; his ''Azores'' adventure), or in the role of common nouns (he's no ''Pavarotti''; a few would-be ''Napoleons''). The detailed definition of the term is problematic and, to an extent, governed by convention. A distinction is normally made in current lin ...
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Moral Particularism
Moral particularism is a theory in meta-ethics that runs counter to the idea that moral actions can be determined by applying universal moral principles. It states that there is no set of moral principles that can be applied to every situation, making it an idea appealing to the causal nature of morally challenging situations. Moral judgements are said to be determined by factors of relevance with the consideration of a particular context. A moral particularist, for example, would argue that homicide cannot be judged to be morally wrong until all the morally relevant facts are known. While this stands in stark contrast to other prominent moral theories, such as deontology, consequentialism, and virtue ethics, it finds its way into jurisprudence, with the idea of justifiable homicide, for instance. In this case, the morally relevant facts are based on context rather than principle. Critics would argue that even in this case, the principle still informs morally right action. History ...
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Contradictories
In term logic (a branch of philosophical logic), the square of opposition is a diagram representing the relations between the four basic categorical propositions. The origin of the square can be traced back to Aristotle's tractate ''On Interpretation'' and its distinction between two oppositions: contradiction and contrariety. However, Aristotle did not draw any diagram. This was done several centuries later by Apuleius and Boethius. Summary In traditional logic, a proposition (Latin: ''propositio'') is a spoken assertion (''oratio enunciativa''), not the meaning of an assertion, as in modern philosophy of language and logic. A ''categorical proposition'' is a simple proposition containing two terms, subject () and predicate (), in which the predicate is either asserted or denied of the subject. Every categorical proposition can be reduced to one of four logical forms, named , , , and based on the Latin ' (I affirm), for the affirmative propositions and , and ' (I deny), fo ...
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Moral Universalizability
The general concept or principle of moral universalizability is that moral principles, maxims, norms, facts, predicates, rules, etc., are universally true; that is, if they are true as applied to some particular case (an action, person, etc.) then they are true of all other cases of this sort. Some philosophers, like Immanuel Kant, Richard Hare, and Alan Gewirth, have argued that moral universalizability is the foundation of all moral facts. Others have argued that moral universalizability is a necessary, but not a sufficient, test of morality. A few philosophers have also argued that morality is not constrained by universalizability at all. Two Moral Universalization Conditions The general concept can be distinguished into two main versions, which can be called ''universal applicability'' and ''universal practice''. Any particular universalizability test requires that some criterion be satisfied within this universalizability condition. A universalization condition combined wit ...
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Categorical Imperative
The categorical imperative (german: kategorischer Imperativ) is the central philosophical concept in the deontological moral philosophy of Immanuel Kant. Introduced in Kant's 1785 ''Groundwork of the Metaphysic of Morals'', it is a way of evaluating motivations for action. It is best known in its original formulation: "Act only according to that maxim whereby you can, at the same time, will that it should become a universal law."It is standard to also reference the ''Akademie Ausgabe'' of Kant's works. The ''Groundwork'' occurs in the fourth volume. Citations throughout this article follow the format 4:x. For example, the above citation is taken from 4:421. According to Kant, sentient beings occupy a special place in creation, and morality can be summed up in an imperative, or ultimate commandment of reason, from which all duties and obligations derive. He defines an ''imperative'' as any proposition declaring a certain action (or inaction) to be necessary. Hypothetical imperati ...
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Universal Prescriptivism
Universal prescriptivism (often simply called prescriptivism) is the meta-ethical view that claims that, rather than expressing propositions, ethical sentences function similarly to imperatives which are universalizable—whoever makes a moral judgment is committed to the same judgment in any situation where the same relevant facts pertain. This makes prescriptivism a universalist form of non-cognitivism. Prescriptivism stands in opposition to other forms of non-cognitivism (such as emotivism and quasi-realism), as well as to all forms of cognitivism (including both moral realism and ethical subjectivism). Since prescriptivism was introduced by philosopher R. M. Hare in his 1952 book ''The Language of Morals'', it has been compared to emotivism and to the categorical imperative of Immanuel Kant. Unlike Kant, however, Hare does not invoke universalizability as a test of moral permissibility. Instead, he sees it as a consistency requirement that is built into the logic of m ...
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Utilitarianism
In ethical philosophy, utilitarianism is a family of normative ethical theories that prescribe actions that maximize happiness and well-being for all affected individuals. Although different varieties of utilitarianism admit different characterizations, the basic idea behind all of them is, in some sense, to maximize utility, which is often defined in terms of well-being or related concepts. For instance, Jeremy Bentham, the founder of utilitarianism, described ''utility'' as: That property in any object, whereby it tends to produce benefit, advantage, pleasure, good, or happiness ... rto prevent the happening of mischief, pain, evil, or unhappiness to the party whose interest is considered. Utilitarianism is a version of consequentialism, which states that the consequences of any action are the only standard of right and wrong. Unlike other forms of consequentialism, such as egoism and altruism, utilitarianism considers the interests of all sentient beings equally. Pr ...
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Concepts In Ethics
Concepts are defined as abstract ideas. They are understood to be the fundamental building blocks of the concept behind principles, thoughts and beliefs. They play an important role in all aspects of cognition. As such, concepts are studied by several disciplines, such as linguistics, psychology, and philosophy, and these disciplines are interested in the logical and psychological structure of concepts, and how they are put together to form thoughts and sentences. The study of concepts has served as an important flagship of an emerging interdisciplinary approach called cognitive science. In contemporary philosophy, there are at least three prevailing ways to understand what a concept is: * Concepts as mental representations, where concepts are entities that exist in the mind (mental objects) * Concepts as abilities, where concepts are abilities peculiar to cognitive agents (mental states) * Concepts as Fregean senses, where concepts are abstract objects, as opposed to mental obje ...
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