Is Morality Even Real?

Six steps into the first question of ethics: is there a truth about right and wrong at all — or only custom, feeling, and command?

A course on the thought of Ethics.

What you will learn

  • State Glaucon's challenge precisely: show that justice is good IN ITSELF, not merely for its rewards and reputation.
  • Reconstruct the contractarian origin story of justice — a compact among the mutually vulnerable — and the Ring of Gyges as its test.
  • See why 'because you'd be caught' and 'because it pays' are not answers to the challenge, and why the question sets the agenda for the entire program.
  • State the minimum conception: morality is the effort to guide conduct by reason while giving equal weight to the interests of each individual affected.
  • Use the Baby Theresa case to show how a moral question is settled by weighing arguments, not by polling feelings — the Benefits Argument against the use-as-means and wrongness-of-killing arguments.
  • Distinguish a moral reason (impartial, defensible to others) from a mere expression of taste or self-interest.
  • State cultural relativism and the Cultural Differences Argument that supports it (from disagreement across cultures to the absence of objective truth).
  • Show why the argument is invalid — disagreement about a matter does not establish that there is no fact of the matter — and trace the unacceptable consequences (no cross-cultural criticism, no reformers, no moral progress).

Course outline

  1. The Ring of Gyges — The challenge that starts the whole of ethics: Glaucon's ring of invisibility, the claim that justice is only a compromise the weak strike among themselves, and Socrates's refusal to answer with…
  2. The Minimum Conception — Before we can ask what is right, we ask what a moral judgment even IS — and Rachels's three wrenching cases of life and death show that whatever else morality is, it is at minimum the guidance of…
  3. When in Rome — The first great denial: that morality is only the code of one's own society. Herodotus's Greeks and Callatians, the Cultural Differences Argument, and the reasons the theory collapses — even as it…
  4. Boo and Hurrah — The second denial, at full strength: A. J. Ayer takes the lectern to argue that moral sentences state no facts at all — they express feeling and seek to influence — and Socrates presses the cost: a…
  5. The Piety Question — The third denial concedes there is moral truth — and says it is only God's command. Socrates's oldest question, put to a man prosecuting his own father, splits the theory on a two-horned fork; and…
  6. Why Be Moral? — The verdict of the first course, and the hinge of the whole program: with the three denials cleared away, morality stands as reason and impartiality — but Glaucon's ring is still unanswered, and the…

Works read in this course

  • Republic, Book II — Plato's dialogue: Glaucon's challenge and the Ring of Gyges — is justice good in itself, or only for its rewards?
  • Euthyphro — Plato's dialogue: Socrates and a young prosecutor on whether the holy is holy because the gods love it, or loved because it is holy
  • (secondary spine) Rachels, The Elements of Moral Philosophy — the minimum conception; the cases of Baby Theresa, Jodie & Mary, Tracy Latimer; the critiques of relativism, subjectivism, and divine command
  • Ayer, Language, Truth and Logic — the emotivist theory of ethics — moral sentences express feeling and seek to influence, and state no fact
  • Aquinas, Summa Theologica — natural law as the alternative to divine command — morality as a rational order reason can read

Terms introduced

the Ring of Gyges, metaethics, the minimum conception of morality, cultural relativism, the cultural differences argument, ethical subjectivism, emotivism, the divine command theory, the Euthyphro question, the theory of natural law, impartiality

Part of the Simposeum course library.