This is an english summary of the book An Introduction To Moral Philosophy by Jonathan Wolff. The summary includes chapter 1, 2, 3, 4, 7, 8. I made it for the course Introduction to Ethics (FI200ITE) for the philosphy minor at University of Groningen.
An Introduction to Moral
Philosophy – Summary
Book: Jonathan Wolff
Summary: Ken Hesselink
Edition: 1st
Date: 12-2020
1 MORAL PHILOSOPHY AND MORAL REASONING
Moral outlook: a way of seeing the world through ethics
2 types of morality:
Objective: universal rules of morality (e.g. mathematics)
Subjective: rules dependent on for example individuals or societies (e.g. fashion)
3 types of moral philosophy:
Meta-Ethics: questions about ethics itself
Normative Ethics: what are the moral rules
Applied ethics: what is the moral thing to do in specific situations
Normative ethics is broad and tries to make rules applicable to everything in life, applied ethics uses
values and rules to solve a specific moral problem
Argument: a way to support a conclusion by reasoning from claims that support it
Logic: formal method of making an argument
Valid: conclusion logically follows from the premises
Sound: a valid argument with true premises
Logical form: an argument formulated through premises and conclusions
Premise 1: Socrates is a human being.
Premise 2: All human beings are mortal.
Therefore
Conclusion: Socrates is mortal.
Fallacy: an incorrect way of arguing (an argument trap)
Equivocation: words have different meanings in different premises
Premise 1: Every river has two banks.
Premise 2: A bank is a financial institution.
Therefore
Conclusion: Every river has two financial institutions.
Circular argument (or begging the question): although the conclusion validly follows from the
premises, the premises already assume the truth of the conclusion
1
, Logically sound arguments are not the only way to support a conclusion:
Analogy: a convincing comparison, from which we can get more knowledge about both subjects
Analogies will break eventually, because two things are never completely the same
Induction: generating observations to develop a principle/law (scientific method)
Induction is never proof, because even though the sun rises every morning, tomorrow it may not
Induction does not proof causation
Inference to the best explanation (or abduction): “What theory best explains the data?”
often used in science and with induction
Thought experiments: a situation is described to stimulate deep thinking (e.g. trolley problem)
It can also reveal things about people’s moral intuition
Moral intuition: what you intuitively think is moral
Counterintuitive: when you intuitively disagree with something
Counterintuitive theories are harder to accept
Intuitions are not always right and are thus not complete proof
2 types of arguments specific to moral arguing:
Universalization: what would happen if everyone did this?
Fact/value distinction: that something “is” a way, doesn’t mean it “ought” to be that way
2 CULTURAL RELATIVISM
What people think is moral is different in different cultures
2 types of moral outlooks
Objectivism: 1 universal set of rules, others are wrong
Cultural relativism: morals are relative to culture and tradition
That morals “are” different in different cultures, doesn’t mean they “ought” to be different
(fact/value distinction)
Commonsense morality: morality we use in everyday life
This is often objectivist
Assumptions made by commonsense morality:
Some things are morally wrong
Statements about the morality of acts are true or false
It is possible to know things are morally right/wrong
When someone does something knowingly wrong, you can blame/criticize
Generally wrong acts were possible to avoid
Moral realism: the objectivist view that values are “real” and “exist” independently of humans
Form of the good: things all good things have in common, pure good does not exist on earth
This is an analogy comparing good to circles, Plato also used this for beauty and truth
Another form of moral realism is an analogy with math, do numbers/good exist?
2
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