Principles of Ethics

Author: Moore
Publisher:
Publish Date: 2003-11-01
Features: In ethics, as in all philosophical disciplines, the difficulties and controversies throughout its history are primarily due to a very simple reason: attempting to answer a question without first precisely discovering what the question is you wish to answer. Even if philosophers strive to identify the very problem they are exploring before attempting to answer it, I do not know to what extent this source of error would be eliminated. To define ethics, we must discover what is both universal and particular to all unquestionable ethical judgments. However, such judgments are not related to human behavior but are concerned with certain attributes, "good" and its opposite "evil," which can apply to actions as well as to other things. The subject of judgments in scientific ethics is not the same as that in certain other disciplines; this is not a "special case." However, this ethics encompasses all universal judgments about the relationship of "predication" to any subject, thereby including agnosticism.