Constructive Ethics

Excerpt from Constructive Ethics: A Review of Modern Moral Philosophy in Its Three Stages of Interpretation, Criticism, and Reconstruction Perhaps an apology is needed, not indeed for the appearance of a new book on Moral Philosophy - for that I hope is sufficiently justified by the importance of the subject, - but for the title which I have ventured to assume for it. The title 'Constructive Ethics,' would indeed with difficulty be justified, if the single volume now offered to the public were all that the author had in mind. In reality, the present book is intended to be a first volume, of which a second and fuller volume will be the sequel. It is intended as an Introduction to a systematic effort to work out a System of Ethics, which some time in the future I hope to be able to accomplish. It was natural and necessary to show, in the first place, that the history of Moral Philosophy itself invites a reconstruction on the lines of that particular theory of ethical data which I have called indifferently Rationalism or Idealism. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.

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Is morality fixed objectively, independently of all human judgment, or do we "invent" right and wrong? Articulating the Moral Community argues that neither of these simple answers is correct. Its central thesis is that, working within zones of objective indeterminacy, the moral community-the community of all persons-has the authority to introduce new moral norms. Unlike political communities, which are centralized, non-inclusive, and backed by coercion, the moral community is decentralized, inclusive, and not coercively backed. This book explains in detail how its structure arises from efforts by individuals to work out intelligently with one another how to respond to morally important concerns. Developing a novel theory of dyadic rights and duties based on this phenomenon, the book argues that conscientious efforts of this kind provide moral input, authoritative only over the parties involved. After sufficient uptake and reflective acceptance by the moral community, however, these innovations become new moral norms. This account of the moral community's moral authority is motivated by, and supports, a type of normative ethical theory, constructive ethical pragmatism, which-to use an unfashionable distinction defended in the book-rejects the consequentialist claim that rightness is to be defined as a function of goodness and the deontological claim that principles of right stand fixed, independently of the good. It holds, rather, that what we ought to do depends on our continuing efforts to specify the right and the good in light of each other.

Ethics is a wide field which has contradicting argumentation. This book tries to open the foundations of ethics by the means of philosophical reasoning. It bridges the gap between the argumentation of ethics and the discussions in the philosophy of science.