Moral Minority
Moral Minority is a podcast on moral philosophy and the problem of moral foundations. Why does morality matter? What grounds the moral principles to which we appeal when making judgments about right and wrong, justice and injustice? Do we have good grounds for making the judgments we do make–in our everyday lives, our relationships, our work, or in politics? And if not, where does that leave us?
Moral Minority
Moral Realism
In this episode, Devin and Charles climb down from the heights of Nietzsche's critique of conventional morality in order to take a brief detour into the domain of twentieth-century analytic metaethics. Together they explore the historical context, motivating forces and access the viability of moral realism—the view that our moral claims have objective validity. The discussion focuses on the social conditions driving analytic philosophy's turn to logical and semantic analysis and how this leads to divergent views on the meaning/use of moral statements and the ontological status of moral claims. A version of moral realism known as intuitionism is explored through an overview of W.D. Ross's seminal work, The Right and the Good. Intuitionism claims that we come to learn moral truths as self-evident in analogous fashion to truths of mathematics and logic. Does this prima facie implausible view hold water? What does Ross's analysis of right action tells us about our obligations to our self and others? What virtues does his account of a plurality of duties and intrinsic value have over alternative theories like utilitarianism?