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(Download PDF) An Introduction To Moral Philosophy Jonathan Wolff Online Ebook All Chapter PDF
Jonathan Wolff
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an
introduction too
moral
philosophy
Jonathan Wolff
Blavatnik School of Government, University of Oxford
n
W. W. Norton & Company
New York • London
To my nephews, Dan and Tom
W. W. Norton & Company has been independent since its founding in 1923, when
William Warder Norton and Mary D. Herter Norton first published lectures delivered at
the People’s Institute, the adult education division of New York City’s Cooper Union.
The firm soon expanded its program beyond the Institute, publishing books by cele-
brated academics from America and abroad. By midcentury, the two major pillars of
Norton’s publishing program—trade books and college texts—were firmly established.
In the 1950s, the Norton family transferred control of the company to its employees,
and today—with a staff of four hundred and a comparable number of trade, college,
and professional titles published each y ear—W. W. Norton & Company stands as the
largest and oldest publishing house owned wholly by its employees.
W. W. Norton & Company, Inc., 500 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10110
wwnorton.com
W. W. Norton & Company Ltd., 15 Carlisle Street, London W1D 3BS
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 0
brief contents
Preface xiii
Preface xiii
About the Author xvi
v
vi ■ Contents
Moral Nihilism 40
Morality and Custom 42
Morality as a Device to Curb the Strong 43
Individual Subjectivism 44
Expressivism 46
Objective Moral Concepts 49
Ethics, Language, Metaphysics, and Epistemology 51
The Argument From Queerness 52
Responding to Nihilism, Subjectivism, and Error Theory 54
Chapter Review 55
Summary 55 • Discussion Questions 56 • Key Terms 56
Key Thinkers 56 • Further Reading 57
Free Will 58
Intuitive Belief in Free Will 59
Sociological Determinism 61
Psychological and Physical Determinism 61
Determinism and Moral Responsibility 63
Contents ■ vii
Compatibilism 64
Law and Determinism 67
Chapter Review 68
Summary 68 • Discussion Questions 69 • Key Terms 69
Key Thinkers 69 • Further Reading 69
chapter 6 Egoism 88
Why Be Moral? 88
Psychological Egoism 89
The Evidence for Psychological Egoism 91
Can Psychological Egoism Be Rejected? 95
Self-Interest and Evolution 96
Selfish Genes and Kin Altruism 96
The Mountain People 98
Ethical Egoism 100
Private Vices, Public Virtues 101
Pure Ethical Egoism 102
Chapter Review 105
Summary 105 • Discussion Questions 105 • Key Terms 105
Key Thinkers 105 • Further Reading 106
viii ■ Contents
O
ne of the key ideas when reflecting on a moral problem is to con-
sider how things look from the other person’s point of view. This, in
my opinion, is just as important in writing about morality as it is for
morality itself. In all my writing, including this book, I have aimed to
write what I would have wanted to read myself at the relevant stage of
my life; in this case, at the start of my study of moral philosophy. I have
been led by the dictum of the great moral philosopher Immanuel Kant in
his text “What is Enlightenment?” To be enlightened is to think for yourself,
rather than taking on other people’s ideas without reflecting for yourself
how they might be justified.
This book is aimed at helping those new to the subject to think for them-
selves about moral philosophy. I want to help you come to a better under-
standing of how you should think, feel, and act, if you are to do so with
moral confidence. I have not attempted to tell you what to think, but rather
to help you think independently about moral q uestions—not only about the
issues in this book, but also about other questions that may occur in your
life and in your thought. In other words, although saying this could give rise
to false expectations, the point of this book is to help set you out on the path
toward moral enlightenment (at least in Kant’s sense of the term enlight-
enment). It is not, however, a matter of knowing the answers, but rather of
having the equipment to think hard about the questions.
The main focus of this book is theoretical or conceptual. It is aimed
at introducing the reader to the main debates, theories, and concepts
that currently structure moral philosophy both as a subject studied in
the university and applied to real life. In doing so I often use examples,
but there is not enough space in just one book to examine practical ques-
tions in full depth. Accordingly, this book is accompanied by another
xiii
xiv ■ Preface
Acknowledgments
In writing this book I have acquired many debts. I think the first person
to suggest that I write this book for W. W. Norton was Roby Harrington.
Ken Barton broke down my resistance, and then Peter Simon was the first
Norton editor I worked with until Ken returned to take over that role. I have
worked with Ken most on this book, but Michael Moss has also played an
important role, as have Diane Cipollone, Shannon Jilek, Christianne Thil-
len, Marian Johnson, Quynh Do, Gerra Goff, Benjamin Reynolds, Ashley
Horna, Erica Wnek, Lissi Sigillo, and other colleagues in bringing it safely
to print and beyond. I am exceptionally grateful to all of these people for
their encouragement and firm advice at many points.
I have received an abundance of comments at many stages. The response
that led to the most significant rethinking was from my former PhD student,
the moral and political philosopher Rajeev Sehgal, who generously wrote up
comments on two successive drafts of the book, each time expressing a rich
variety of forms of dissatisfaction with what I had written. I learned from
all these suggestions, and adopted many of them, though I fear not enough
to dispel all of Raj’s doubts. But even if it is far from perfect, the book is
Preface ■ xv
J
onathan Wolff is the Blavatnik Chair in Public Policy at the Blavatnik
School of Government, University of Oxford. Previously he was Pro-
fessor of Philosophy, and Dean of Arts and Humanities, at University
College London. His books include Robert Nozick: Property, Justice and
the Minimal State (1991), An Introduction to Political Philosophy (1996,
3rd ed. 2016), Why Read Marx Today? (2002), Disadvantage (with
Avner de-Shalit) (2007), Ethics and Public Policy (2011), and The Human
Right to Health (2012). He has been a member of the Nuffield Council of
Bioethics, and has worked on questions of the ethics of risk and the valua-
tion of life and health with regard to the railway and pharmaceutical indus-
tries in the UK, as well as the government. He writes a regular column for
The Guardian newspaper.
xvi
12 ■ An Introduction to Moral Philosophy
before you can even know what evidence to look for) but the problem is
obvious. However many times you see white swans, or however many times
you see the sun rise in the morning, you have no guarantee that the next
swan you see won’t be a different color, or that tomorrow morning the sun
simply doesn’t rise. Induction is never p roof—but at its best it can provide
strong evidence.
But how precisely can scientific reasoning be a helpful model for moral
reasoning? As we noted, morality is a normative discipline, looking for an
understanding of how things ought to be rather than evidence of how things
are. For example, only a generation or two ago it was common for parents
to discipline their children by hitting them with a belt or cane. There was
plenty of evidence that this practice happened. But that, on its own, is hardly
enough to convince us it is right. Induction, then, does not look directly
applicable to moral philosophy in its pure form; but in an extended form,
induction has much greater use.
This extended form is another methodology commonly used in science
and elsewhere, known as inference to the best explanation, sometimes called
abduction (no connection with the practice of abduction as a crime involving
the taking of another person). Consider the important medical and scientific
example of the relation between smoking and lung cancer. Although not all
smokers developed lung cancer, and although some people suffered from
lung cancer without smoking, nevertheless it became clear, by the use of
induction (the accumulation of evidence) that there is a strong association
between lung cancer and smoking. It would be easy to jump straight to
the conclusion that smoking tends to cause lung cancer. But even though
the conclusion is correct, it would not be right to adopt it just on the basis
of the inductive evidence linking smoking and lung cancer. Induction on
its own says nothing about the causal relation, for it is consistent with the
evidence that what comes first is some sort of underlying condition that
causes you both to develop lung cancer and to smoke. In other words,
the evidence is consistent with the hypothesis that being the sort of person
liable to develop lung cancer makes you smoke. And indeed this conclusion
was suggested as a possibility by those who wanted to defend the tobacco
industry. Although false, it isn’t completely crazy. It could have been, for
example, that some people had a form of extreme anxiety disorder that led
them not only to want to smoke but also to develop lung cancer.
So there are at least two competing hypotheses consistent with the data:
First, that smoking tends to cause lung cancer; and, second, there is an
underlying factor that causes both the tendency to develop lung cancer and
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