Sophie Grace Chappell

What is at stake in the dispute between moral objectivism and subjectivism is how we are to give a rational grounding to ethical first principles or basic commitments. The search is for an explanation of what if anything makes any commitments good. Subjectivisms such as Blackburn's quasi‐realism can give any set of commitments no ‘rational grounding’ in this sense except in considerations about internal consistency. But this is inadequate. Internal consistency is not sufficient for ethical rationality, since a set of obviously bad commitments could be internally consistent. Nor is it necessary, since a set of obviously good commitments could be internally inconsistent. I therefore argue for an objectivist view of the grounding of commitments, taking them to be attitudes which get their rationality, or lack of it, from their responsiveness to natural human needs and well‐being. Since this view is objectivist, it avoids the problems which face subjectivism.

An option range is a set of alternative actions available to an agent at a given time. I ask how a moral theory’s account of option ranges relates to its recommendations about deliberative procedure (DP) and criterion of rightness (CR). I apply this question to Act Consequentialism (AC), which tells us, at any time, to perform the action with the best consequences in our option range then. If anyone can employ this command as a DP, or assess (direct or indirect) compliance with it as a CR, someone must be able to tell which actions fit this description. Since the denseness of possibilia entails that any option range is indefinitely large, no one can do this. So no one can know that any option has ever emerged from any range as the best option in that range. However we come to know that a given option is right, we never come to know it in AC’s way. It is often observed that AC cannot give us a DP. AC cannot give us a CR either, unless we are omniscient. So Act Consequentialism is useless.

I develop an anti-theory view of ethics. Moral theory (Kantian, utilitarian, virtue ethical, etc.) is the dominant approach to ethics among academic philosophers. But moral theory's hunt for a single Master Factor (utility, universalisability, virtue...) is implausibly systematising and reductionist. Perhaps scientism drives the approach? But good science always insists on respect for the data, even messy data: I criticise Singer's remarks on infanticide as a clear instance of moral theory failing to respect the data of moral perceptions and moral intuitions. Moral theory also fails to provide a coherent basis for real-world motivation, justification, explanation, and prediction of good and bad, right and wrong. Consider for instance the marginal place of love in moral theory, compared with its central place in people's actual ethical outlooks and decision making. Hence, moral theory typically fails to ground any adequate ethical outlook. I propose that it is the notion of an ethical outlook that philosophical ethicists should pursue, not the unfruitful and distorting notion of a moral theory.