Value judgement: improving our ethical beliefs

Abstract

James Griffin asks how, and how much, we can improve our ethical standards - not lift our behaviour closer to our standards, but refine the standards themselves. To answer this question it is necessary to answer most of the questions of ethics. So Value Judgement includes discussion of what a good life is like, where the boundaries of the 'natural world' come, how values relate to the world, how great human capacities - the ones important to ethics - are, and where moral norms come from. Throughout, the question of what philosophy can contribute to ethics repeatedly arises. Philosophical traditions, such as most forms of utilitarianism and deontology and virtue ethics, are, Griffin contends, too ambitious. Ethics cannot be what philosophers in those traditions expect it to be because agents cannot be what their philosophies need them to be. This clear, compelling, and original account of ethics will be of interest to anyone concerned with thinking about values: not only philosophers but also legal, political, and economic theorists.

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