PHIL 342 - Metaethics

FDR: HU
Credits: 3
Planned Offering: Alternate years.

This course focuses on contemporary issues in metaethics. For example, we address questions such as the following: Do moral judgments express truths that are independent of our feelings and conventions? Are “goodness” and “wrongness” real properties of things, or do we simply use these terms to express our subjective preferences toward states of affairs? Can we reason about morality? Do moral considerations provide practical reasons for all rational agents, or does the normative force of these considerations depend upon an agent’s subjective desires? We also consider some meta-theoretical questions about the aims, methods, and authority of moral theory. Smith.