Upon what can we base our ethical principles?
Subjective methods (such as intuition, revelation, and instinct) are
often used; however, these criteria have obvious defects and will
not be considered here. |
I. Authority: the opinion of those with
special ability or knowledge of a field. |
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A. Advantages: |
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1. Authorities are respected in courts of law, in
government, in scientific circles, and the schoolroom. |
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2. Authorities are relied upon because highly
trained, knowledgeable, talented and successful persons should be
able to render valuable opinions in their fields. |
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B. Disadvantages: |
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1. ad
Verecundiam: the fallacy
arising from relying upon an authority outside his field of
expertise. |
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2. Authorities in the same field sometimes
contradict each other on the main points. |
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3. Even if an authority is right, we still need to
ask why that person is correct in order to have knowledge. |
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4. The opinions of authorities change from time to
time, but truth should not change over place and time. |
II. Consensus Gentium: if there is a
unanimous opinion on a particular belief, it is considered to be
true. (Related criteria are majority rule, custom, and public
opinion.) |
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A. Advantages: |
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1. It's democratic--everyone gets a
"fair" chance to determine the truth. |
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2. It's a practical way to decide pressing issues
quickly. |
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B. Disadvantages: |
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1. ad Populum:
the fallacy arising from the belief that simply from the fact many
people believe something is true, it must be true. |
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2. In general, the majority is unreflective and
easily swayed by passion and prejudice. |
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3. Even if the majority is correct, we still need
to ask why the statement is true in order to have knowledge. |
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4. The opinion of the majority changes from time
to time, but truth should not change over time. |
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5. In practical matters, there can be a tyranny of
the majority. |
III. Legality: whatever is legal is moral. |
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A. Advantages: |
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1. The laws are both comprehensive and
specific--more so than any set of behavioral rules. |
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2. The court system can decide difficult
applications of principles. |
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B. Disadvantages: |
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1. Law and morality are not coextensive. (Not all
laws are good or moral.) As as the columnist Walter Williams
succintly puts it: "[D]oes legality establish morality? Before
you answer, keep in mind slavery was legal, apartheid was legal,
the Nazi's Nurenmberg Laws were legal, and the Stalinist and
Maoist purges were illegal. Legality alone cannot be the guide for
moral people." |
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2. Laws differ from place to place, time to time. |
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3. Many laws are vague--the law suffers from
"open texture." |
IV. The traditional theories of truth: |
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A. Pragmatism: the criterion that tests
beliefs by their results when put into operation, a criterion
supported by Peirce, James, and Dewey. |
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1. A statement is thought to be true insofar as it
works or satisfies or fulfills its function. |
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2. Working or satisfying or functioning is
described differently by different people. One attends to the
practical consequences of ideas. |
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3. Peirce wrote, "In order to ascertain the
meaning of an intellectual conception, one should consider what
practical consequences might conceivably result by necessity from
the truth of that conception; and the sum of these consequences will
constitute the entire meaning of the expression." |
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4. The pragmatists reduced the notion of being
truth to that of being accepted as true or even to that of being
tested for truth. |
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5. What are the defects for using this criterion
for establishing the truth of morality? |
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B. Correspondence Theory of Truth: this
criterion claims that an idea that accords with its object must be
true. In other words, a statement is true, if it expresses what is
the case. |
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1. To say that something is true is to say that
there is a correspondence between it and a fact. |
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2. For example, "It is raining here,
now" is true if it is the case that it is raining here now;
otherwise it is false. |
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3. The nature of the relation of correspondence
between a fact and a true proposition is described differently by
different writers. |
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The controversial features are due mainly to the
different interoperations of the key words, "fact" and
"statement." |
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4. One main difficulty is finding what corresponds
to a false statement or a nonreferring statement such as "The
present king of France is bald." |
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C. Coherence theory of truth: this
criterion is used to ascertain whether the individual statements
that comprise a belief are rationally and consistently interrelated.
(A criterion used by Leibniz and Spinoza, and Bradley). |
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1. To say that what is said is true or false is to
say that what is said is consistent with or is not consistent with a
system of other things which are said. |
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A statement is true if it is a part of a system of
statements each of which are related to each other by logical
implication (e.g., Euclid's geometry). |
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2. Hence a statement is true insofar as it is a
necessary part of a systematically coherent set of statements. Thus,
truth is a property of an extensive body of consistent propositions. |
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3. An unusual feature is the doctrine of the
degrees of truth: if the truth of an given statement is bound up
with, and can only be seen with the truth of all the statements in
the system, individual statements as such are only partly true--only
the whole system is said to be true. |
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Consider, for example, the truth of the statement,
"The earth is round." |
V. What criteria of truth will we used in this
course? |
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A. We will use a composite of the coherence and
the correspondence theories of truth. Generally speaking, the
process goes as follows. |
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B. When we use reason to establish the truth or a
statement, we need to argue from true premisses. |
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1. The premisses of our arguments can be
established as true either by the coherence theory (they follow from
other true statements) or the correspondence theory (they follow
from our knowledge of states of affairs in the world) |
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2. The conclusions of our arguments then can be
established from the rules of logic (the implementation of the
coherence theory). |