Your questions show that you really understand the debate here well, because they probe very deep into the motivation for quasi-realism. So to attempt a rather tentative answer, one that may help with all three questions. Blackburn starts from the claim that ‘Ethics is about how we live in the world… The practical role of ethics is what defines it. This is what ethics is for. If there is such a thing as ethical knowledge, it is matter of knowing how to act… more than knowing that anything is the case.’ (Ruling Passions, p. 1) This is intended as conceptual analysis. If this is right, then ethics is shown in our responses to the world. These responses arise as a result of how we represent the world. We recognise something distinctive about the situation we are in, and we respond with some attitude or emotion or behaviour. Our ‘ethical sensibility’ connects the input and the output. Very often, we describe the situation in value-laden terms. So it may seem that the input includes values. But Blackburn...

This question expresses a puzzle that many philosophers have shared. However, I think that whether Kant was right or not (I think not, myself), his theory turns out not to be a form of consequentialism. This only becomes apparent when we look at the logical structure of the theory, and in particular, the difference between Kant’s views about what it is to act rationally and what consequentialism says on this matter. There are ways of making deontology and consequentialism sound very close, but I think this ends up in confusion, not reduction. Consequentialism first. The essential structure of consequentialism is 1) a theory of what is good, e.g. happiness (or species survival, or dignity, or logical integrity) and 2) a theory of that what is right is to bring about (usually, to maximise) what is good. It is important to the theory that how we bring about what is good is irrelevant, that we have a conception of what is good that is independent of what is right, and that we are concerned with some...

An interesting question. There are a large number of rather tangled issues involved in thinking about egoism as an ethical theory. Let's take this as the claim that (for each of us) I should look out for my interests only (or primarily). The implicit contrast is that I should not sacrifice my interests to those of others. (I won't try to deal with the issue of whether the theorists you mention actually defend a pure form of egoism.) A number of philosophers have argued that egoism of this kind cannot be an ethical theory. While I think the theory is fundamentally flawed, I'm not convinced that egoism is somehow impossible to live by. However, to be coherent, it does require some very challenging commitments. Objection 1: Egoism is logical contradictory. If we accept that each person privileges their own interests, then we accept that, if my interests conflict with those of someone else ('Adam'), then Adam should seek to assert his interests over mine. But since I should assert my interests over his, how...

Perhaps the easiest way to answer your question is to start from a slightly different place. We need to distinguish the idea of rights from the idea of what is morally right (and wrong). Once we’ve made that distinction, we can then look at the further distinction between what is morally wrong and what is morally bad. The idea of rights extends widely. I have a right to go to the cinema, a right not to be killed, a right to be paid (given my contract with my employer), a right to have children, a right to the exclusive use of my house. Some rights are moral rights, some are legal, some are the results of contracts. In general, a right can be understood as an entitlement to perform, or refrain from, certain actions and/or an entitlement that other people perform, or refrain from, certain actions. Many rights involve a complex set of such entitlements. The two central features of rights are: Privilege/liberty: I have a privilege/liberty to do x if I have no duty not to do x. I have the right to go to the...

Most philosophers, me included, would say that we do not choose to feel what we do. Ever since the ancient Greeks, emotions have been thought of as 'passions', because we are passive, not active, in experiencing emotions. We 'suffer' or 'undergo' them, rather than bring them about. It may be that we can make choices, e.g. about what kind of person to be, that will change our character and that will result in our having different emotions in the future. For example, we may choose to face our fears, to become more courageous, and then feel less or fewer fears in the future. But we cannot choose what to feel in the present. Or again, we may have some indirect control over what we feel, by focusing our attention on certain aspects of a situation rather than others. But we can't directly control, by choice, what we feel. We do make moral choices as well. Given that we don't choose our emotions, it follows that when someone feels shame, this is not a moral choice they make. Instead, we might say that our moral...

This is a nice question. Essentially, I agree with your description of what we need to do, but not your conclusion that this gets us nowhere. The process that you describe is known as ‘reflective equilibrium’ (named and defended by John Rawls). In coming to discover what is morally right or good, we reflect on both our individual judgements based on pre-theoretical intuitions and on broader moral principles or theoretical arguments. As you point out, it is very unlikely that these are coherent to start with. So we go back and forth between the individual judgements and the principles adjusting each in the light of the other until we reach coherence or 'equilibrium'. If you think that what is morally right is completely independent of what we think, then you may be concerned that such coherence is no guide to the truth. Indeed, philosophers have objected that this method may just make someone's moral prejudices more systematic, leading them away from the truth. But for that reason, and because there is...

Morality must, I think, be something that can guide our choices and actions. And to do this, it must take account of what is realistic - morality needs to be morality for human beings, with the kind of psychology and concerns that we have. But what is 'realistic'? It's not the same as how we find many people behaving, but how it is possible for them to behave. What we can realistically hope for from people is less than utopian behaviour, but it is much more than a more pessimistic view of 'the real world'. Your example about majority rule is a case in point. Democracy respects majority rule more than any other political system, and yet from its beginnings, at least in modern times, it has also incorporated restrictions on what the majority can do. And that is because we can not only hope, but expect, people to take account of the interests of those they disagree with (altruism is just as much part of human nature as selfishness - the trouble is usually with how the two balance out). I think it is...

This is not an easy question to answer! Part of the difficulty is that quasi-realism is a very technical theory. So I can start by saying that Wikipedia is not quite right… Quasi-realism can be understood as a descendant of emotivism, and both theories claim that ethical sentences express emotional attitudes. They agree that these attitudes are not representations of how the world is; they can’t be true or false. But the two theories disagree on further details about ethical language and how it functions. There is even disagreement within emotivism. Ayer’s emotivism takes the expression of emotion as central: in saying that an action is wrong, I’m not making any further factual claim about it, but expressing my moral disapproval, he says. Stevenson’s emotivism argued that the purpose of ethical language is not merely to express how we feel but to influence how we and others behave, to motivate us to act in certain ways and not others. Blackburn’s quasi-realism argues that ethical language is rather more...

I think that you are right that there are no clear, definite rules about exactly when one may break a promise. But I don't think that this shows that whether or not it is acceptable is based on your whim. Aristotle argued that there are only very rarely fixed rules in ethics, but there are nevertheless objective reasons for why (and when) actions are right and wrong. It just means that reasoning in ethics doesn't take the form of discovering rules. There aren't laws of ethics the way there are laws of nature. He argued that to know what is the right thing to do, at least in complex and unpredictable situations like this, you have to be good. So 'you'll just know it when you see it' is only true if you are a good person; if you aren't, you will probably think it is okay to break a promise when, really, it isn't (e.g. not being good, you might be swayed by selfishness to disregard the harm that breaking the promise would do to someone else). Knowing when to break a promise is a matter of weighing up the...