Topics Ethics

Question If I am understanding it, some philosophers don't beleive in moral facts because such facts would have to motivate all people who KNOW about them regardless of what those people WANT (or something like that). My question is if it will make a big difference if those philosophers are right, and we give up talking about moral facts, but talk instead about, say, almost-moral facts (with words like "almost-wrong" and "almost-right"), which are almost identical to moral facts except in that they do not motivate people who just know about them? Let me put it another way: some philosophers say that nothing is wrong, because something being wrong would have to be, by itself, a motive for people not to do it, and this is impossible. But can't we just say: ok, nothing is wrong, but some things are almost-wrong, and "almost-wrong" is close to be a synonym of "wrong", except that something being almost-wrong, by itself, doesn't give anybody a motive to avoid it?

Accepted:
November 24, 2010

Comments

My co-panelists who specialize in such matters may have more insight than I, but I would have thought the reply would be this: the idea that something could really be right and yet its rightness should provide no motive for doing it is incoherent. "Rightness," so the argument would go, is conceptually connected to motivation. If that's correct (I'm not offering a view on that, by the way), then there doesn't seem to be any room for the idea of "almost right" as you explicate it. There's no obvious way to distinguish the "almost right" from the "almost wrong." (Is murder "almost wrong" even though not wrong? What does that mean if the almost-wrongness doesn't provide a motive for avoiding it?) And so to assess your proposal, we'd need to know quite a bit more what sort of facts "almost-rightness" and "almost-wrongness" are meant to be.