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Ethics

During a discussion in the pub the other day my friend suggested that morality -- and the associated concepts of right and wrong, good and bad -- doesn't objectively exist, and that the universe is therefore essentially indifferent and meaningless. Any meaning or idea of "rightness" or "wrongness" that we perceive is a completely subjective human construct. This seems to me to be intuitively incorrect, but is there a way to effectually counter this view?
Accepted:
August 20, 2014

Comments

Stephen Maitzen
August 21, 2014 (changed August 21, 2014) Permalink

Philosophers have been debating this issue for about 2500 years. As things now stand, most academic philosophers deny, or are inclined to deny, that moral rightness and wrongness are purely subjective: in the recent PhilPapers survey, a majority of "target faculty" favored moral realism over moral anti-realism. But it's an area of robust philosophical debate. You might start by looking at the SEP entries on moral realism and moral anti-realism. They contain careful discussions and lots of references to further reading.

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