Charles Stevenson

I reconstruct a plot in the twentieth-century Anglo-Saxon ethical discussion. I discuss first the reasons why in the first half of the twentieth  century the claim of a neutral character of metaethics vis-a-vis normative ethics was generally accepted; then I discuss the reasons for a U-turn that took place in 1958, which brought back to the forefront two traditional schools of normative ethics, Kantian and Utilitarian, and the reasons for criticism from the new school of virtue ethics. I end by claiming that intuitionism and Kantian ethics will still be on the agenda for some time.

1. Fog on the Channell
2. 1903-1949: when people believed that philosophy needed to be depurated from cant 2.1. Cognitivism and non-cognitivismo 2.2. The naturalistic fallacy  2.3  Hume’ss law 2.4 Hume’s fork 2.5 Intuitionism, naturalism, emotivism
3. 1949-1958: when ethics was depurated from the ‘third person’
3.1 Hampshire’s diagnosis  3.2. Criticism to the The naturalistic fallacy  3.3. Criticism to Hume’s law
4. 1958-1980:  Kantian elements
4.1 The Kantian element in the good reasons approach: Kurt Baier  4.2. The Kantian element in pragmatism: Clarence Lewis  4.3. The Kantian element in utilitarianism: Harrod, Hare, Brandt  4.4. The Kantian element in post-intuitionism
5. 1971-2002: Kantian normative ethics
5.1 Reasons for the normative-ethics revival5.2 Gewirth  5.3 Donagan  5.4 Nagel  5.5 Kantian constructivism 5.6 Kantian contractualism
6. The recent Kant and Aristotle rediscovery and the forthcoming Price and Whewell rehabilitation
7. Provisional concluding remarks: analytic philosophy from Hume to Kant

Zu Beginn des 20. Jahrhunderts geschah in der Philosophie etwas grundlegend Neues: Junge Philosophen wandten sich von der Metaphysik ab. Die Philosophie, so eine damals revolutionäre These Alfred Ayers in seinem Werk „Language, Truth and Logic“ aus dem Jahr 1936, müsse von der Metaphysik unterschieden werden. Leider war Ayers Theorie noch nicht ausgereift, auch wenn sie die wichtige Basis für die Abkehr der Philosophie von der Religion einleitete.

Im vorliegenden Paper soll Alfred Ayers emotivistische Theorie mit der emotivistischen Theorie Charles Stevensons aus dessen 1944 veröffentlichtem Werk „Ethics and Language“ verglichen werden. Dabei soll bewiesen werden, dass Stevensons emotivistische Theorie dem Ayerschen Emotivismus  überlegen ist.

There are certain 'hard cases' of weakness of will that seem to occur, indeed to be common, but are very difficult to give a non-paradoxical account of.  It is just not clear how they are possible.  This paper is largely an attempt to get them in focus.  What conditions must such weak-willed actions satisfy?  In what sense must they be intentional, for example?  And must the weak-willed agent thinks his action objectively worse than some alternative action open to him?  And must that alternative action actually be open to him?  The paper concludes by considering the condition that a clear case of weakness of will must be in certain sense non-procrastinatory and this turns out to be particularly difficult to satisfy.  Other explanations, ones that do not postulate weakness of will (though they may involve paradoxes of their own), always seem to be available.

There is stock argument against libertarianism: that the indeterminism it postulates makes human choice a matter of chance and this is no better as a basis for practical rationality and moral responsibility than the most rigid determinism.  I suggest that a similar problem arises on deterministic assumptions: although human choice is no longer a matter of mere chance, it remains arbitrary since whatever explains a person’s choice to act on the reasons for an action rather than those against, it is not a matter of reasons that were reasons FOR THAT PERSON.  The explanatory gap is closed in the wrong way for the impression of sheer arbitrariness to be cancelled.  I discuss (via a digression on F. H. Bradley) whether Davidson’s ‘anomalous monism’ would, if correct, necessitate any modification to this conclusion.  I also ask how the problem addressed in this paper relates to Galen Strawson’s rejection of the possibility of complete autonomy or self-determination.

As a non-cognitivist analysis of moral language, Charles Stevenson's sophisticated emotivism is widely regarded by moral philosophers as a substantial improvement over its historical antecedent, radical emotivism. None the less, it has come in for its share of criticism. In this essay, Leslie Allan responds to the key philosophical objections to Stevenson's thesis, arguing that the criticisms levelled against his meta-ethical theory rest largely on a too hasty reading of his works.