Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Notes on the contributors
- Acknowledgments
- Introduction
- Prologue: Excellence and obligation a very concise history of western metaphysics 387 bc to 1887 ad
- 1 The normative question
- 2 Reflective endorsement
- 3 The authority of reflection
- 4 The origin of value and the scope of obligation
- 5 Reason, humanity, and the moral law
- 6 Morality and identity
- 7 Universality and the reflective self
- 8 History, morality, and the test of reflection
- 9 Reply
- Bibliography
- Index
4 - The origin of value and the scope of obligation
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 20 May 2010
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Notes on the contributors
- Acknowledgments
- Introduction
- Prologue: Excellence and obligation a very concise history of western metaphysics 387 bc to 1887 ad
- 1 The normative question
- 2 Reflective endorsement
- 3 The authority of reflection
- 4 The origin of value and the scope of obligation
- 5 Reason, humanity, and the moral law
- 6 Morality and identity
- 7 Universality and the reflective self
- 8 History, morality, and the test of reflection
- 9 Reply
- Bibliography
- Index
Summary
If suicide is allowed then everything is allowed.
If anything is not allowed then suicide is not allowed.
This throws a light on the nature of ethics, for suicide is, so to speak, the elementary sin …
… Or is suicide in itself neither good nor evil?
WittgensteinINTRODUCTION
In this lecture I address three apparently unconnected worries to which my argument in the last lecture gives rise. First, I will discuss a. familiar objection to the type of argument which I have offered: the objection that valuing your own humanity does not commit you to valuing that of others. I will argue that this objection does not hold. It is based upon a false view about reasons, the view that they are private mental entities. This response, which invokes Wittgenstein's ideas, will lead me into a discussion of die question of the normative status of pain, and that will put me in a position to address another familiar objection to Kantian theories: the objection that basing all value upon the value of humanity gives no moral standing to the other animals. I will argue that the other animals do have moral standing and that a natural extension of the sort of argument I have been presenting can accommodate that fact. That argument in turn will lead me to some reflections about the natural and in particular biological sources of value, and I will move from those to a discussion of the question of normative scepticism.
OBLIGATING ONE ANOTHER
In the last lecture I argued that we must value our own humanity, and so that we must treat our human identity as a form of practical, normative identity.
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- The Sources of Normativity , pp. 131 - 166Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 1996
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