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Creating Facts and Values

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  30 January 2009

Ruth Anna Putnam
Ruth Anna Putnam
Affiliation:
Wellesley College
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Extract

Moral sceptics maintain that there are no objective moral values, or that there is no moral knowledge, or no moral facts, or that what looks like a statement which makes a moral judgment is not really a statement and does not have a truth-value. All of this is rather, unclear because all of it is negative. It will be necessary to remove some of this unclarity because my aim in this paper is to establish a proposition which may be summarized by saying: even if there are no objective moral values in one sense, there are objective moralvalues in another sense, and the latter values are good enough to do some of the jobs that objective values in the first sense would have done. A useful analogy might be that of a person who has lost her hand and has been given a prosthesis. In one sense the prosthesis is not as real (because man-made) as the hand, in another sense it is just as real (both are physical objects); most importantly, the person can do with the prosthesis enough of what she could do with the hand to make do.

Information

Type
Articles
Information
Philosophy , Volume 60 , Issue 232 , April 1985 , pp. 187 - 204
Copyright
Copyright © The Royal Institute of Philosophy 1985

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15 This work was supported in part by a grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities.