【伦理学】道德的本质：伦理学导论.pdf

The Nature of Morality The nature of morality AN INTRODUCTION TO ETHICS GILBERT HARMAN Princeton University New York OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS 1977 ISBN 0-19-502143-6 15 16 17 18 19 Copyright ? 1977 by Oxford University Press, Inc. Library of Congress Catalogue Card Number: 76-29806 Printed in the United States of America For Elizabeth Preface This book is a philosophical introduction to ethics. It differs from existing texts by focusing on a basic philosophical problem about morality, its apparent immunity from observational test- ing. Other texts either ignore this issue altogether, in order to concentrate on interesting but largely nonphilosophical discus- sions of moral problems, or treat the issue as only one of several highly technical questions in something called "meta-ethics." Meta-ethics became a subject during the period of linguistic philosophy, say from 1930 to 1960, when many English-speaking philosophers toyed with the idea that philosophy might be noth- ing but the analysis of language. Philosophical ethics, in this view, was the analysis of the language of morals. The philoso- phical subject of meta-ethics was to be distinguished from the nonphilosophical subject of normative ethics. A normative ethi- cal theory would be a theory of Right and Wrong, Good and Evil, Ought and Ought Not. It would be a nonlinguistic and therefore nonphilosophical subject. A meta-ethical theory, on the other hand, would be a properly philosophical account of the meaning and justification of moral judgments such as those that might be made in the course of setting out a normative ethical theory. Many philosophers now think that this sort of distinction rests viii ? Preface on highly controversial and possibly even incoherent assump- tions about meaning and justification. But at the time these as- sumptions were treated as self-evident principles that had to be mastered by any student of the subject and the basic philoso- phical problems of