Abstract

There is no clear consensus about even the most fundamental issues in meta-ethics, except insofar as there is agreement that Moore, Prichard, Ross, and other "intuitionists" were on a fundamentally wrong track--genuine realism regarding moral properties and intuitionism regarding our awareness of them have been largely abandoned. Objectivism and Rational Action is an attempt to show that the fundamental principles of the "intuitionist" school--that there are objective properties in the world which answer to ethical terms, that these properties are not "relative" in any important way, that we are aware of them through "intuition" and that they form the basis of rational action--are substantially correct. ;I begin by presenting the major alternatives to objectivism, e.g. Emotivism, Subjectivism, and Prescriptivism. I argue that none can capture the facts about our ethical discourse and practice as well as objectivism, and since each of them is an attempt to explain the meaning of ethical terms, none of them can be accepted. ;I then present some of the most important objections to objectivism. I argue that postulating the existence of objective ethical properties, even Moorean non-natural properties, does not do violence to our phenomenological evidence. Further, the notion of our ethical knowledge coming to us by "intuition" is neither an empty concept nor one which clashes with sound epistemological principles. None of these objections seem conclusive. ;Having thus defended objectivism, I go on to argue that rationality itself is linked to the supposition of real ethical properties. I claim that the Humean account of rationality in terms of desire satisfaction is inadequate, and that it is desires, and not ethical properties, which require justification as ends for human action. The heart of my defense of these claims is an argument which links deliberate avoidance of goodness with a sort of quasi-epistemic irrationality. ;If I am correct, then, ethical objectivism is the most credible doctrine of the meaning of ethical terms and the status of ethical properties, and further the correct account of rationality necessarily refers to those properties