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How We Can Know the Good and the Right

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An essay on the fundamentals of ethics. Long enough for a short book, perhaps.

Pulling together things I've written on this blog and elsewhere on the subject, but not an anthology of stuff I've already written.

Drawing on the history of philosophy, but not historical in focus.

Organize like this?

I. Is morality beyond the reach of knowledge?
  a) non-cognitive understandings of ethics
  b) a special case: the error theory
  c) the central case for a cognitivist understanding
  d) related but perhaps less central considerations here
II. Is too much knowledge a threat to morality?
  a) stating the problem carefully
  b) dismissing the "faculty" of the will
  c) randomness and the understanding of time
III. So we can know moral truths: how?
   a) what might serve as the foundation for ethical knowledge? Intuition!
   b) what we mean if we answer "intuition"
   c) what we don't mean, but may wrongly be thought to mean
IV. The Good and the Right
   a) deontology versus consequentialism
    b) the case for consequentialism (working from intuitions)
    c) why that doesn't imply utilitarianism
    d) the case against utilitarianism
    e) looking for the most plausible non-util. consequentialism
V. Values Pluralism
   a) We know that there are competing goods
   b) We know there are competing rights
   c) The tearfulness of things
VI. A Historical Dimension

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