On a standard philosophical conception, being autonomous is roughly equivalent to having some particular natural capacity. This paper provides argues that this conception is incorrect, or at least incomplete. The first chapter suggests that adopting an alternative conception of autonomy promises to resolve to several objections to the metaethical constitutivism, and so promises to provide highly desirable theory of moral reasons. The second chapter first motivates a broadly Kantian account of autonomous action, and then gives reasons to think that Kant's own development of this theory runs into damaging action-theoretic problems. The way to address these problems, I argue, is to modify Kant's account of autonomy in a way that leaves no room for the standard conception of autonomy to do any work.

Against moral intuitionism, which holds that moral intuitions can be non-inferentially justified, Walter Sinnott-Armstrong argues that moral intuitions are unreliable and must be confirmed to be justified (i.e. must be justified inferentially) because they are subject to cognitive biases. However, I suggest this is merely a renewed version of the argument from disagreement against intuitionism. As such, I attempt to show that the renewed argument is subject to an analogous objection as the old one; many cognitive biases of moral intuitions result from biases of non-moral judgments. Thus, the unreliability of moral intuitions due to biases (and the reason inferential justification was required) can be removed by clearing up the non-moral biases. Accordingly, biases of moral intuitions do not threaten a slightly qualified version intuitionism which posits non-inferential justification of intuitions when non-moral biases are not present. I also present an empirical study that lends initial support to my argument.

Richard Joyce claims sincerely uttering moral claims necessarily commits the moral claimant to endorsing false beliefs regarding the predication of nonexistent (non-)natural moral properties. For Joyce, any proposition containing a subject, x, saddled with the predicate “…is moral”[1] will have a truth-value of ‘false’, so long as the predicate fails to refer to anything real in the world. Furthermore, given the philosophical community’s present state of epistemic ignorance, we lack sufficient evidence to justify our endorsement of the existence of (non-)natural moral properties purportedly capable of serving as truth-makers for moral claims. My thesis offers a defense of Joyce’s moral error theory against two different lines of criticisms proffered by Russ Shafer-Landau—one conceptual in nature, and the other ontological. I argue that available evidence compels the informed agnostic about moral truth to suspend judgment on the matter, if not endorse Joyce’s stronger thesis that all moral claims are false.

Anti-theorists claim that moral theories do not deliver all the goods we want and that consequently such theorizing is not a philosophically worthy pursuit. We suffer from certain misconceptions about the point and purpose of such theorizing and the theories it produces. In this essay, I treat moral theorizing as a genuinely theoretical enterprise that produces abstract knowledge about the general structure of morality.Moral theories should be understood as tools--intellectual and practical tools with importantly different uses. Just as with hand tools where it is useful to have hammers for one sort of job and screwdrivers for another, it can be rational to accept multiple moral theories at the same time. The idea here is that all good theories illuminate some truths about morality, but are also misleading at times. A theory that is good at solving one moral problem may be bad at solving another; a theory that is illuminating in one place may be distorting in another.Chapter one outlines the differences between moral theory, metaethics, moral metatheory, and morality itself. It argues that disagreement about moral theory need not reflect moral disagreement, and vice versa. Chapter two argues that even if moral theory turned out to be practically useless, it would still accomplish certain theoretical tasks. Chapters three and four explain how and why one might adopt different incompatible moral theories at the same time. Chapter five defends moral principles from various particularists and shows how the imperfections of moral principles mirror the imperfections of laws in other fields. Chapter six explains why philosophical inquiry is worthwhile despite the overwhelming disagreement displayed by philosophers. Chapter seven shows that moral intuitions serve as a check on philosophical methodology just as much as methodology helps us verify our intuitions. It explains why a certain sort of psychology-based argument against deontological intuitions will not work. Finally, chapter eight explores the various ways in which moral theory is and is not practical. It concludes that the practical usefulness of theory is a matter of empirical contingency that philosophers have done little to investigate.

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In context of the possibility of aging interventions leading to significant or radical extensions in human lifespan, this thesis seeks primarily to address the question of the value of life’s continuance to persons, as the most fundamental motivating factor behind the project specifically to extend life beyond the classic endogenous maximum span. In so doing, its chief focus will therefore be upon the nature of persons themselves, especially in terms of the structure of personhood as a category of being. Much of the investigation will therefore be of an ontological nature, with the nature of value itself, and the relation of value both to persons in particular, and living organisms and the natural realm in general, being a critical theme. The consideration of the latter cases is necessitated by the requirement to analyse the structure of persons in whole, and especially because the primary positive thesis is that persons are processes which are motivated at base by a conative driver which itself is constitutive of their being at all. The analysis of the nature and function of this primary driver of persons as processes, in context of its relation to their secondary instrumental valuation of themselves, which lies at the core of the thesis will generate the conclusion that life’s continuance constitutes an inalienable value to persons that is profound to the degree that it obtains irrespective even of their own evaluative judgements. This analysis suggests a grounding in the question of the manner in which persons arise from the category of other living organisms in general, and the manner in which these arise from the background matter in the universe. The latter will be analysed and the nature of the conative driver will be asserted to be a physical principle which is a defining condition of living organisms in general. Additionally, the analysis of the category of the natural will constitute a critical theme for other reasons, which involve the reliance by certain commentators in the discourse concerning the ethics of aging intervention and life extension upon assertions as to naturalness, and the ethics of human alteration of or interference with the natural, the sacred, the normal, and the given. These latter will be argued to constitute a cluster concept, which will be analysed and demonstrated largely to be lacking in soundness, validity and real cohesion. Further, common ethical arguments against the wisdom of radical life extension in the personal case will be analysed, and mostly found wanting. The core thesis represents a re-evaluation of the classic liberal concept of persons as selfconscious, autonomous, rational valuing agents. This classic analysis will be shown to be faulty in certain key respects, and a correction will be proposed along the lines mentioned above. The fact that these faulty aspects of the classic liberal position constitute key points of attack for conservative personhood theorists, and that the correction offered by the revised liberal version generates a picture of the stability of the value of persons to themselves (and therefore generally) that at least matches that of the various conservative positions (considered to be their main strength by their proponents), largely neutralises such critiques, as well as removes a key rationale for those opting for the conservative positions in their rejection of the general subjectivist liberal picture of personhood. The conservative conception of value in general, and the value of life and persons in particular is critiqued and found wanting. Aside from being commonly based upon a false conception of naturalness, in which supernatural entities, substances or beings are considered to operate, a significant aspect of the failure of this conservative picture arises from the false conception of persons as substantial in nature, or as substances. Accordingly, a critique of the concept of substance in universal ontology is conducted in the first section of the thesis, which will attempt to demonstrate the ontological primacy of process over substance.

Submitted by William Justo Figueiro (williamjf) on 2015-07-09T22:25:06Z No. of bitstreams: 1 26b.pdf: 548409 bytes, checksum: dea18b68447228403a2b9f3bd80fe34f (MD5) / Made available in DSpace on 2015-07-09T22:25:07Z (GMT). No. of bitstreams: 1 26b.pdf: 548409 bytes, checksum: dea18b68447228403a2b9f3bd80fe34f (MD5) Previous issue date: 2014 / Nenhuma / Este trabalho investiga o naturalismo moral contemporâneo a partir das variadas formulações do argumento conhecido como a falácia naturalista, assim como do contraponto de algumas teorias não-naturalistas, em especial a de G. E. Moore. Parto da análise destas formulações do argumento no contexto formal da metaética contemporânea, buscando aferir a validade da falácia naturalista no contexto atual, bem como de seus limites na aplicação contra o naturalismo moral. Apresento então o naturalismo moral numa versão humeana, que sugere uma abordagem descritivista da moralidade, em oposição ao viés prescritivista. Trabalho as origens do naturalismo e apresento algumas posições em metaética a fim de melhor entender a situação contemporânea do debate moral no que tange à naturalização da ética, contrastando teorias da ação e do valor quanto ao tema da motivação e da normatividade morais. / This work addresses contemporary moral naturalism from the investigation of an array of formulations of the argument known as the naturallistic fallacy, as from the contrast of a few non-naturalistic theories, especially G. E. Moore’s. Proceeding from the analysis of such formulations of the argument in the formal context of contemporary metaethics, attempting to assert the validity of the naturallistic fallacy in the current context, as so its limits in its application against moral naturalism. Then I am going to present moral naturalism in a humean version, which suggests a descriptivist naturalism instead of a prescriptivist one. Such origins of naturalism will be worked with and some positions in metaethics to further understand of the contemporary situation of the moral debate concerning the naturalization of ethics will be presented, contrasting theories of action and of value on the matter of moral motivation and normativity.

When facing a dilemma about what to do, rational agents will often encounter a conflict between what they ought to do, morally speaking, and what they most want to do. Traditionally we think that when there is a moral imperative for an agent to do something, even if she does not want to do it, she nevertheless ought to do it. But this approach inevitably fails to be able to explain why agents often choose to do what they most want, in many cases flouting such moral imperatives. The purpose of this thesis is to offer a plausible alternative to this way of understanding these deliberative dilemmas. I argue that communitarian moralism, the account according to which genuine moral imperatives are only imperatives on communities, rather than agents, and according to which agents’ moral conduct is necessarily bound up with her particular preferences, projects and commitments, is the most plausible way to understand dilemmas in which agents must choose between doing moral and self-interested actions.