This is a prologue to a post

Working at a center for ethics has its advantages.  (By the way, I work at a center for ethics now.) One of these advantages is the ability to work next to – and be on first name basis with– internationally renowned ethicists. I don’t usually think about ethics, but I used to be fairly interested in it.

Last week I spent half-an-hour talking to Walter Sinnott-Armstrong about some of his views. He essentially summed up his most interesting/relevant papers for me. It’s fun to hear about groundbreaking ideas from the source itself.  Especially when it doesn’t require me reading anything.

Anyway, Walter doesn’t believe that morality is a natural kind. He doesn’t think that there is some criterion or set of criteria that will pick out all and only moral actions. He thinks it’s something akin to jade.  There is no such thing as jade. There are two separate minerals jadeite and nephrite that we call ‘jade.’ There’s nothing uniting them other than similar colors, similar hardness, and the historical accident by which people confused the two.

I asked Walter what he thought the moral ‘kinds’ were, if they weren’t all of one sort. Specifically, I’d had in mind some extremely flimsy categorizations by Jonathan Haidt. I’ve talked about Haidt before.

Walter didn’t want to discuss this, as he thought that it was at least partly an empirical question whether significant subdivisions could be made and how.  But when pressed, he had a whole list ready for me. Walter had different categories than Haidt (this is a good thing). His were (I think):

• Distribution
• Retribution
• Harm
• Honesty
• Roles
• Ingroup/Outgroup
• Purity

I like the idea. But I’m not going to discuss this now. Why? Because this is really just a prologue to another post I really want to write really soon. Possibly tomorrow.

So… think about it and get back to me.

Working at a center for ethics has its advantages.  (By the way, I work at a center for ethics now.) One of these advantages is the ability to work next to – and be on first name basis with– internationally renowned ethicists. I don’t usually think about ethics, but I used to be fairly interested…