Is Morality Even Real?

Six steps into the first question of ethics: is there a truth about right and wrong at all — or only custom, feeling, and command?

A course on the thought of Ethics.

Course outline

1. The Ring of Gyges — The challenge that starts the whole of ethics: Glaucon's ring of invisibility, the claim that justice is only a compromise the weak strike among themselves, and Socrates's refusal to answer with…
2. The Minimum Conception — Before we can ask what is right, we ask what a moral judgment even IS — and Rachels's three wrenching cases of life and death show that whatever else morality is, it is at minimum the guidance of…
3. When in Rome — The first great denial: that morality is only the code of one's own society. Herodotus's Greeks and Callatians, the Cultural Differences Argument, and the reasons the theory collapses — even as it…
4. Boo and Hurrah — The second denial, at full strength: A. J. Ayer takes the lectern to argue that moral sentences state no facts at all — they express feeling and seek to influence — and Socrates presses the cost: a…
5. The Piety Question — The third denial concedes there is moral truth — and says it is only God's command. Socrates's oldest question, put to a man prosecuting his own father, splits the theory on a two-horned fork; and…
6. Why Be Moral? — The verdict of the first course, and the hinge of the whole program: with the three denials cleared away, morality stands as reason and impartiality — but Glaucon's ring is still unanswered, and the…

Part of the Symposium course library.