Simon Blackburn Quotes on Virtue
Simon Blackburn's Ruling Passions (1998) and the broader quasi-realist program develop the most rigorous contemporary defense of Humean expressivism in metaethics. Moral judgments are not descriptions of mind-independent moral facts but expressions of the projected sentiments through which moral agents take up evaluative attitudes toward their world; the appearance of moral truth, moral knowledge, and moral disagreement is preserved through the projection that quasi-realism accounts for without reifying. The framework grounds Blackburn's wider work on practical reasoning, the analysis of the cardinal and Christian virtues in the long historical perspective of Truth: A Guide and the more popular Being Good, and the engagement with Williams, McDowell, and Korsgaard on the contemporary metaethical scene.
Quotes
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Attributed to Simon Blackburn:
“Quasi-realism earns the right to talk like a realist while ceding the metaphysics to the projectivist.”
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Attributed to Simon Blackburn:
“Moral judgments are not descriptions of the world; they are stances toward it.”
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Attributed to Simon Blackburn:
“Humean philosophy is the school of moral common sense.”
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Attributed to Simon Blackburn:
“An honest naturalism is enough for ethics.”
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“We hope for lives whose story leaves us looking admirable; we like our weaknesses to be hidden and deniable... We want to enjoy our lives, and we want to enjoy them with a good conscience ... Ethics is disturbing. We are often vaguely uncomfortable when we think of such things as exploitation of the world's resources, or the way our comforts are provided by the miserable labour conditions of the third world ... Racists and sexists, like antebellum slave owners in America, always have to tell themselves a story that justifies their system .”
Simon Blackburn , Being Good (2001) -
“Simon Blackburn , Being Good (2001)”
We hope for lives whose story leaves us looking admirable; we like our weaknesses to be hidden and deniable... We want to enjoy our lives, and we want to enjoy them with a good conscience ... Ethics is disturbing. We are often vaguely uncomfortable when we think of such things as exploitation of the world's resources, or the way our comforts are provided by the miserable labour conditions of the t -
“Simon Blackburn , Being Good (2001)”
An ethic gone wrong is an essential preliminary to the sweat shop or the concentration camp and the death march .