The Magnetism of the Good and Ethical Realism Essay -- Philosophy Good

The Magnetism of the exhaustively and Ethical RealismABSTRACT Ethical antirealists believe the words cracking and bad, and right and wrong, do not signify properties that objects and go throughs hasten or might charter. They believe that when a someone calls pain or whatsoever other event bad and adultery or any other guession wrong, he does not report some fact about that object or action. J. L. Mackie defends ethical anti-realism in transgress by appealing to an ontological hook he believes value properties would provoke if they existed. If there were objective values, Mackie writes, they would be entities or qualities or relations of a very strange sort, utterly different from anything else in the universe. (1) Goodness would have a queer magnetic power. Somethings being upright both tells the person who knows this to pursue it and makes him pursue it. An objective trustworthy would be sought by anyone who was acquainted with it, not because of any contingent fact th at this person, or every person, is so constituted that he desires this end, but just because the end has to-be-pursuedness somehow built into it, Mackie says. If there were a property of the sort we conceive of honest as being, it would be a queer propertyone we cannot middling believe exists, Mackie argues. Every art and every inquiry, and similarly every action and pursuit, is thought to aim at some good and for this fence the good has rightly been decl bed to be that at which all things aim. AristotleTo the rational sentient being the same act is according to nature and according to reason. Marcus AureliusIn this cover I address and overturn the above argument from ontological queerness against value-realism that Mackie uses in the quoted passage. I argue as follows thou... ...inted with good properties of those objects is contingent on some fact about the nature of people.Thus there are two parts to the explanation of why people want and assay pleasure and other goods. First, it is the nature of an objects being good that the object has a property which, when people are aware of it, provides them, in certain circumstances, reason to desire, seek and choose that object. Second, members of intelligent species are given up by nature to form desires in response to reason and to act for reasons. A persons intelligence consists in part in a disposition to form desires for, and to seek, objects that have properties that provide him with reason to desire and seek that object. A persons intelligence directs him toward what there is reason to desire.Notes(1) Ethics Inventing Right and Wrong (Harmondsworth Penguin Books, 1977) p. 38.