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Analytic and Existential Ethics

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 June 1970

C. D. MacNiven
Affiliation:
York University

Extract

“What has ethical theory to do with the moral life?”. This is a question which continually confronts moral philosophers, especially those who identify themselves with the analytic tradition of contemporary Anglo-American philosophy. Continental European moral philosophers and those Anglo-Americans who identify themselves with them are seldom confronted with this question. Existentialism, for example, has an obvious connection with the moral life which contemporary analytic philosophy seems to lack. For many people outside professional philosophic circles analytic moral philosophy appears completely irrelevant to the moral life. Since the analysts conceive ethics, to quote R. M. Hare, as “the logical study of the language of morals”, they never seem to get past linguistic analysis to the concrete moral problems which are its main incentive in the first place.

Type
Articles
Copyright
Copyright © Canadian Philosophical Association 1970

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References

1 Hare, R. M., The Language of Morals, Oxford University Press, 1952, p. iGoogle Scholar.

2 Gellner, E. A., Words and Things. Gollancz, London, 1959Google Scholar.

3 Murdoch, Iris, Sartre, Romantic Rationalist, Yale University Press, New Haven, 1959Google Scholar.

4 Hare, R. M., The Language of Morals, Oxford University Press, 1952Google Scholar and Freedom and Reason, Oxford University Press, 1963Google Scholar.

5 Gellner, E. A., “Ethics and Logic”, P.A.S., vol. 55, 1955-6, pp. 157178Google Scholar.

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7 Sartre, J.-P., Existentialism and Humanism, translation and introduction by Philip Mairet, Methuen & Co., London, 1948, p. 38Google Scholar.

8 E. A. Gellner, “Ethics and Logic”, p. 167.

9 Iris Murdoch, Sartre, Romantic Rationalist, pp. viii-ix.

10 Ibid., p. 42.

11 Ibid., p. ix.

12 J.-P. Sartre, Critique de la Raison dialectique, Gallimard: Paris, 1960. This work had not appeared at the time Iris Murdoch published her study of Sartre in 1953. The prefatory essay to the Critique (Question de Methode) has been translated into English by Barnes, Hazel E., Search for a Method, New York, Knopf, 1963Google Scholar.

13 Murdoch, Iris, Under the Net, Chatto and Windus, London, 1954Google Scholar, Penguin Books Ltd., Harmondsworth, 1960, p. 22.

14 Ibid., pp. 80–81.

15 Ibid., p. 61.

16 Sartre, J.-P., La Nausée, Gallimard, Paris, 1938Google Scholar.

17 Iris Murdoch, Sartre, p. 3.

18 Murdoch, Iris, “Metaphysics and Ethics”, reprinted in The Nature of Metaphysics, edited by D.F. Pears, Macmillan, London, 1957, p. 115Google Scholar.

19 R. M. Hare, The Language of Morals, p. 1.

20 Ibid., pp. 77–78.

21 Iris Murdoch, “Metaphysics and Ethics”, p. 109.

22 Ibid., p. 111.

23 Ibid., p. 116.

24 Hare, R. M., “Universalizability”, P.A.S., vol. 55, 1955-1956Google Scholar, p. 298; Freedom and Reason, pp. 7–29, 30–50, 38 and 98–100.

25 J.-P. Sartre, Existentialism and Humanism, p. 52.

26 Ibid., p. 29.

27 Ibid., p. 32.

28 R. M. Hare, Freedom and Reason, p. 3.

29 Warnock, M., Existentialist Ethics, Macmillan, LondonGoogle Scholar, (New Studies in Ethics Series), pp. 43–44. The same point is made in Mary Warnock’s fuller study of Sartre’s philosophy, The Philosophy of Sartre, Hutchinson, London, 1965, pp. 131–132

30 Sartre, J.-P., Being and Nothingness, An Essay on Phenomenological Ontology. Translated with an introduction by Barnes, Hazel E., Philosophical Library, New York, 1956, p. 364Google Scholar.

31 M. Warnock, Existentialist Ethics, p. 52.

32 See my own article “Hare’s Universal Prescriptivism”, Dialogue, vol. 3, pp. 191–8.

33 Cf. Rubinoff, L., The Pornography of Power, Quadrangle, Chicago, 1968Google Scholar, Ch. 6, Sect. I, pp. 162 ff.

34 Sartre, J.-P., Anti-Semite and Jew, translated by Becker, George J., Schocken Books, New York, 1965, p. 53Google Scholar.

35 Gellner, E. A., Thought and Change, Weidenfeld and Nicholson, London, 1970, p. 62Google Scholar.

36 J.-P. Sartre, Being and Nothingness, p. 70

37 R. M. Hare, Freedom and Reason, p. 98.

38 Iris Murdoch, “Metaphysics and Ethics”, p. 119.