Promulgations and presuppositions

✍ Scribed by Bernard Rosen

• Publisher: Springer
• Year: 1970
• Tongue: English
• Weight: 193 KB
• Volume: 5
• Category: Article
• ISSN: 0022-5363
• DOI: 10.1007/bf00139547

✦ Synopsis

One of the chief functions of moral philosophy is to explain the justification of moral judgments such as "U.S. involvement in Vietnam is wrong." How are such individual judgments justified or supported? A popular view is that a moral judgment about a specific event, person or thing is justified by a general statement such as "Any country which meddles in the internal affairs of another country is doing what is wrong." Individual moral judgments can be represented schematically as x is M. That is, to: some event, person or thing, x, a moral predicate or characteristic, M, applies. A general statement scheme that would allow the derivation of such an individual judgment is If any x is F then x is M. F is a "non-moral" predicate or termwhatever that turns out to be.

This general statement scheme allows a straightforward derivation of the desired kind of statement.

1. If any xis F then xis M. 2. This x is F.