Normativity in Ancient Greek Metaethics

Grads enroll in 204. In this course, we shall examine some basic issues in metaethics in the context of Plato's and Aristotle's philosophy. First-order ethics asks questions such as 'What makes an action right?', 'What are virtues and vices?', 'Do I have, ceteris paribus, a duty to obey the laws?', and 'What is the best theory of social justice?'. Metaethics takes moral or ethical judgments as its subject matter and inquires into their nature. Basic metaethical questions include: 'What do moral or ethical judgments mean?'. When we say 'X is right', do we mean that X is objectively right?', 'Do moral judgments make claims about the world or about how we think about the world?' (These are questions about moral semantics.) Moral judgments, as we'll see, seem to involve the notion of evaluating actions, agents, social practices and so on. They are, in a bit of jargon, normative or evaluative. We'll try to get clearer on what such normativity involves by considering two other fundamental sort of metaethical questions. The first concerns the possibility of moral knowledge, includes questions such as 'Can we ever know if a moral claim is true and, if so, how can we know this?', 'In mathematics, chemistry, the history of India, and chess, for example, we think that there are experts who know more than we do and that we should, at least to some extent, defer to their judgments in their areas of expertise. Can there be moral experts to whom we should defer in the same way?' (These are questions about moral epistemology.) Yet other metaethical questions concern the place of morality in the world. Such questions include 'Are moral properties such rightness and wrongness "out there" in the world as we might think mass and electrical charge are (or being a neuron)?', 'Or are moral properties really just properties of our attitudes and beliefs?', 'Or do they simply not exist in the way that there is nothing that is phlogiston or Santa?' (Sorry). We'll start by reading some basic literature in contemporary metaethics and then turn to take up these questions in the context of Plato and Aristotle. By reading our ancient authors carefully, we'll try to work out the differences and similarities between their questions and answers and our own. I'm organizing the course so that both students who've done a good deal of work in metaethics and ancient philosophy and those who have done none at all will both be able to learn from the readings, the lectures, and what I hope will be lively classroom discussions.