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This chapter addresses the question how an emotion-based theory of moral discrimination, one that in many ways assimilates moral cognition to color sensation, can explain the fundamental expectation that moral evaluations will be widely shared within a community. Hume explains the causal origin of our moral sentiments by means of the mechanism of sympathy, and he completes his account of moral evaluation with an appeal to our use of the common point of view to compensate for the variations in sympathy's workings. The account threatens to become inconsistent, first because it sounds as if Hume is backing off from his claim that moral discrimination is not an activity of reason, and secondly because he seems tacitly to retract his claim that passions (including the moral sentiments) have no representative character. The chapter offers a two-feeling interpretation that removes these inconsistencies.

Scepticism about the power of pictures to convey moral messages and to improve the quality of moral reflection is unfounded, as is scepticism about links between moral and aesthetic evaluation. Pictures can afford moral insights, especially as vehicles for seeing- in. However, this amplifies—it does not diminish—the force of critiques of some pictures, including the feminist critique of the male gaze.

This chapter discusses why welfarism is worth elaborating upon. It explains why a person-centered view of morality and consequentialism are both plausible premises, and why even the reader who rejects them might find this book of interest. It suggests that welfarism should be seen as an approximation to a truly plausible moral view, namely responsibility-sensitive welfarism; and that the elaboration of the social welfare function (SWF) framework undertaken in this book should be understood as a large step toward elaborating a decision procedure that would implement responsibility-sensitive welfarism. The chapter seeks to accomplish two other vital preliminary tasks. The first is to distinguish between moral evaluation and other types of normative evaluation. The second task is to review questions of metaethics and epistemology that no work of normative theory can wholly ignore. It argues that the SWF approach is the most “attractive” choice-evaluation framework, that it helps us determine which governmental policies (or other large-scale choices) are “better” or “worse.” The chapter concludes by providing a formal, generic structure for a welfarist choice-evaluation procedure.

This chapter investigates how legitimations are added to representations of social practices, and how the same practices may be legitimized differently in different contexts. Key categories of legitimation include various forms of authority legitimation—personal and impersonal authority, expertise, and role modeling—as well as rationalization legitimations, moral evaluation legitimations and ‘mythopoesis’. The chapter discusses the linguistic and visual realizations of legitimation and shows how analyses of social practices can be integrated with legitimation analyses, and how legitimation theory can be applied to critical discourse analysis.

The aim of the book is to determine the category to which the moral evaluation of human actions belongs. This involves making certain distinctions in the logical grammar of evaluations. Drawing upon Peter Geach's distinction, argues that ‘predicative’ adjectives and ‘attributive’ adjectives are logically different: a predicative adjective, such as ‘red’, operates independently of any noun to which it is attached, whereas an ‘attributive’ adjective, such as ‘good’, depends radically on that which is said to be good. The general thesis is that moral judgement of human actions and dispositions is one of those genres of evaluation that is characterized by the fact that its objects are living things.

Foot considers the difference between calling a plant and an animal ‘good’ and calling a human being ‘good’; in the former case we think of the plant or animal as a whole, while in the latter we are evaluating the person with respect to his or her rational will. This particular type of evaluation may be called ‘moral evaluation’, although Foot is keen to show that ‘moral’ judgements belong to a wider class of evaluations of conduct with which they share a common conceptual structure. Foot discusses and criticizes J. S. Mill's understanding of the word ‘moral’, as an example of the modern view that contrasts ‘moral’ and ‘prudential’ considerations. Thus, Foot denies the expressivist view that moral evaluation must be understood in terms of the expression of special mental states such as approval, or mental acts such as endorsing. Drawing upon Aquinas's theory of the sources of good and bad actions, Foot argues that there is no reason to think that Mill's ‘moral’ evaluations should be treated differently from other evaluations concerning the human will.

Analytic general jurisprudence has become increasingly attentive to its own methodology in recent years. No longer content with its traditional first-order questions revolving around the varieties, commitments, and defensibility of legal positivism, the discipline of jurisprudence has raised a second-order methodological question: How should one do jurisprudence? This chapter introduces the methodology debate, draws attention to the merits and shortcomings of various positions already staked out, and contributes to the debate by defending the claims that moral evaluation has a modest role in analysing the concept of law and that conceptual analysis, or rather, many of its incarnations, is defensible and indeed inescapable in jurisprudence.

Refinements in Darwin's theory of the origin of morality create a framework equipped to organize and integrate relevant contemporary theory and research. Morality originated in social instincts or decision-making strategies that enabled early humans to maximize their gains from social exchanges and resolve their conflicts of interest in adaptive ways. Moral judgments and moral norms originated from strategic interactions among members of groups who experienced confluences and conflicts of interest. Moral argumentation buttressed by moral reasoning is equipped to generate universal and impartial moral standards. Moral beliefs and standards are products of automatic and controlled information-processing and decision-making mechanisms. To understand how people make moral decisions, we must understand how early-evolved mechanisms in the old brain and recently evolved mechanisms in the new brain are activated, and how they interact.

When we turn from Hume’s social theory and moral psychology to his Book 3 system of ethics in the Treatise, it is notable that Book 2’s deep and detailed account of social difference and social division is not considered in Hume’s account of the practice of moral evaluation. Chapter 4 gives a critical analysis of Treatise Book 3, pointing to a central problem with Hume’s account of the common point of view from which we evaluate moral character. It also examines the later, more sophisticated account of moral evaluation in the Enquiry concerning the Principles of Morals. In this work, Hume emphasizes the virtues required for good evaluation, and introduces the principle of humanity as a moral sentiment that, when cultivated, reflects those virtues.

It is a truism that counter-terrorism activities can cause harm greater than the terrorism they are intended to combat; yet such activities frequently proceed without their agents engaging in detailed reflection on the morality of the policies or practices pursued. An examination of the morality of IRA terrorism ideally should include an examination of the morality of British counterterrorism as well. This chapter has two aims. First, it surveys British counter-terrorism policies and practices in Northern Ireland, distinguishing among activities authorised by counter-terrorism legislation (internment without trial), those that clearly go beyond anything authorised in legislation (alleged shoot-to-kill executions) and those that exist in the grey area in between (methods of interrogation alleged to involve torture). Second, recalling that the domains of the legal and of the moral typically overlap but are not coextensive, the chapter provides a moral evaluation of a subset of these activities.

It is frequently assumed that if terrorism is morally wrong, then terrorism practised by the state is necessarily even worse. To evaluate this accusation of state terrorism, and the moral judgement commonly attached to it, reasonable answers must be given to three fundamental questions: What is state terrorism? To what extent has the British government engaged in it in Northern Ireland? Is state terrorism necessarily morally worse than terrorism practised by non-state agents? This chapter argues that although state terrorism has occurred in Northern Ireland, there is little evidence to suggest it has been pursued as a policy. Although there are conceivable situations in which acts of state terrorism can be morally justified, there are vastly more opportunities for it to be morally wrong.

This chapter explains how norms influence mental state ascriptions by examining the relationship between prescriptive norms (moral and conventional) and ascriptions of intentional action. According to Joshua Knobe, there is an imbalance in judgments about whether morally good actions against bad side effects were done “intentionally,” a phenomenon he dubbed as the side-effect effect. It looks at the two contrasting perspectives in response to the side-effect effect, the Intuitive Moralist view and the Biased Scientist view, and proposes a third approach, the “Rational Scientist”. The chapter then presents studies testing the Rational Scientist as a conjecture about the relationship between moral evaluation and the theory of mind.

This chapter presents some findings of a discourse-analytical study of meanings conferred on old age and health in the talk of older people themselves. Definitions of health and old age entail both moral evaluations and definitions of the participants' social identities. Physical and social activity and the ability to do things were constructed in the interviews as constitutive of good health and as an outward indication of it. It seems that adopting the social position of ‘old’ did not necessarily free the participants from their feelings of responsibility to try to resist the adverse effects of old age and to try to be active. In all the extracts shown here, the participants were balancing between conceding some changes in their health status and mitigating the threat to their adult status, and at the same time advancing their claims to a positive self-image.

Given the multiplicity and complexity of standards of possible interpretation, is it possible to attain neutral principles or objective standards? For this inquiry, one can focus on what judges write in their opinions, their likely actual bases for determination, or what one might ideally do with a particular legal conflict. Since Justices within a majority typically afford considerations somewhat different weight, it is impossible for even a majority opinion that is as accurate as possible to capture exactly what all those joining the opinion rely upon. If one asks about the possibility of a neutral or objective approach for a single, completely candid Justice, the reality that considerations carry different weight in different contexts undermines a successful general formulation. Lying in the background is the disagreement over whether, unlike factual judgments, difficult moral and political judgments have objective answers.