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This chapter examines the concept of moral sense. It presents a brief history of the concept. It compares moral sense in the 18th century and today, and then considers the sense of right and wrong in present-day English. The phrase moral sense plays a significant role in contemporary philosophy, science, and popular science, and it is an important tool in the conceptual kit with which the English language provides its speakers, writers, and thinkers. Anglophone scientists, including evolutionary biologists, often take this phrase for granted and assume that it corresponds neatly to something “built into our brains”. Yet this phrase has no exact equivalents in other European languages, let alone non-European ones. The phrase moral sense is part of the Anglo cultural heritage going back not only to 18th-century British moral philosophers like Shaftesbury, Hutcheson, and Hume but even further — to Locke's influential tenet that all knowledge ultimately derives from the senses.

Many rationales are offered in support of the consequentialist theory of moral standards. This chapter harnesses the challenge to consequentialism mounted in prior chapters in order to demonstrate that the pull of many of these rationales is illusory. They do not provide a path of theoretical reflection that leads to consequentialism. They appear to result from what can profitably be seen as a misappropriation of general intuitions concerning the relationship between good/bad and right/wrong as properties of action and their misguided deployment as general intuitions concerning the relationship between good/bad as a property of states of affairs impersonally considered, and right/wrong as a property of actions. It is this misappropriation which underwrites the claim that consequentialism provides the most plausible interpretation of the general intuition that it is always right to do what is best. With this misappropriation in view, a return to the rationales that appear to favour consequentialism, reveals that their apparent support collapses.

In contrast to most recent scholarship, which attempts to divorce Bentham’s psychology from his ethics, this chapter shows how they were conceptually related through the sensations of pleasure and pain. The phrase ‘principle of utility’, by which Bentham denominated his standard of morality, represented the name of a fictitious entity. The real entities into which it could be resolved were the pains and pleasures experienced by sentient creatures. Individuals were, by nature, motivated to increase their pleasure and to avoid pain. Their actions were right or good, and therefore worthy of approval, in so far as they increased the pleasure or averted the pain, in other words contributed to the happiness, of all those who were affected by them.

This chapter examines the sociology of sociological problems. The first section describes the history of the sociological study of social problems. The second explains how the history has been shaped by Weber's views on value freedom. The third shows why a study of social problems cannot be silent on questions of right and wrong and, at the same time, be socially relevant, and the fourth section considers whether a study can be both value laden and objective or scientific.

Sometimes, we can gain new moral rights by acting wrongly. Sometimes, we can gain new moral rights (in addition to restitution rights) from other people acting wrongly. This chapter presents a typology of these rights. It then analyses why some wrongs can change the moral ballgame in this way to give us new rights, and other wrongs cannot. The chapter focuses on three factors that are relevant to moral ballgame-changing cases: (1) legitimate expectations; (2) personal investments; and (3) piggybacking on others’ interests. Finally, the chapter examines two ultimately unsuccessful strategies to resist this analysis of wrong-generated rights. The first strategy pertains to the defeasibility of rights. The second strategy pertains to their conditionality.

The chapter starts from a specific interpretation of what it means to know the difference between right and wrong, which stems from Gilbert Ryle. To know the difference between right and wrong implies caring about morality. The author links Ryle’s ideas to the notion of being a moral person. Two different ideas found in moral philosophy are delineated, namely, the amoral person, that is, someone who rejects the demands of morality, and the morally incapacitated person, that is, someone who cannot take those demands into account. Psychopaths are not amoral in the philosophers’ sense of the word, but are incapable of, or seriously deficient in, taking the moral point of view.

Rawls proposes that the moral concept of ‘right’ is defined by the functional role it has of properly adjudicating conflicting claims that persons make on one another and on social practices. Substantive moral theories of right and wrong are supposed to provide more specific principles, criteria, values, and ideals for interpreting and resolving this fundamental moral problem. It is not immediately apparent, however, what moral problem Rawls thinks substantive theories of right are supposed to interpret and address. The aim of this chapter is to offer a fuller account of what Rawls could have meant by defining the concept of right as the proper adjudication of conflicting claims that persons make on one another or on social practices. Three implications of this expanded definition of right are explained, and two reasons are then offered in its defense.

Scholars and political leaders agree that in the contemporary world where the tempo and intensity of international and intercultural contacts is continually growing, communication about values has become increasingly crucial. But in what conceptual language can people and peoples across the world communicate about values? As this chapter illustrates, currently, questions about values tend to be asked in the conceptual vocabulary of English, with English value words such as “fairness,” “honesty,” “violence,” and “cooperation” playing a crucial role. The chapter illustrates the Anglocentrism of current global discourse about values with examples drawn from recent books by Steven Pinker, Daniel Everett, and Marc Hauser and it shows how global conversation about values can be conducted more meaningfully on the basis of universal human concepts (such as GOOD and BAD) and how it can be freed from its conceptual dependence on English words and Anglocentric assumptions.

This chapter, which concludes Parts I to V of the book, argues that if the historically shaped Anglo English is distinguished from the Minimal English embodied in NSM English, then English does not need to be a conceptual prison for anyone. On the contrary, in its “mini” version it can serve as a common auxiliary inter-language for speakers of different languages, and a global means for clarifying, elucidating, storing, and comparing ideas. Such a mini-version of English, trimmed to the bone and detached from the culture-specific conceptual heritage of “Anglo English,” can be seen, the chapter argues, as “Basic Human,” and can fulfill a vital role in today’s globalized and English-dominated world. In his introduction to a volume entitled Universals of Human Thought, philosopher Ernest Gellner (1981) wrote: “Unconvertible currencies are not suitable for trade.” As this chapter makes clear, a key characteristic of Minimal English is that it is “fully convertible.”

Intuitions about knowledge and justified belief have evidential weight and can be used to support or reject proposals about the nature of knowledge and justified belief. This chapter argues by analogy that intuitions about right and wrong, or what there is reason to want or do, have the same evidential weight and can play a similar role in supporting, or rejecting, views about the nature of right and wrong and practical reasons. A non-cognitivist’s view of the nature, role, and evidential force of intuitions is criticized, and a response is given to the objection that disagreement in normative intuitions undercuts their epistemic force. Later in the chapter Parfit’s arguments against Analytical and Non-Analytical naturalism are criticized, but another argument against Non-Analytical naturalism is offered.

This introductory chapter discusses how judicial review of the constitutionality of legislation has usually emerged historically for a combination of four reasons. First, judicial review of the constitutionality of legislation is a response to a nation’s need for an umpire to resolve federalism or separation of powers boundary line disputes. The second main cause of the origins and growth of judicial review of the constitutionality of legislation is what can be called the rights from wrongs hypothesis; judicial review very often emerges as a response to an abominable deprivation of human rights. The third major cause is the out-and-out borrowing of the institution of judicial review of the constitutionality of legislation from either the United States’ model; the German Civil Law model; and, most recently, from the Canadian Second Look judicial review constitutional model. The fourth major cause is the existence of a system of checks and balances, which gives Supreme Courts and Constitutional Courts political space to grow in. Revolutionary charismatic constitutionalism can also lead to the growth of judicial review as Professor Bruce Ackerman has explained in an important new book, REVOLUTIONARY CONSTITUTIONS: CHARISMATIC LEADERSHIP AND THE RULE OF LAW (2019).

The account of the virtue of honesty developed in chapter 2 is a promising start. But it needs a lot more improvement. One big omission has to do with honest motivation. That is the topic of chapter 4. This chapter looks at a variety of challenges and potential counterexamples. In doing so, it turns to our second desideratum, avoiding counterintuitive results. In particular the chapter focuses on Nazi-at-the-door cases and the case of Huck Finn. It also explores the idea that honesty pertains to distortions of normative as well as descriptive facts, and the sense in which many of the wrong actions we perform also might fail to be honest.

The complete moral event is a complex unity of various parts that can be examined independently. Traditional moral theology recognized this and incorporated it into its method. By suggesting that one should begin practical ethical analysis with an examination of intention, one does not thereby imply that acts and circumstances are any less important than the more traditional approach would suppose. The advantage of approaching the analysis of the moral event by starting with intention is that it helps us to understand that behaviour must always be seen in function of moving one toward an end or goal. Nevertheless, it is important to examine human behaviour on its own so that we know what we are dealing with before engaging in the analysis of particular cases.