PHLA11H3 Lecture Notes - Lecture 1: John Stuart Mill, Felicific Calculus, Henry Sidgwick
Document Summary
Week 1 lecture #1: tuesday january 05, 2016. Two influential attempts to give a systematic answer to moral questions: utilitarianism, kantianism. Week 1 lecture #2: thursday january 07, 2016. Descriptive things can be true or false. If it says should have and etc. it"s normative. Moral claims are claims about how people ought to act, rather than about how people do in fact act. Prudential claims: claims about what would be prudent, or in your self-interest. You should eat a lot of leafy greens. What we should do, not right or wrong, concerns self interest. Normative epistemic claims: claims about what one should believe, or how one ought to reason. If all the evidence supports that it was professor plum in the library with the candlestick, you should believe that it was. What we should believe and how you should believe in it. Moral claims are: normative rather than descriptive.
