PP224 Chapter 1-3: Philosophical Ethics
Document Summary
Bush speaks(cid:499) (cid:498)the state has no place in the bedrooms of the nation(cid:499) (cid:523)trudeau(cid:524) All of these statements purport to tell us something factual, to describe the way the world really is (or was, or will be). One feature they all share is that they are truth functional. That is, every one of them is either true or false. By contrast, there are these sorts of statements: Make claims about the way the world ought to be or have been. Ethics is concerned above all with normative statements. This is not to say that descriptive statements are irrelevant to it, however. For example, if environmental ethics is about what we should do in the face of an ecological crisis, then we should be clear about whether there really is such a crisis (a matter of the way the world is). Nevertheless, the focus of ethics is on how we want the world to be, not just how it is.
