خلاصة:
Contemporary ethics and moral philosophy need a kind of revision due to their negligence in human moral capacities, ordinary life, and humans’ expectations of ethics. The assumptions and presuppositions of ethics result in their current unsatisfactory status. In this paper, we first explore and criticize those presuppositions. Then, instead of introducing ideal presuppositions of ethics, we introduce folk ethics and its components in order to show that contemporary ethics and moral philosophy should always begin with folk ethics. The most important advantage of folk ethics is its realistic foundation, which in turn will produce better results.
ملخص الجهاز:
The Necessity of Considering Folk Ethics in Moral Philosophy* Jalal Peykani** Associate Professor, University of Payam-e Noor Abstract Contemporary ethics and moral philosophy need a kind of revision due to their negligence in human moral capacities, ordinary life, and humans’ expectations of ethics.
Keywords: folk ethics – moral philosophy – moral capacities – virtue ethics –consequentialism This paper was extracted from a research project in Payame Noor University, Iran.
Of course, moral philosophers take social problems seriously (for example, we know that Kant was so concerned with the end of the French Revolution), but in their moral philosophy, their beginning point is neither individuals nor their real lives.
Thus, it seems that to observe folk ethics requires that moral philosophers take only those presuppositions which correspond to what ordinary people believe concerning morality.
For example, it is a common belief between moral philosophers that deontology, consequentialism and virtue ethics are not consistent and only one approach is the case in the normative ethics.
Of course there are exceptions to the prevalent approach: virtue ethics of Rosalind Hursthouse, Christine Swanton, Linda Zagzebski, and the rule- consequentialism and moral contractualism defended in Derek Parfit and Derek Phillips.
In fact, according to its ideal presupposition, moral philosophy wants to move beyond folk ethics to construct a new moral system for people.
Third, in the new approach to moral philosophy, which I call Copernican revolution, it is not permissible to assert counter examples before finding the nature of folk ethics through empirical studies.