Moral Truth and Hume's Fork: The Prospects of Reconciliation

Honors College Thesis

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Citeable URL: https://ir.library.oregonstate.edu/concern/honors_college_theses/4m90f301f

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Attribute Name	Values
Creator	Embleton, Clark A.
Abstract	Hume’s division of truth into agreement with matters of fact or relations of ideas casts doubt on our capacity to have moral knowledge, as moral propositions do not seem to fall obviously into either category. This thesis looks at how two views, ‘descriptive moral functionalism’ and ‘moral concept essentialism’, try to account for moral truth as agreement to matter of fact and relations of ideas, respectively. Descriptive moral functionalism uses our folk-theoretic template of moral intuitions to try to fix the truth conditions for when a state of affairs possesses a moral property. Moral concept essentialism tries to find a place for moral truth among relations of ideas by appealing to the essences of concepts. I conclude that both views are unsatisfactory and that this should motivate us to look for other accounts of moral truth if we want to preserve our claim to moral knowledge.
Resource Type	Honors College Thesis
Date Issued	2020-05-27
Degree Level	Bachelor's
Degree Name	Honors Bachelor of Science (H.B.S.)
Degree Field	Physics
Degree Grantor	Oregon State University
Commencement Year	2020
Advisor	Thompson, Allen
Committee Member	Orosco, Joseph Kaplan, Jonathan
Non-Academic Affiliation	Oregon State University. Honors College
Rights Statement	In Copyright
Publisher	Oregon State University
Peer Reviewed	No
Language	English [eng]

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