From ethics to epistemology

Hitherto, I have been reading the philosophical papers, in order, from the Ethics section of the Friesian website. However, in the last essay that I read, "Key Distinctions for Value Theories, and the Importance of Hume", I discovered that this was too shallow a level of analysis. In that essay, Ross argues for the inadequacy of subjectivism as an account of morality. His notion of objectivism is that morality is not just a matter of feeling, but of rational knowledge, and on that I agree with him completely. Hence, if that is how he is to define "objectivism", then I must be an objectivist, with the reservations listed in the previous two sections. However, he goes on to write that the question of how objectivism works is discussed in detail in his essay "The Foundations of Value", which is not even part of the Ethics section at all, but the Epistemology section. I have always cared greatly about the claim that ethics is objective, and have never found a satisfactory way to derive ethical objectivity from non-arbitrary roots. Many moral philosophers, such as Peter Singer, prefer to leave the objectivity of ethics at the intuitive level, because their interests lie elsewhere. Yet all ethicists seem to have some need, somewhere, to confront that question. How they answer it, after all, determines a great deal about what they can legitimately claim to be the content of their own particular theory of ethics. Hence, if I am to have a true understanding of the ethics of the Friesian school, I must first understand its epistemology.

I was prepared to read all the ethical papers of the Friesian school in order. I have found each and every one of them to be instructive and thought-provoking. I shall extend this same level of enthusiasm to the papers of the epistemology section, hereby resolving to read them all, in the order in which they appear in the table of contents.