Uploaded July 2025 | Updated September 2026, 3 weeks ago
On "Does Moral Philosophy Rest on a Mistake?" (1912). Prichard claims that we feel certain actions to be obligatory, and that we have no justification for doubting those raw intuitions. The situation, he claims, is comparable to epistemology: We have no grounds for doubting globally a la Descartes, but only in particular circumstances where science demands we should go back and check again, but more carefully. Likewise, we can be wrong about particular moral judgments, but the process of refining them is just to put ourselves (really or imaginatively) in the ethical situation and gauge the intuitions more carefully. So the only legitimate task of moral philosophy is to establish that global doubt is not warranted, and to get us to observe our intuitions more carefully and discuss them with others.
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On "Does Moral Philosophy Rest on a Mistake?" (1912). Prichard claims that we feel certain actions to be obligatory, and that we have no justification for doubting those raw intuitions. The situation, he claims, is comparable to epistemology: We have no grounds for doubting globally a la Descartes, but only in particular circumstances where science demands we should go back and check again, but more carefully. Likewise, we can be wrong about particular moral judgments, but the process of refining them is just to put ourselves (really or imaginatively) in the ethical situation and gauge the intuitions more carefully. So the only legitimate task of moral philosophy is to establish that global doubt is not warranted, and to get us to observe our intuitions more carefully and discuss them with others.
Follow along with us: partiallyexaminedlife.com/wp-content/uploads/prichard_-_does_moral_philosophy.pdf.
Get more Closereads: Philosophy with Mark and Wes at closereadsphilosophy.com. Get additional parts to this and many other discussions at patreon.com/closereadsphilosophy. Note that any ads here are inserted by YouTube, with no money going to us. Everything on our Patreon page is ad free.
