Fully rational morality and evaluation of public decisions : with action research case study : a local planning controversy and residents' appeal to a public inquiry and to national and international courts
The impetus for my deliberations arises from the need to establish which proposals and decisions by social institutions to approve. This seems to come down to much the same as considering which alternatives are the better in a moral sense, but, unfortunately, there is no general agreement as to which of numerous proposed moral systems is apt, and the long and tortuous history of ethics indicates very poor prospects for such agreement. If at the outset I had been more conversant with that and the argument that the notion of a 'right' or 'objective' morality is tautological, nonsensical and/or incoherent, I would probably have thought it ridiculously ambitious to seek the basis of morality and would probably not have embarked upon the theoretical parts of this thesis. However, occasionally something is gained by attempting the impossible, and, while I certainly do not claim to have found the (morally) right morality, I suggest that I come at least very near to establishing how to ascertain what rules for behaviour are fully rational. Whether fully rational rules (FRM) are the same as 'moral' ones is arguably essentially a semantic question. However, I suggest that our definition of 'moral' is doomed to be a
Norderhaug, Arne
Philosophy
Fully rational morality and evaluation of public decisions : with action research case study : a local planning controversy and residents' appeal to a public inquiry and to national and international courts. The impetus for my deliberations arises from the need to establish which proposals and decisions by social institutions to approve. This seems to come down to much the same as considering which alternatives are the better in a moral sense, but, unfortunately, there is no general agreement as to which of numerous proposed moral systems is apt, and the long and tortuous history of ethics indicates very poor prospects for such agreement. If at the outset I had been more conversant with that and the argument that the notion of a 'right' or 'objective' morality is tautological, nonsensical and/or incoherent, I would probably have thought it ridiculously ambitious to seek the basis of morality and would probably not have embarked upon the theoretical parts of this thesis. However, occasionally something is gained by attempting the impossible, and, while I certainly do not claim to have found the (morally) right morality, I suggest that I come at least very near to establishing how to ascertain what rules for behaviour are fully rational. Whether fully rational rules (FRM) are the same as 'moral' ones is arguably essentially a semantic question. However, I suggest that our definition of 'moral' is doomed to be a
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