Lewis Powell

A couple days ago I was reading through chapter one of "Ethics: Inventing Right and Wrong", The Subjectivity of Values for a paper I was working on for the metaethics seminar I took this semester, and section 5, "Standards of evaluation" caught my attention. It is about two pages long, and in it, he is both clear and insightful. The section lays out the relationship between standards of evaluation and value judgements, as well as the appropriateness of standards relative to aims. He concludes that the objectivity of evaluation relative to standards in no way threatens a denial of objectivity about values in the sense that he means.

Right now, I suspect that he is wrong in that conclusion, and that the contents of that section either directly threaten, or play a role in something that does directly threaten a denial of objectivity, but I haven't had a chance to work that out, as I am trying to get this semester's work finished in a timely manner.

Which I should be getting back to now, actually.

Lewis Powell

Thanks to a post on the Bolwing Green Grad student ethics blog, referencing a post on Pea Soup, I found out about an internet moral intuitions test. I usually prefer to just state my intuitions as though they are massively widespread, but I suppose there is some reason to suspect these results might be more meaningful.