Thursday, April 22, 2010

Color analogies in metaethics

I'm trying to put together a list of people who have analogized morality to color in defense of one metaethical view or another. The best example I know about is John McDowell in "Values and Secondary Qualities." Geoffrey Sayre-McCord briefly uses the analogy in a defense of nonreductive realism in "Moral Theory And Explanatory Impotence." And in old times, there's Hume, who wrote, "Vice and virtue, therefore, may be compar'd to sounds, colours, heat and cold, which according to modern philosophy, are not qualities in objects, but perceptions in the mind."

Does anybody else spring to mind?

7 comments:

Richard Y Chappell said...

Railton's 'Red, Bitter, Good' (in Facts, Values and Norms).

Anonymous said...

Didn't Moore have some kind of color analogy?

Unknown said...

Hume, too.

Hans Georg Lundahl said...

I disagree with Hume.

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Ben Blumson said...

Moore thought "good" and "yellow" were indefinable in the same sense.

I think Jackson is pretty explicit about the analogy with color in "From Metaphysics to Ethics".

jim said...

See Prinz, The Emotional Construction of Morals (111)

Vanessa C. said...

Darwall, "Normativity and Projection in Hobbes' Leviathan." (He cites others including Mackie, Hume.)

Roskies, "Are Ethical Judgments Intrinsically Motivational?"