Moral obligations and social expectations: a humean reduction

Abstract

In this paper I shall argue that an account can be given of the sense of duty without reference to such specifically philosophical notions as "moral law," "moral rule," "moral principle," and "moral intuition." By shifting out of this vocabulary into talk about social roles, role expectations, and role modulations, attention is directed away from an attempt to justify people's moral judgments by demonstrating their consistency with those principles--an attempt that is likely, in view of the immense diversity of these judgments, to be unsuccessful and to have, at best, only an intellectual interest -- and turned in a direction that, more modestly, concentrates on the kind of small-scale theory that helps us understand a little better how moral attitudes, moral judgments and moral changes occur.