Browsing by Subject "ideaalitarkkailija"

Ideal observer theory is an attempt to solve the meta-ethical question: What does it mean that 'x is right' or 'x is good'? The starting point for the ideal observer theory can be dated to 1950s and to Roderick Firth’s article 'Ethical Absolutism and the Ideal Observer'. For example Adam Smith and David Hume can be seen as predecessors for this theory, but Firth was the first to address this theory fully. The answer to the meta-ethical question stated above is the following. We define a being that is omniscient with respect to non-ethical facts, he is omnipercipient, he is disinterested, he is dispassionate, he is consistent, and he is in other respects normal. Then we call this being the ideal observer. The ideal observer’s reactions or dispositions determine whether the ethical situation is right or wrong. My interpretation of the ideal observer is that it constitutes a thought experiment. As Firth states, it is not necessary for the ideal observer to actually exist. It is enough that we imagine him. A lot of the critique on Firth’s theory seems to have missed this point. For example Richard Brandt, Thomas Carson, and Jonathan Harrison put a lot of effort into trying to fix the problem that is caused by the impossibility of the existence of such a being as the ideal observer. Another part of the theory, which caused a lot of the critique to sound an alarm, was the claim that the ideal observer is normal. Normality is, of course, hard to define as anything else than as a statistical tendency. Simply put, the ideal observer is normal in other respects, meaning that he possesses superhuman characteristics, but is still otherwise a regular person. In a meta-ethical thesis one must also attend to epistemological issues. In this thesis I claim that the ideal observer needs what I call 'high level intuitionism'. This means that the 'moral skills' the ideal observer possesses are analogous to the skills possessed by highly trained professional in their fields of work. I use as an example the Japanese chicken sexers. They train for years to acquire a very specific skill: to be able to identify the sex of a chick when it is only one day old. Expert chicken sexers are extremely good at this, but they cannot tell how they do it. This is high level intuitionism. The ideal observer must possess something similar to this. And this is not something one acquires automatically. Therefore I added reason as one crucial element of the ideal observer’s characteristics. High level intuitionism can be acquired with the help of reason. In addition to the more ambitious part of my thesis that I just described, I also studied basics of ethics. One of my main observations is that meta-ethics needs to deal with epistemology and therefore the line between ethics and epistemology wavers. This is clear if we take another look at the main question of this thesis: What does it mean that 'x is right'? It is both ethical and epistemological question.