Moral Twin Earths: Contextualism, Relativism and Semantic Externalism

《打算做研究》一书的选题是基于霍根和蒂蒙斯的道德孪生地球思想实验(1991)。H&T建议我们想象两个行星：地球，在那里，地球上的人根据结果论原则在道德上行为、思考和辩论；双胞胎地球，在那里，双胞胎地球上的人根据道义论原则在道德上行为、思考和辩论。这两个星球上的居民说的语言在很大程度上非常相似。如果我们拿地球人和双胞胎地球人来质疑‘撒谎救人在道德上是好的’这句话的真实性，H&T观察到了两种选择。由于地球人和双胞胎地球人通过他们的道德术语意味着不同的事情，要么-一-我们声称地球人和双胞胎地球人只是在语言上存在分歧，承认两者都是正确的；或者-两-我们遵循关于他们存在实质性道德分歧的普遍直觉，我们否认两者可能同时是正确的。因为任何将一组固定的性质作为道德术语的参照的理论都可以建立一个地球上的例子，所以任何对道德术语含义的综合方法都将面临这种脱节。在我的研究中，我打算探索霍根和蒂蒙斯提出的选择之间的选择。

The topic in intend to do research on is based on Horgan and Timmons's Moral Twin Earth thought experiment (1991). H&T proposed us toimagine two planets: Planet Earth, where earthlings behave, think, and argue morally according to Consequentialist Principles; and Twin-Earth,where twin-earthling behave, think and argue morally according to Deontologist Principles. Inhabitants of both planets speak languages that arerelevantly very much alike. If we take earthlings and twin-earthlings to disagree about the truth of the sentence 'lying for saving a life is morallygood', H&T observe two options. Since earthling and twin-earthling are meaning different things by their moral terms, either -one- we claim thatearthlings and twin-earthlings just have a linguistic disagreement acknowledging that both are correct in their own terms; or -two- we follow thewidespread intuition about them having a substantive moral disagreement and we deny that both could be simultaneously correct. Since atwin-earth example can be built for any theory that admits a fixed set of properties as references of moral terms, that disjunction would be faced byany synthetic approach to the meaning of moral terms. In my research, I intend to explore the options that are between the disjuncts Horgan andTimmons proposed.