Bücher veröffentlicht von ajaylakhotia

Knowledge of reality is distinctly personal. Human beings encounter the world through five senses and find themselves confined to search for objective truths through this pinhole of their own subjective existence. Understanding ourselves in relation to the world has largely been an investigation of how to reconcile subjectivity to objectivity with any degree of certainty. How can we ever know our beliefs about reality to be true if we can only access the world through the bars of our proverbial sensory-experience cage? Cartesian doubt epitomizes the nature of this inquiry and no attempt has yet successfully come to a conclusion that can move us definitively beyond the knowledge of phenomenon perceived by the senses to real knowledge about objective reality. The epistemological skeptic is ever present and as a result many philosophies have chosen to abandon the attempt to reconcile subjectivity and objectivity and pursue subjectivity alone as a viable means of understanding oneself and reality.

There are three things that motivate my philosophical interests. First, I want my research to have practical application that isn't too difficult to motivate for people inexperienced with (analytic) philosophy. Given everyone deals with life, death, and health, bioethics seemed like a natural fit. Second, I want to provide people with tools and conceptual framings to engage in productive and meaningful anti-racist discourse and action. Some of my earliest (and most unpleasant) memories stem around race and racism. Prior to studying the philosophy of race, many of my questions related to race and racism were met with answers that were (to put it nicely) inappropriate, inadequate, or incorrect. Thus, I think it is important to give others what I was/am looking for - helpful ways to navigate experiences of race and racism. This leads to my third motivation. I want to be able to serve communities outside of academia with my work. I want my academic career to be a demonstration of goodwill toward others. In thinking through issues related to race, racism, and bioethics, my hope is that I can provide clarity on these topics and empower others. This dissertation is my attempt to tie these three motivations together

The aim of this thesis is to outline a plausible metaethical framework. The inspiration for this project is a desire to respond to the moral error theory of Richard Joyce and John Mackie, and to offer a version of moral success theory not subject to the same sceptical attacks.1 Joyce's and Mackie's error theory may be summarised as follows: morality is (or purports to be) normative in a kind of way that turns out to be problematic and which renders all moral judgments false.2 What I intend to do is present an underexplored (but not all together new) way of understanding the normativity of morality, and, from this, to develop an account of the conditions under which moral judgments are true. This thesis is an ambitious one given that the four central chapters (2-5) each address a different major question, each of which is pertinent to the aims of this project. Chapter 2 will address the question of which of the two major competing theories of practical rationality (internalism and externalism) is superior