General provisions

The course is offered to C level students and students at advanced level (master's students). For students at advanced level (master's students), the examination requirements are higher than for students at C level, see the heading Assessment.

Entry requirements

Eligible is the person who fulfils the requirements for a bachelor's degree in the humanities or has a corresponding foreign degree.

Learning outcomes

After completing the course, the student is expected to:

• have an increased understanding of realist views about morality
• be able to describe the most influential arguments for and against such views
• be able to analyse the strengths and weaknesses of those arguments
• understand how the debate about the nature of morality is connected to questions in other areas of philosophy, such as epistemology, metaphysics and philosophy of language

Content

The question of whether there are objective moral truths is one of the central questions in metaethics. The view that there are such truths is called moral realism. Historically, this view has sometimes been widely taken to be implausible, but in the current debate it has a large number of supporters. One important argument for this view relies on the idea that a realist view of other kinds of values, such as epistemological ones, is most plausible. However, opponents of moral realism have claimed that it has implausible implications for questions that concern, e.g., moral knowledge (how can we know what is morally right?), moral language (what do words like "right" and "wrong" mean?) and moral metaphysics (what is the nature of moral truths?). The course seeks to assess the plausibility of moral realism by considering arguments of this kind for and against this view. As these arguments illustrate, the metaethical question of whether there are objective moral truths is intimately connected to more general questions in epistemology, metaphysics and philosophy of language, and special attention will be paid to the relation between metaethics and these other areas of philosophy.

Instruction

The instruction is in the form of lectures, but the lectures are to a significant extent interactive.

Assessment

One longer essay and three shorter writing assignments.

The students at advanced level (master's students) are expected to write more comprehensive essays than C level students, and the requirements concerning scholarly quality are higher.

If there are special reasons for doing so, an examiner may make an exception from the method of assessment indicated and allow a student to be assessed by another method. An example of special reasons might be a certificate regarding special pedagogical support from the University's disability coordinator.