The Necessity of Considering Folk Ethics in Moral Philosophy

Abstract

Contemporary ethics and moral philosophy need a kind of revision due to their negligence in human moral capacities, ordinary life, and humans’ expectations of ethics. The assumptions and presuppositions of ethics result in their current unsatisfactory status. In this paper, we first explore and criticize those presuppositions. Then, instead of introducing ideal presuppositions of ethics, we introduce folk ethics and its components in order to show that contemporary ethics and moral philosophy should always begin with folk ethics. The most important advantage of folk ethics is its realistic foundation, which in turn will produce better results.

Keywords

• folk ethics – moral philosophy – moral capacities – virtue ethics –consequentialism