It is a bit too highbrow for me, but if the argument is that “moral” is not a special sense of words, a moral “ought” is the same kind of “ought” as “this machine ought to be oiled”, isn’t that textbook consequentalism? Non-moral oughts are of course consequentialist—if oiling or not oiling the machine makes no difference, why bother?
No, it only seems that way to you because you implicitly assume consequentialism. Plato, for example, would argue that “this machine ought to be oiled” because an oiled machine better approximates the ideal form of a machine (in what we now call a Platonic sense).
Ah… I sense there is a different problem here. Consequentualism can be interpreted widely enough to be fully general term that predicts everything and thus nothing. After all even breaking a deontological rule can be said to have some consequence somewhere somehow and virtue ethics certainly speaks about internal consequences.
No, it only seems that way to you because you implicitly assume consequentialism. Plato, for example, would argue that “this machine ought to be oiled” because an oiled machine better approximates the ideal form of a machine (in what we now call a Platonic sense).
And better approximating it is a consequence.
Ah… I sense there is a different problem here. Consequentualism can be interpreted widely enough to be fully general term that predicts everything and thus nothing. After all even breaking a deontological rule can be said to have some consequence somewhere somehow and virtue ethics certainly speaks about internal consequences.