Kurt Baier, The rational and the moral order

UWE Czaniera

pp. 306-310

in: Werner Depauli Schimanovich, Eckehart Köhler, Friedrich Stadler (eds), The foundational debate, Berlin, Springer, 1995

Abstract

Since the appearance of his Moral Point of View in 1958, Kurt Baier has been one of the main figures in the field of moral philosophy. He belongs to those philosophers in the analytical tradition who did not accept the verdict on moral judgements formulated by the early Logical Empiricists. Instead, he always walked the tightrope between untenable metaphysical claims about absolute values on the one hand and a noncognitivitist position that maintains the meaninglessness of moral judgements, on the other. Thereby he tried to come to a theory of morals which enables us to distinguish between morally acceptable and morally inacceptable types of behaviour without having to maintain the existence of any nonnatural or supernatural facts.