Abstract

Among different types of autonomy of ethics, semantic autonomy seems to be the most interesting. It is a thesis about irreducibility of meaning of ethical terms to some other types of discourse. The paper proposes an argument for the semantic autonomy of ethics, based on a detailed interpretation of the Open Question Argument by G.E. Moore, and followed up by the reading of Philippa Foot's argument about weak objectivity of evaluative meaning of ethical terms. The result of investigation gives the two-fold picture of modern understanding of morality: irrevisability of moral demands as attempted by any theoretical armchair endeavors, which are external to the moral practice, and democratic intersubjectivity of moral discourse.