• Aristotle
• deontology
• ethical theory
• intuitionism
• Kant
• metaethics
• Moore
• non-cognitivism
• ordinary moral thought
• Ross
• Sidgwick
• utilitarianism

I aim at reflecting on how different philosophers decline the relationship between ethical theory and ordinary moral thought.
In the first chapter I will concentrate on the role of ordinary moral thought in the moral philosophy of Henry Sidgwick and George Edward Moore. I will show that both Sidgwick and Moore rely heavily on our ordinary moral thought in order to establish the core theses of their moral philosophy and to discard rival theories, which are charged with being incapable of accounting for what we recognise in our common consciousness and ordinary moral judgements. However, I believe that they implicitly identify two different senses of ordinary moral thought, with two different roles in their philosophical project. Indeed, a more specific sense of ordinary moral thought, comprising certain moral rules and principles of behaviour, can be recognised. I will show how for both authors this conception of our common moral thought has a limited role against ethical theory: in fact, they ascribe importance to the adhesion to these principles in virtue of their expediency within a utilitarian perspective and their claims are not advanced against utilitarianism as such.
The second chapter is dedicated to a series of objections against ascribing philosophical relevance to ordinary moral thought. Some of these, advanced by Patrick Horace Nowell-Smith and John Leslie Mackie, point to the derivation of theses about the existence of objective moral properties from features of our ordinary moral thought and language. In the second section I will gather several arguments, advanced by different philosophers, which share the view that ordinary moral thought and language are philosophically inadequate and unreliable. I will discuss Nowell-Smith’s reflection upon the «untidiness» of ordinary language, Richard Mervyn Hare’s distinction between the current use of moral words and the current moral opinions and John Jamieson Carswell Smart’s and Peter Singer’s charges of superstition and conservativism.
In the last chapter I will analyse how Aristotle, Immanuel Kant and William David Ross decline the relationship between ethical theory and ordinary moral thought, by reflecting both on theoretical and methodological assertions they made and on their actual arguments against rival ethical theories. I have chosen to focus on these three philosophers because, as I will show, I find in their arguments a stronger role ascribed to ordinary moral thought, compared to that it plays in Sidgwick’s and Moore’s moral philosophy. I will reflect upon the characterisation of ordinary moral thought provided by each of them and try to explain and solve alleged ambiguities and contradictions in their accounts.
Finally, when treating Ross’s account, I will show (1) how it differs from those of Sidgwick and Moore, but also of those philosophers who, in the interpretative framework I provided, endorse his same perspective on ordinary moral thought, namely Aristotle and Kant; (2) if and how such account can survive some criticisms presented in the second chapter. I intend to take Ross’s perspective as a point of reference, both for the comparison among different philosophical approaches and for the reply to the critics, on a number of different reasons: (a) he considers some of the afore-mentioned philosophers to be his models and precursors, so that it is interesting to see what he reprises from them, explicitly and implicitly, and in what he differs; (b) he provides a critique of contemporary ethical theories, utilitarianism in particular, by appealing strikingly to ordinary moral thought: his critiques are therefore extremely relevant in the current debate between utilitarianism and deontology; (c) many of the criticisms reported in the second chapter explicitly address Ross’s method: I think some of them can be dealt with once Ross’s contentions are carefully examined and understood and once a Rossian-like method is assumed.
Given that, as it will be shown, moral philosophers have different conceptions of ordinary moral thought and they also ascribe different roles to it in their arguments, I intend first of all to analyze their views, so that a comparison can be made and similarities and dissimilarities can emerge, and then to enquire whether some of the objections examined can be overcome.