Thick Ethical Concepts
Updated 2026-09-10
INTRODUCTION
English translation pending.
CORE DEFINITION
Evaluative concepts divide into thick and thin. Thick concepts such as courageous, considerate, selfish, rude, and cruel both describe facts and pass evaluation; the corresponding thin concepts such as right, wrong, ought, and permissible carry almost purely evaluative function. The central dispute is whether the descriptive content of a thick concept can be disentangled from its evaluative content, which is what the anti-disentangling argument denies.
SCAFFOLDING EFFECT
Reduce cognitive load
- Fact extraction: pull apart what a thick word actually describes about the behavior in question. - Evaluation spotting: settle whether a dispute is over facts or over evaluative stance. - Word choice: switch to thin words when the facts must be described neutrally, to avoid presupposing an evaluation.
Anchor fast decisions
The key feature of a thick concept is that its application is fixed jointly by facts and evaluative stance: to learn to use a thick word is to learn to see a certain kind of fact as supporting a certain evaluation. So the descriptive content is hard to abstract away without evaluative coloring, which grounds the inseparabilist claim; opponents try to show that the evaluative content follows from the descriptive content plus general normative principles.
MINIMUM ACTION
In progress 0/1Practice this model in one real situation:
account_treeGenealogyexpand_more
menu_bookReferencesexpand_more
Source support: Explicit
- plato.stanford.eduhttps://plato.stanford.edu/entries/thick-ethical-concepts/verified
PRIVATE NOTES · Only visible to you
SAVED Q&A
ENTRY Q&A · Private saving available
Ask with a clear boundary
thinkingmodels answers from published entry context only.
Your question is sent to thinkingmodels. The answer uses public entry context only.
RELATED MODELS