"""'\"CI' Moral Theories and the Evaluation ofMoral Premises Although moral arguments are evaluated much like any other argument, there are sometimes special difficulties in evaluating moral premises. With factual premises we often know whether they are true, know how to find out if they are true, or at least can imagine a way to find out if they are true (e.g., by taking a rocket ship to Mars to determine whether there is life beneath the polar ice caps). Many people think that moral premises are different from factual premises in this respect. As we saw in Chapter 1, there are lots of disagreements about ethics and often there doesn't seem to be any rational way to resolve those disagreements. Some people claim that such disagreements show that moral statements can't be true or false, or that morality is just a matter of social convention or personal opinion. Others argue that while ethical issues are often thorny and complex, there are objective and rationally defensible answers to moral questions. If so, how can we discover what those objective and rationally defensible answers are? To help you think through such questions, let's look at some leading ethical theories