Moral Normativity, Misc

The grounding of absolute morality requires surmounting some hurdles, including Euthyphro’s dilemma, Hume’s guillotine, and Moore’s naturalistic fallacy. This paper shows how those hurdles don’t prevent moral absolutes in a transcendent idealist setting. (Incomplete draft.).

If the task of theoretical reason is to discover truth, or reasons for belief, then theoretical reason is impossible. Attempts to circumvent that by appeal to probabilities are self-defeating. If the task of practical reason is to discover what we ought to do or what actions are desirable or valuable, then practical reason is impossible. Appeals to the subjective ought or to subjective probabilities are self-defeating. Adapting Karl Popper, I argue that the task of theoretical reason is to obtain theories (...) that we can agree to instate given that they appear to have greater explanatory merit than their rivals. I then argue that the task of practical reason is to decide which ought-propositions to act on. As a consequence theoretical reason is seen as a branch of practical reason. This approach makes both theoretical and practical reason practicable and free of the defects of the usual accounts. (shrink)

There are Humeans and unHumeans, disagreeing as to the validity of the Treatise’s ideas regarding practical reason, but not as to their importance. The basic argument here is that the enduring irresolution of their Hume centric debates has been fostered by what can be called the fallacy of normative monism, i.e. a failure to distinguish between two different kinds of normativity: empirical vs. rational. Humeans take the empirical normativity of personal desire to constitute the only real kind, while unHumeans insist (...) that only the objective rationality associated with categorical morality can provide reliable normative guidance. In turn, the failure to recognize the dual nature of normativity has helped engender motivational obscurantism: as essentially causal notions, motive and motivation obscure the rational processes that lie at the heart of deliberation and choice. Once it is realized that normativity takes two different forms, each with its own distinctive role, it becomes possible to mediate if not mitigate the differences between Humeans and unHumeans. Choice will be the key to understanding practical reasoning, and its analysis will provide the basis for a belief/desire model that upends conventional wisdom regarding motivation and desire. (shrink)

The paper proposes a radical rethinking of the foundations of morality by developing a conception of freedom as intrinsically obligatory. In contrast to approaches that derive duty from rationality or reduce it to social conventions, it argues that the normative force of moral requirements arises from the distinctive ontological status of freedom. By distinguishing the "natural" freedom to choose means from the "social" freedom to determine one’s ends, the paper shows that the pursuit of the social freedom itself gives rise (...) to universal moral principles. Thus, freedom and morality are interdependent: obligation is a constitutive mode of the free agent’s being, and morality is a necessary condition for the realization of freedom. (shrink)

Henry Sidgwick has famously stated that the conflict between self-interest (prudence) and morality cannot be resolved: a dualism of practical reason is thus established. As is well-known, Sidgwick was distraught with this conclusion thinking that only the existence of God can resolve the dualism. Contemporary thinkers prefer to avoid this way out and argue either that. egoism is not rationally justifiable, or that self-interest and morality always point in the same direction, or that properly understanding the conflict also shows that (...) the dualism can be avoided. We take a different route. We agree with Sidgwick that some part of practical reason might indeed be discordant but we provide examples when what appears to be discord is in fact harmony on a higher level. We call these sets of. conflict cases pockets of harmony. We first show how these pockets form and what shape they take before moving on to considering their scope. At this point we confront a possible objection using an adapted version of Arrow’s impossibility theorem. Once this objection is out of the way, we conclude with a discussion of exactly what we have shown: what is the nature of our solution, and how it relates to recent skeptical positions taking their inspiration from Sidgwick’s dualism. (shrink)

Contemporary philosophy remains fragmented between universality and relativity, norms and flux. This fragmentation stems not from mere theoretical opposition but from the limitations of existing conceptual frameworks. Traditional concepts—harmony, balance, dialectics—all presuppose static relationships or mechanical synthesis. However, the experience of existence as lived temporality cannot be captured by such static models. What we need is a new concept where movement itself is order. This paper traverses this divide anew through the concept of Resonance. Resonance is the way being lives (...) time, and the principle of self-organization revealed in a field where countless weak rhythms overlap. Today we exist under the pressure of accelerated time—AI governance, ecological crisis, intercultural conflict. The metaphors of static rules and balance easily become rigid or hollow in such variable situations. The resonance proposed in this paper transcends these limitations through a temporal ontology where change itself becomes order. Rather than fitting events to rules, resonance directs a shift in thinking that identifies and coordinates rhythms within events. This shift is precisely the new philosophical language demanded by today's ethical, political, and technological debates. Truth, therefore, is not a fixed substance. While truth exists in fractal structures at all scales, its manifestation is relative to what temporal lens and conceptual lens the observer uses for focus. This is not nihilism denying absolute truth, but relational realism where truth reveals itself only within resonant relationships between observer and world. This definition presents resonance not as a mere metaphor or phenomenon, but as a fundamental structure explaining being, time, and relationship. (shrink)

Sentimentalist response-dependence views in metaethics hold that at least some values metaphysically or conceptually depend on affective responses. Some varieties account for values in terms of our dispositions to respond sentimentally under suitable conditions. While they offer a naturalistic account of values and associated motivation, they struggle to explain how values can set a standard for our responses and dispositions. What I label critical sentimentalism avoids this problem by understanding values in term of merited responses. The dilemma for such views (...) is making sense of an emotion being merited without appealing to correctly representing a response-independent property while simultaneously avoiding collapse into dispositionalism. As D’Arms and Jacobson (2023) argue, this means that sentimentalism assumes a non-representationalist, broadly motivational theory of emotion. Building on this proposal, I argue that ‘fit-making’ reasons for attitudes can be reduced to reasons for action of a sort determined by the nature of the emotion. For an evaluative property like being shameful to be response-dependent will then turn out to amount to the relevant reasons of action being ultimately based on our contingent sensibilities. Finally, I suggest that not all sentimental values fit this picture – some evaluative properties, like being funny, are best understood in dispositionalist terms after all. There’s room for pluralism in the metaphysics of value. (shrink)

This is a review of Chris Tucker's "The Weight of Reasons: A Framework for Ethics" (OUP 2025). It critically examines his defense of Weight Pluralism and his claim that the fundamental model of weighing reasons requires multiple scales.

What is it for an agent to have a moral obligation, or, equivalently, to be overall morally required, to perform an act? In this article, I present an informative account of moral obligations in terms of reasons and show how it can be put to use to solve some pressing problems in moral philosophy. The core idea is that morality is the realm of what we can legitimately expect of one another: for agents to be morally required to F is (...) for them to have reasons to F that are at the same time reasons for everyone to expect them to F. This account is superior to standard rationalist and sentimentalist approaches in capturing both the first-personal deliberative as well as the socio-emotional dimension of moral obligations. Over and above, it provides illuminating explanations of supererogation and the imperatival character of moral requirements. (shrink)

Constitutivists often argue that agency is inescapable. This is supposed to, among other things, explain why norms that are constitutive of agency are forceful. But can some form of inescapability do that? I consider four types of inescapability—psychological, further factor, standpoint, and plight—and evaluate whether they manage to explain four necessary features of normative force: that it does not vary with desire change, that ought-implies-can and can-fail, and that we are criticizable for failing to live up to forceful norms. The (...) former three all fail to explain some of these features, but a version of plight inescapability does, in fact, appear able to explain them all. This is good news for constitutivists. The catch? The plight inescapability explanation generates relativism. This leaves constitutivists at a choice point: accept the plight inescapability explanation of normative force and relativism—or give up the plight inescapability explanation. (shrink)

According to the Overridingness Claim, if it is morally wrong for an agent to φ, then that agent has decisive normative reasons not to φ. A common argument for the Overridingness Claim appeals to the connection between moral wrongness and moral blameworthiness. I argue that this argument fails.

Normativity is both one of the most important and ubiquitous of phenomena and, despite its historical centrality to philosophy, one of the least understood. The idea that there might be objective, attitude-independent, truths about what we ought to do (morality), what we ought to believe (rationality) or what we ought to appreciate (aesthetics), has always seemed very puzzling to philosophers, even though ordinary thought seems steeped in such judgments. -/- Up until quite recently, the received view was that there was (...) no good way to make sense of such a realistic, objectivist construal of normativity, that we have to make do with one or another anti-realistic alternative, principally, Expressivism, some forms of Constructivism, or Relativism. However, the well-known difficulties with these anti-realist options have motivated philosophers, most especially younger ones, to take a fresh look at Realism and to assess and develop it in new ways. Sometimes the result is that Realism is seen to be better protected against classic objections than had been previously realized; at others, the result seems to be that Realism is even harder to defend, and perhaps even harder to understand, than traditional thinking had allowed. The upshot is a vigorous and stimulating debate that is just beginning to take shape and whose outcome is far from resolved. -/- The main impulse behind the present volume was to commission new work on Normative Realism by a mix of senior and junior scholars to give the philosophical community a useful sense of the current state of play on this central topic. ... (shrink)

N.B. This is a significantly updated version of the paper. In The Methods of Ethics, Henry Sidgwick opined that the 'profoundest problem in ethics' is the (at least apparent) possibility of conflict between what morality requires of us and what self-interest requires of us. This problem, sometimes called 'Sidgwick's dualism of practical reason', has been the subject of increasing study as of late. This chapter focus on how a new approach in ethics, the project of de-moralising ethical inquiry and theories, (...) can lead to a dissolution of Sidgwick's dualism. In particular, the chapter looks at the implications of what an impartial, welfarist version (impartial de-moralised universal welfarism) of the project are for Sidgwick's dualism. I argue that understanding IDUW helps to highlight the way in which Sidgwick's dualism is driven by assigning special normative to significance to prudence. The paper offers insights into how to understand distinct types of approaches to resolving, or accepting, the dualism. (shrink)

(Under contract with Routledge, Routledge Studies in Ethics and Moral Theory.) This book will be an edited volume on problems of choice with four sections dedicated to: normativity and choice, rationality and choice, value and choice, morality and choice. Chapters by: Chrisoula Andreau, Paul Bloomfield, Krister Bykvist, Sophie Grace Chappell, David Copp, Guy Fletcher, Joshua Gert, Olasv Gjelsvik, Natalie Gold, Marina Moreno, Fredrik Nyseth, Wlodek Rabinowicz, Andrew Reisner, Caj Strandberg, Sarah Stroud, Johanna Thoma.

This chapter puts forward a Neo-Humean view on reasons that combines the distinction between rationally requiring reasons and rationally justifying reasons with a Neo-Humean view on rationality which understands this notion in terms of coherence between final desires and pro-attitudes. According to this view, moral reasons consist in rationally justifying reasons whereas prudential reasons consist in rationally requiring reasons. In contrast to a reasons-based view on rationality, the view makes it possible to explain and compare an agent’s moral and prudential (...) reasons by employing the notion of rationality. The view entails that an agent’s moral reasons might be stronger than her prudential reasons in that she is rationally justified to act in accordance with the former instead of the latter. At the same time, it accounts for the contention that an agent need not be irrational if she does not adhere to her moral reasons. (shrink)

Supererogatory acts are, in some sense, morally better their non-supererogatory alternatives. In this sense, what is it for one option A to be better than an alternative B? I argue for three main conclusions. First, relative rankings are a type of all-in action guidance. If A is better than B, then morality recommends that you A rather than B. Such all-in guidance is useful when acts have the same deontic status. Second, I argue that Right > Wrong: permissible acts are (...) always better than their impermissible alternatives. If Right > Wrong were false, then morality’s deontic verdicts would sometimes conflict with its relative rankings. Such conflict would undermine the thought that morality is a coherent, authoritative guide to action. Third, the All or Nothing Problem is not a counterexample to Right > Wrong as is commonly thought. Instead, it involves an interesting ranking reversal: whether A > B can depend on whether a certain alternative is added as a third option. (shrink)

This paper argues in favour of a desire-based account of normativity. In addition, it demonstrates that the view is particularly well-placed to answer ‘bootstrapping’ objections. Such objections have previously been taken to be a problem not just for desire-based accounts, but for a variety of other subjective accounts of practical normativity. I will begin by explaining desire-based accounts of normativity, and then by explicating two different kinds of bootstrapping objection: one about normative conflicts, and one about normativity coming from the (...) wrong kind of source. Both objections, I will show, can be answered with a clear explanation of what makes desire-based accounts of normativity so attractive: their ability to explain practical normative force. As such, this paper aims to go further than simply being a new response to a popular objection, or a new argument in support of a controversial view. It will also contribute to a better understanding of practical normativity itself, and how the nature of the normativity depends on and changes with the corresponding desire. (shrink)

When moral and epistemic norms pull in different directions, what should one believe? Moral encroachment is the view that there is an ought simpliciter that is determined by both moral and epistemic norms. Others, on the other hand, hold that norms of different domains cannot be combined and can therefore give conflicting verdicts. This view, however, may run into Moorean paradoxes. This paper argues for a view in which moral and epistemic norms remain distinct, but in a way that does (...) not run into paradoxes, by adopting and expanding Angela Smith’s view of a three-tiered structure of responsibility attributions (Smith, 2007) and arguing for a view of responsibility for beliefs according to which background attitudes play a pivotal role in belief-forming processes. These background attitudes affect how evidence is gathered and weighed, and thus they not only determine what beliefs the agent rationally ought to form (Nelson, 2010) but also indirectly influence the content of the belief. A belief may thus reveal a morally problematic attitude, for instance, but there is rarely a point at which an agent is conscious of different norms pulling in different directions. (shrink)

This paper introduces Dual-Domain Neopragmatism (DDN), a postrealist evaluative framework that extends and departs from the neopragmatist tradition associated with Richard Rorty. Rorty's decisive contribution was the dissolution of representationalism and the relocation of justification inside practices of inquiry. What he did not provide was a stable basis for evaluating those practices from outside any single vocabulary. DDN completes that project by replacing the concept of truth not with a deflated intra-practice label but with three evaluative dimensions: coherence as a (...) formal condition, and two normative domains organizing families of values instrumental to practical wisdom, utility and morality. The paper argues that morality, in particular, functions not as a downstream consequence of good reasoning but as a constitutive dimension of evaluation. This architectural move distinguishes DDN both from Rorty's cultivated solidarity and from the constraint-pragmatism of Peirce, Dewey, and Habermas, all of whom add normative constraints in the service of epistemically motivated inquiry. The paper concludes by specifying the philosophical fault line: DDN does not constrain pragmatism; it reconstitutes what pragmatic evaluation means. (shrink)

My aim in this paper is to introduce and motivate a general normative framework, which I call feasibilism, and to sketch a view of the relationship between the prescriptive and the hypological in the epistemic domain by drawing on the theoretical resources provided by this framework. I then generalise the lesson to the moral domain. I begin by motivating feasibilism. A wide range of norms appear to leave uncharted an important part of the normative landscape. Across different domains we need (...) norms more directed at the subject, and less dependent on how the world beyond our control plays out. In the beginning of this paper I briefly outline two broad ways of seeking such subject-directed norms: perspectivism and feasibilism. According to feasibilism, the ultimate reason why more objectivist norms are inadequate on their own is not that they fail to take into account the limits of an agent’s perspective, but that they are not sensitive to limits on what ways of choosing, acting, and believing are feasible in a given situation. I think of these ways of choosing, acting, and believing in terms of an agent’s dispositions. This paper focuses on a gnosticist implementation of feasibilism. Such a view supplements a knowledge norm with a norm urging one to only be in doxastic states that are manifestations of the most knowledge-conducive feasible dispositions – that is, a norm urging one to be in doxastic states that are reasonable. But how should we think about the normative statuses of knowledge versus reasonableness? By drawing on two general hypotheses about the relationship between succeeding (e.g. knowing) and manifesting dispositions conducive to success (e.g. reasonable belief), I argue for a view on which the prescriptive and the hypological come radically apart. The result is that an epistemic analogue of a thesis that many have assumed to hold in the moral realm should be rejected. This thesis is Only Blameworthy for Wrongs: we can only ever be blameworthy for acts that are morally wrong. I argue that on the picture presented, we can be epistemically blameworthy for doxastic states that do not violate any prescriptive epistemic norms. I then generalise the considerations to the moral realm, arguing against Only Blameworthy for Wrongs. (shrink)

Ascriptivists such as H.L.A. Hart, J.L. Austin, and Joel Feinberg defended a conceptual link between agency and normativity by putting forward the thesis that the attribution of an action is also an attribution of responsibility. This thesis has been heavily criticised for not providing an accurate model of what is signified by action statements and attributions of responsibility. In this chapter, I explore two ways of supporting it philosophically. The first is based on the constitutivist view, developed by Philippa Foot (...) and Michael Thompson, according to which the concept of agency is dependent on the concept of life-form. The second is founded on the Hegelian idea of recognition as part of the human form of life. According to this second idea, recognition shows how the sociality of agency creates the conditions for normativity. It is argued that the sum of both strategies makes it possible to explain some basic normative notions. The result is a weak social constitutivism that shows how the interpersonal meaning of our actions makes us responsible for them and allow us to build the normative landscape. (shrink)

In this paper, we provide a novel definition of moralism as a failure in moral judgment, and we seek to identify its two main sources (relational and substantive). After defining moralism, we spell out a taxonomy of different kinds of moralism, the opposite—yet equally defective—moral failures, and the corresponding correct attitudes. Then, we examine how some proximate notions (judgmentalism, moral fury, hypocrisy, paternalism, puritanism, moral grandstanding) may have parallels with or differ from one or more of the four kinds of (...) moralism identified. Finally, we argue that for there to be moralism, we must presuppose some features inherent in moral judgment which moralism perturbs in terms of its exercise and legitimate area of competence. (shrink)

Paraconsistent deontic logics have been proposed to deal with deontic paradoxes. We argue that these systems have been misdirected when used to solve deontic paradoxes not grounded on deontic inconsistency. Although the solutions are a formally satisfactory way out of the paradoxes, philosophically they are unsatisfactory. As an example, we discuss how some paraconsistent deontic logics have dealt with Chisholm’s Paradox. A paraconsistent deontic logic should be used to solve paradoxes directly related to deontic inconsistency, as in the case of (...) moral dilemmas. We show how some of these logics can model moral dilemmas while avoiding trivialization. We then consider the philosophical viability of their treatment of moral dilemmas. We argue that _DPI_ is a system that models moral dilemmas in a philosophically satisfactory way. We offer an interpretation for this system, which reads the operator \boxminus as formalizing non-dilemmatic situations. We discuss its philosophical consequences. (shrink)

The aim of this paper is to explore the cultural and historical dimension of morality, seldom discussed in contemporary moral philosophy. Referring to Nicolai Hartmann and his theory of the spiritual being, I show how morality fits into the totality of objective spirit and which general and specific features of morality may be discerned therein. Next, I discuss several promising insights following from that approach: regarding the relation between common morality and conscience, the emergence of generational conflicts concerning moral principles, (...) and interactions between morality and other areas of culture and society. (shrink)

Michael Huemer argues that cross-cultural convergence toward liberal moral values is evidence of objective moral progress, and by extension, evidence for moral realism. Nathan Cofnas claims to debunk Huemer’s argument by contending that convergence toward liberal moral values can be better explained by ‘two related non-truth-tracking processes’: self-interest and its long-term tendency to result in social conditions conducive to greater empathy. This article argues that although Cofnas successfully debunks Huemer’s convergence argument for one influential form of moral realism – Robust (...) Moral Realism, which holds that moral facts are non-natural, stance-independent normative facts – Cofnas’s debunking argument broadly supports a second type of moral realism: Enlightened Self-Interest Realism, the view that moral facts are reducible to stance-dependent requirements of instrumental (‘means-end’) rationality. Finally, this article argues that insofar as different Enlightened Self-Interest Realist theories make specific predictions about the intra- and inter-personal mechanisms behind moral convergence toward liberalism, empirical observations of cross-cultural convergence can provide independent support for Enlightened Self-Interest Realism. I conclude that this is an important mark in favor of Enlightened Self-Interest Realism over Robust Moral Realism. (shrink)

According to normative pluralists there are no truths about what one ought simpliciter to do, only truths about what one ought to do according to some normative system or stand-point. In contrast with conceptual normative pluralists who argue for this conclusion on the basis that the concept of an ought simpliciter is somehow defective, non-conceptual normative pluralists defend this conclusion on first-order grounds. Non-conceptual normative pluralism has recently received a book-length defence by Mathea Slåttholm Sagdahl. In this article I critique (...) Sagdahl’s defence of non-conceptual normative pluralism. Firstly, I challenge Sagdahl’s attempt to motivate non-conceptual normative pluralism by appealing to Henry Sidgwick’s work on the dualism of practical reason. Secondly, I criticise her response to the most prominent argument against non-conceptual normative pluralism in the philosophical literature, the argument from nominal-notable comparisons. Thirdly, I explore the possibility of a view similar to Sagdahl’s position but which accepts the ought simpliciter. (shrink)

In this paper I describe two distinctions about what “eating animals” entails which are often confused in conversations or arguments aimed against meat-based diets and try to show how both distinctions, on their own lights, ultimately support a concern for all fellow creatures, regardless of species or other biological categories. The distinctions in question are: the distinction between moral and nonmoral actions, presumptions about which serve to define whether or not particular topics (like meat consumption) deserve moral consideration whatsoever, and (...) the distinction between moral and immoral actions, about which suppositions bear on both reflexive and considered moral judgments to inform agents in making meaningful normative decisions. (shrink)

Someone acts in a morally worthy way when they deserve credit for doing the morally right thing. But when and why do agents deserve credit for the success involved in doing the right thing? It is tempting to seek an answer to that question by drawing an analogy with creditworthy success in other domains of human agency, especially in sports, arts, and crafts. Accordingly, some authors have recently argued that, just like creditworthy success in, say, chess, playing the piano, or (...) archery, creditworthy moral success is a matter of getting things right by way of manifesting a relevant skill. My main aim in this paper is to bring out an important structural difference between moral creditworthiness and creditworthiness in sports, arts, and craft, undermining attempts to use examples of the latter as a model for understanding the former. As an alternative, I propose an account of morally creditworthy action, according to which such action is a matter of manifesting virtue, not skill—a claim that's based on an important, but underappreciated, difference between the sorts of excellences constituting virtues and skills. The paper thus contributes to a more nuanced picture of normative achievements across different domains of human agency, highlighting largely overlooked structural dissimilarities among them. (shrink)

I argue for a distinction between two varieties of disvalue (“evil”), natural and practical evil. Pain, premature death, and maiming are examples of natural evil; breaches of moral duty are cases of practical evil. I contend that natural evil is a property of people and other things (states of affairs, properties, objects, events, anything you like) considered as part of the natural world governed by laws of nature. Furthermore, natural evils are evil in virtue of natural facts. By contrast, practical (...) evil is a property of people or actions when the former are considered as free agents capable of acting for reasons. A parallel grounding claim holds for practical badness as well: what makes it the case that people and their actions are practically bad will appear only when the former are looked on as free agents who can act for reasons. After establishing what makes practical evil different from natural evil, I will argue that the former is more serious than the latter because the defect in the use of freedom that grounds it degrades the agent, who in doing what she must not do, acts like an unfree, natural thing determined by laws external to herself. (shrink)

What is it that one fundamentally rejects when one criticizes a way of thinking as moralistic? Taking my cue from the principal leveller of this charge in philosophy, I argue that the root problem of moralism is the dualism that underlies it. I begin by distinguishing the rejection of moralism from the rejection of the moral/nonmoral distinction: far from being something one should jettison along with moralism, that distinction is something that any human society is bound to develop. But this (...) valuable distinction is transformed into a problematic dualism when it casts the two sides of the distinction as contrasting sharply in nature, value, and structure. In ethics, the resulting dichotomy takes the form of a dualism of morality and prudence. In politics, it takes the form of a dualism of principle and interest. I explain the enduring appeal of such dualisms before laying out the costs of moralism thus conceived: moralism erodes our sensibility to the moral and political costs of value conflicts; it projects an unrealistic conception of agency that sets up scepticism about responsibility; and it limits our ability to appreciate and realize the wider variety of nonmoral values that sustain us, our achievements, and morality itself. (shrink)

Wenn wir Peter Singers Konklusion in „Famine, Affluence, and Morality“ (1972) akzeptieren, dann handeln wir im Alltag sehr viel häufiger falsch, als es uns lieb ist. Anstatt über die Natur von Altruismus zu philosophieren, könnten wir auch möglichst effektiv Hungerleidenden helfen. Ist es daher etwa moralisch verwerflich – weil egoistisch – zu philosophieren? In diesem Beitrag beleuchte ich die Gründe, die wir haben, Philosophie in den Mittelpunkt unseres Lebens zu stellen. Ich argumentiere, dass Philosophieren – genauso wie die Beschäftigung mit (...) Kunst und Wissenschaft – nur dann gerechtfertigt sein kann, wenn es praktische Gründe jenseits von Gründen des persönlichen Nutzens und der Moral gibt. Dabei schliesse ich an Susan Wolfs Idee an, dass diese Tätigkeiten ein Leben mit Sinn erfüllen können. Es bleibt jedoch offen, ob in einer Welt voller Ungerechtigkeit die moralischen Gründe gegen das Philosophieren (und für andere Handlungsoptionen) nicht dennoch überwiegen. (shrink)

The moral problem presented by Michael Smith in his seminal book with the same name consists of three claims that are intuitively plausible when considered separately, but seem incompatible when combined: moral judgments express beliefs about objective moral facts, moral judgments are practical in being motivational, and beliefs are unable to motivate by themselves. An essential aspect of Smith’s solution to the moral problem is the contention that moral judgments are both motivating for rational agents and objective. In this paper, (...) I take a close look at Smith’s arguments by considering his characterizations of rationality understood as coherence between attitudes. It is suggested that on this understanding of rationality and coherence, it has not been clearly shown that moral judgments are both practical and objective. (shrink)

There are reasons for many things. For instance, we can have reasons to watch our favorite movie and believe that it will live up to the hype. These are cases of reasons for beliefs and actions. We can also have reasons for affective attitudes: we can have reasons to be excited the movie is releasing, to fear that our friends won’t like it as much as we do, and to be relieved that they did. Barry Maguire has recently argued against (...) the claim that there are reasons for affective attitudes. If he is right, it would have serious consequences in metaethics. Several projects in metaethics are committed to the existence of reasons for affective attitudes. These views are doomed if Maguire is right. Other projects have run into serious difficulties in trying to account for the existence of reasons for attitudes. Their prospects are seriously improved if Maguire is right. I hope to show we should not accept these consequences: the existence of reasons for attitudes can be defended against Maguire’s attack. (shrink)

Moral evidentialism is the view that one ought morally to believe only what is suggested by the evidence at one's disposal. As announced in the title, an argument for (a slightly restricted version of) this view is presented. The argument crucially relies on two specific links between belief and assertion, namely that one should not believe what one must not assert, and that one must not assert what is not suggested by the evidence at one's disposal. In both cases, the (...) normativity involved is moral. The links are established, and it is shown how to deal with seemingly apparent counterexamples. (shrink)

Dual-role approaches to reasons say, roughly, that reasons can relate to actions in two fundamentally different ways: they can either require conformity, or justify an action without requiring that it be taken. This paper develops a formal dual-role approach, combining ideas from defeasible logic and practical philosophy. It then uses the approach to shed light on the phenomenon of supererogation and resolve a well-known puzzle about supererogation, namely, Horton’s All or Nothing Problem.

In The Sources of Normativity, Korsgaard argues for what can be called “The Universality of Humanity Claim” (UHC), according to which valuing humanity in one’s own person entails valuing it in that of others. However, Korsgaard’s reliance on the claim that reasons are essentially public in her attempt to demonstrate the truth of UHC has been repeatedly criticized. I offer a sentimentalist defense, based on Adam Smith’s moral philosophy, of a qualified, albeit adequate, version of UHC. In particular, valuing my (...) humanity, understood as (my awareness of) my perspective and the reasons determined from within it, entails valuing your humanity, understood as (your awareness of) your perspective and the reasons determined from within it. Given Korsgaard’s emphasis on the publicity of reasons in her argument for UHC, I also discuss the role of reasons in my account. I argue that the relative weights of (at least some of) an agent’s reasons are determined from within a shared evaluative point of view, namely, the standpoint of what Smith calls “the impartial spectator.” These reasons have normative authority over and constrain the agent’s private reasons, that is, those that are determined from within her own particular evaluative point of view. (shrink)

Pauline Kleingeld and Marcus Willaschek, in a co-authored article, declare that their purportedly new interpretation of Immanuel Kant's writings on autonomy reveals that his moral philosophy is neither realist nor constructivist. However, as I explain here, John Rawls already occupies the area of intellectual territory to which Kleingeld and Willaschek attempt to lay claim: Rawls interprets Kant's moral philosophy as neither realist, as Kleingeld and Willaschek evidently construe this term, nor constructivist, as they evidently construe this term. Contra Kleingeld and (...) Willaschek, the moral constructivism attributed to Kant by Rawls is not voluntarist, and Rawls's account of Kant's concept of autonomy is not paradoxical. In order to understand autonomy, it is necessary to understand Kant's complex conception of the will, which structures his moral philosophy (as Rawls, unlike Kleingeld and Willaschek, explains). Rawls, like Kant, but unlike Kleingeld and Willaschek, clearly distinguishes between certain importantly different questions about normativity and obligation. Kant's moral philosophy, according to Rawls's insightful interpretation, is a form of objective moral constructivism. (shrink)

This contribution discusses two aspects of Watson’s account of epistemic rights: namely, the nature of epistemic rights, and a particular form of epistemic rights violation that Watson calls the abuse of perceived epistemic authority. It is argued that Watson’s take on both aspects is unsatisfactory, and some suggestions for an alternative view are offered.

This paper presents a dilemma for the additive model of reasons. Either the model accommodates disjunctive cases in which one ought to perform some act $$\phi $$ just in case at least one of two factors obtains, or it accommodates conjunctive cases in which one ought to $$\phi $$ just in case both of two factors obtains. The dilemma also arises in a revised additive model that accommodates imprecisely weighted reasons. There exist disjunctive and conjunctive cases. Hence the additive model (...) is extensionally inadequate. The upshot of the dilemma is that one of the most influential accounts of how reasons accrue to determine what we ought to do is flawed. (shrink)

This paper has two aims. The first is to present and defend a new argument for rights contributionism – the view that the notion of a moral claim-right is a contributory (or pro tanto) rather than overall normative notion. The argument is an inference to the best explanation: it is argued that (i) there are contributory moral factors that contrast with standard moral reasons by way of having a number of formal properties that are characteristic of rights, even though they (...) can be overridden, and (ii) that this is best explained by a view that takes these factors to correlate with rights. The second aim is to show that the truth of rights contributionism matters for normative ethics. More specifically, it is argued that rights contributionism clears the way for deontologists to justify the pre-theoretically plausible verdict that we have a duty to save the greater number in so-called Taurek scenarios – scenarios in which we have to choose between saving either a greater or a smaller number of different people. The chapter offers a novel and distinctively deontological explanation of this verdict that is based on the assumption that everyone has a pro tanto right to be saved in a Taurek scenario. (shrink)

Anscombe counsels us to dispense with those moral concepts that presuppose a divine law conception of ethics, among which she numbers the concepts of “moral obligation and moral duty, […] of what is morally right and wrong, and of the moral sense of ‘ought’.” Schopenhauer made a similar point more than a century earlier, though his critique implicates a narrower range of concepts. Through reflection on his accounts of right and wrong and of duty and obligation, this chapter attempts to (...) show that we can dispense with the imperative in ethics while retaining these notions, thus preserving a distinctively modern conception of morality. (shrink)

A barrier to entailment exists if you can't get conclusions of a certain kind from premises of another. One of the most famous barriers in philosophy is Hume's Law, which says that you can't get normative conclusions from descriptive premises, or in slogan form: you can't get an ought from an is. This barrier is highly controversial, and many famous counterexamples were proposed in the last century. But there are other barriers which function almost as philosophical platitudes: no Universal conclusions (...) from Particular premises, no Future conclusions from premises about the Past, and no claims that attribute Necessity from premises that merely tell us how things happen to be in the Actual world. Barriers to Entailment proposes a unified logical account of five barriers that have played important roles in philosophy, in the process showing how to diagnose proposed counterexamples and arguing that the case for Hume's Law is as strong as that for the platitudinous barriers. -/- The first two parts of the book employ techniques from formal logic, but present them in an accessible way, suitable for any reader with some background in first-order model theory (of the kind that might be taught in a first class in logic). Gillian Russell introduces tense, modal, indexical, and deontic formal logics, but always avoids unneeded complexity. Each barrier is connected to broader philosophical topics: universality, time, necessity, context-sensitivity, and normativity. Russell brings out under-recognised connections between the domains and lays the groundwork for further work at the intersections. -/- The last part of the book transposes the formal work to informal barrier theses in the philosophy of language, in the process doing new work on the concept of logical consequence, and providing new responses to proposed informal counterexamples to Hume's Law which employ hard-to-formalise tools from natural language, such as speech acts and thick normative expressions. (shrink)

Extract: Maria Baghramian and Annalisa Coliva (henceforth, B&C) have written a superb, compendious book on various kinds of relativism (2019). While they give nuanced and sympathetic reconstructions of these views, it is illuminating to see them show, repeatedly and in detail, how each of these views succumbs to a familiar dilemma: a relativistic view requires that it be possible for two judgers to genuinely disagree with one another, even while their views count as ‘equally valid’. However, it is not possible (...) to make sense of this combination: in each and every case, the view either fails to specify a genuine disagreement, or it fails to make sense of equal validity. Since I completely agree with this type of critique of relativistic views (see Boghossian 2006, 2008), I found it hard to find something to write a critical notice about. However, there is one argument I was not convinced by and that is B&C’s argument against Gilbert Harman’s influential version of moral relativism. Since their discussion of Harman is original and interesting and leads to a number of fundamental philosophical issues, I will devote this notice to a detailed critique of it. (shrink)

This Element examines the concept of moral responsibility as it is used in contemporary philosophical debates and explores the justifiability of the moral practices associated with it, including moral praise/blame, retributive punishment, and the reactive attitudes of resentment and indignation. After identifying and discussing several different varieties of responsibility-including causal responsibility, take-charge responsibility, role responsibility, liability responsibility, and the kinds of responsibility associated with attributability, answerability, and accountability-it distinguishes between basic and non-basic desert conceptions of moral responsibility and considers a (...) number of skeptical arguments against each. It then outlines an alternative forward-looking account of moral responsibility grounded in non-desert-invoking desiderata such as protection, reconciliation, and moral formation. It concludes by addressing concerns about the practical implications of skepticism about desert-based moral responsibility and explains how optimistic skeptics can preserve most of what we care about when it comes to our interpersonal relationships, morality, and meaning in life. (shrink)

Some standards, such as moral and prudential standards, provide genuinely or authoritatively normative reasons for action. Other standards, such as the norms of masculinity and the mafia’s code of omerta, provide reasons but do not provide genuinely normative reasons for action. This paper first explains that there is a similar distinction amongst attitudinal standards: some attitudes (belief, desire) have standards that seem to give rise to genuine normativity; others (boredom, envy) do not. This paper gives a value-based account of which (...) attitudinal standards give rise to genuine normativity. It argues that this account has interesting implications before extending it to provide an account of which action-guiding standards are genuinely normative. It argues that this value-based account of which standards are genuinely normative is more plausible than alternatives suggested in the literature and has interesting implications for genuine normativity in law and aesthetics. (shrink)

[Longform review essay] The central argument of Youpa's book is that Spinoza's moral philosophy offers a distinctive variety of moral realism, grounded in a standard of human nature. In this review essay, I provide an overview of Youpa's remarkably lucid interpretation of Spinoza. However, I also critique Youpa's conception of the 'free man' as an objective standard of perfection which (a) applies equally to all humans, and (b) which has objective moral force in the sense that it ought to be (...) approached. I sketch an alternative reading of Spinoza which denies a shared human essence, and which denies that an individual ought to become more perfect than they in fact are. I argue that Youpa's reading rests on the conflation of Spinoza's concepts of active power and adequate causation. I then suggest that Youpa's resultant excessive focus on a rational human essence as 'what we fundamentally are' leads him to downplay a more developmental and imaginative dimension to Spinoza's moral philosophy. (shrink)

In this paper, an attempt has been made to analyze J.S. Mill’s notion of individuality to examine its significance within Mill’s utilitarian scheme. If Mill’s notion of individuality is closely examined, it can be noted that he has emphasized upon exercise of individuality in two senses: 1) as an expression of individual spontaneity and 2) as an expression of developed individuality. But a pertinent question arises: Has Mill given equal importance to both the senses? Or has he assigned more importance (...) to one sense over the other keeping in view his utilitarian objective? In this paper, both the senses of individuality have been explored and examined taking into account their interdependence and importance from Millian perspective. Based on examination and analysis of Mill’s views, it has been noted that though Mill has valued both the senses, he has given primacy to "developed individuality" over the expression of individual spontaneity to arrive at his utilitarian goal. (shrink)

Joseph Raz addresses one of the most basic philosophical questions: how to explain normativity in its many guises. His value-based account is brought to bear on many aspects of the lives of rational beings and their agency, such as their ability to maintain relationships, and to live their lives as social beings with a sense of their identity.

Review of Andreas Müller's Constructing Practical Reasons.

The dominant theory of the evolution of moral cognition across a variety of fields is that moral cognition is a biological adaptation to foster social cooperation. This chapter argues, to the contrary, that moral cognition is likely an evolutionary exaptation: a form of cognition where neurobiological capacities selected for in our evolutionary history for a variety of different reasons—many unrelated to social cooperation—were put to a new, prosocial use after the fact through individual rationality, learning, and the development and transmission (...) of social norms. This chapter begins with a brief overview of the emerging behavioral neuroscience of moral cognition. It then outlines a novel theory of moral cognition that I have previously argued explains these findings better than alternatives. Finally, it shows how the evidence for this theory of moral cognition and human evolutionary history together suggest that moral cognition is likely not a biological adaptation. Instead, like reading sheet music or riding a bicycle, moral cognition is something that individuals learn to do—in this case, in response to sociocultural norms created in our ancestral history and passed down through the ages to enable cooperative living. (shrink)