Values and Norms

In his seminal essay, 'Two Concepts of Rules', John Rawls draws a central distinction between justifying a practice and justifying a particular action falling under it. In this review, Leslie Allan walks through Rawls's essay, highlighting his key arguments for a strengthened version of rule utilitarianism and reflecting on the lasting influence of his analysis.

In this paper I defend the thesis that, considered simply as certain sorts of bodily sensations, pleasure is not the good nor is pain intrinsically evil. In fact, the opposite is largely the case: pursuit of pleasure is generally productive of ontic evil, and pain, when heeded, directs us toward the ontic good.

Loneliness, while a common human experience, is something to which people often respond quite differently. Here, I examine how an individual’s social position, as well as his socialization into a particular cultural milieu, can shape his response to the fact of his loneliness (as well as the features of human existence that loneliness makes salient). Specifically, I argue that in cases where the individual experiencing loneliness has been socialized to disvalue the features of existence that loneliness makes salient (e.g., our (...) dependence on and vulnerability to others) and/or to feel entitled to the social goods that they are, or perceive themselves to be, lacking (e.g., recognition or intimate connection), loneliness may catalyze the vicious, extremist attitude of ressentiment. This analysis allows us to see how loneliness may play a role in catalyzing vicious, extremist attitudes—though I contend that loneliness never warrants such attitudes. (shrink)

In this paper, I address a fundamental challenge in the philosophy of trust: how to account for trustee discretion in scenarios that fall outside explicitly defined expectations. I argue that this challenge reveals vagueness as an inherent feature of trusting relationships, often leading to disagreements between trustors and trustees. To resolve this, I propose a novel account of trust grounded in rule-following, shifting the object of trust from particular actions to adherence to rules constitutive of relationships. By focusing on relationships (...) and their constitutive rules, I provide here a framework for understanding and minimizing disagreements through communication and engaged practice. Furthermore, I argue this framework sheds light on the dynamics of trust-related reactive attitudes, in particular, distinguishing between betrayal and mere disappointment. (shrink)

The fact that I am a committed gardener has some practical upshot or other. But what, exactly, is the upshot of the fact that I am committed to some project, person, or principle? According to a standard view, my commitment to gardening directly effects a change in the normative facts by giving me a further reason to garden. I argue that we should reject this view and its attendant psychological story involving a normatively significant will. According to the view I (...) develop here, a commitment to X just is a decision to take seriously the reasons to which X gives rise, and where necessary, to give those reasons an elevated place in one’s practical thinking. In virtue of being decisions to conduct one’s deliberation in a certain way, commitments alter what it is rational for us to do without giving us further reasons to act. (shrink)

Subjectivists about practical normativity hold that an agent’s favoring and disfavoring attitudes give rise to practical reasons. On this view, an agent’s normative reason to choose vanilla over chocolate ice cream ultimately turns on facts about what appeals to her rather than facts about what her options are like attitude-independently. Objectivists—who ground reasons in the attitude-independent features of the things we aim at—owe us an explanation of why it is rational to choose what we favor, if not because favoring is (...) a source of reasons. My aim in this paper is to supply such a story. The proposal is roughly that when an agent cannot base her choices on her judgments about what she has most reason to do, structural rationality extends to her a license to choose something just because she favors it, without imbuing favoring with the authority of a normative reason. (shrink)

Charlotte Witt covers a remarkable amount of ground in this concise and elegantly written book. Coming in at under 150 pages, she artfully weaves together Aristotle’s theory of functions with contemporary work on cultural transmission and apprenticeship, ideas about self-creation with theories of aspiration and transformative experience, and reflections on the relationships among social norms and games with thoughts about social roles and the nature of hierarchy. At the heart of it is an elaboration and defense of a thoroughly externalist (...) account of social normativity. Witt takes skilled experts, especially artisans like chefs and carpenters, as paradigm cases for theorizing about social normativity. She uses them to argue that the ultimate source of many normative obligations is found not in the acquiescence, attitudes, or any other features internal to those on whom those obligations fall. Rather, the demands are rooted in the world itself, and flow from specific circumstances, especially from the constraints those circumstances impose on different actors in virtue of the tasks they need to perform. The result is a view that depicts social normativity not just as external to individuals but also unavoidably role specific; what is right for a chef is not necessarily right for a carpenter, and what makes for a good nurse might make for a poor drill sergeant. Witt’s presentation of this package of ideas is both careful and austere, and it makes for a wonderfully thought provoking read. Social Goodness: On the Ontology of Social Norms will reward the careful attention of anyone interested in social ontology, especially the metaphysical foundations of normativity, the nature of social norms, and the relationship between social roles and the self. (shrink)

This paper begins by bringing love and hate into tension via the ideal that you ought to love your enemy. The trouble with loving your enemy is that they may seem to merit hate instead, especially in cases of serious injustice. I develop this simple thought into a challenge for loving your enemy: that you cannot be required to do what makes no sense to you. This challenge is not adequately met by extant explanations for why you ought to love (...) your enemy within the Christian tradition and its heirs, which tend to give reasons that are either insufficient or else instrumentalize love. The second half of the paper presents a solution with a very different shape to the challenge. I argue that love may still be fitting even when your enemy fails to merit love, notwithstanding the contemporary orthodoxy about fittingness. What makes it fitting to love your enemy depends on the fact (if it is one) that you yourself have received unmerited love. You may thereby have reason to exclude the issue of merit from consideration; what is more, you have reason to love out of gratitude for the unmerited love that you yourself received. (shrink)

Recently, researchers and reporters have made a wide range of claims about the distribution, nature, and societal impact of political polarization. Here I offer reasons to believe that, even when they are correct and prima facie merely descriptive, many of these claims have the highly negative side effect of increasing political polarization. This is because of the interplay of two factors that have so far been neglected in the work on political polarization, namely that (1) people have a tendency to (...) conform to descriptive norms (i.e., norms capturing (perceptions of) what others commonly do, think, or feel), and (2) claims about political polarization often convey such norms. Many of these claims thus incline people to behave, cognize, and be affectively disposed in ways that contribute to social division. But there is a silver lining. People’s tendency to conform to descriptive norms also provides the basis for developing new, experimentally testable strategies for counteracting political polarization. I outline three. (shrink)

What reasons do we have to use certain concepts and conceptions rather than others? Approaching that question in a methodologically humanistic rather than Platonic spirit, one might seek “reasons for concept use” in how well concepts serve the contingent human concerns of those who live by them. But appealing to the instrumentality of concepts in meeting our concerns invites the worry that this yields the wrong kind of reasons, especially if the relevant concerns are nonmoral ones. Drawing on Susan Wolf’s (...) work on the moral/nonmoral distinction and the neglected role of reasons of love, I argue that this worry is misplaced, and in fact overlooks some of our most important reasons to prefer certain concepts over others. Yet a lingering worry remains, namely that the value of concepts does not just lie in what they are good for. Drawing on another strand in Wolf’s work, I explore the question whether concepts can be valuable good-for-nothings, and show how this ultimately also underscores the importance of reasons of love as reasons for concept use. (shrink)

Philosophers pursue a number of different explanatory projects when explaining various sorts of normative phenomena. For example, they may seek to explain why the right acts are right or why the things that are good for us are so, explain what it is for something to be obligatory, or explain the source of reasons for action. This chapter takes some steps towards understanding this variety. I first lay some general ground about explanation, suggest that explanations that are appropriate in normative (...) inquiry are objective in a certain sense, and discuss the relevant notion of the normative. I describe some key axes of debate about the form and the content of explanations that first-order normative inquiry (such as normative ethics) typically seeks to state and defend, such as whether normative principles are essential to first-order normative explanation and whether first-order normative explanations work by highlighting what grounds the normative phenomena that are being explained, or by unifying them with other seemingly disparate normative phenomena, or in some other way. I then discuss the function of explanation in normative inquiry and the question of whether normative explanation might be pluralist in various senses. More briefly I discuss how two other sorts of normative explanation that seem more concerned with the foundations of normative domains like ethics and practical reason (such as the source of reasons for action) and with explicating or analyzing the natures of normative properties might be understood and how they relate to first-order normative explanations. (shrink)

Gender norms can guide our sense of what we feel like we ought to do, even when we don't want them to. Understanding this norm responsiveness is an important part of understanding how oppressive gender systems are sustained. According to a social constructionist position, gender norm responsiveness happens as a result of social training, or socialization. It's often assumed that this training depends on our gender categories—that, for example, those who occupy the category “man” will be responsive to masculine norms, (...) and so on. Call this a category-based view. But trans and gender-nonconforming people are often responsive to gender norms that don't match our gender categories. This is sometimes taken as evidence for the conclusion that normative masculinity and femininity are somehow innate or presocialized. I reject this inference. I argue that we should instead dispense with a category-based view, and instead adopt a traits-based view. Gender norms apply to individuals on the basis of the gender-coded traits that they express. A traits-based view represents a social constructionist account of gender norms that leaves room for trans and GNC experiences of normative gender, and thus represents an important step towards creating inclusive theory. (shrink)

Emotions are open to various kinds of normative assessment. For example, we can assess emotions for their prudential or moral value. Recently, philosophers have increasingly attended to a distinct form of normative assessment of emotions – fittingness assessment. An emotion is fitting when it is merited by its object. For example, admiration is fitting when it is felt towards the admirable, and shame towards the shameful. This paper defends a hybrid account of emotional fittingness. Emotions are complex, and typically involve (...) various elements. As well as involving representations that can be assessed for accuracy, emotions typically motivate their subjects in characteristically urgent ways. The fittingness of an emotion as a whole is a function of the fittingness of both its representational and motivational aspects. (shrink)

Ce qui est visé derrière ce titre, ce n’est pas la signification de la cicatrice en tant que marque sur un corps, mais le sens à donner à l’existence de l’individu dans son unité, le rapport entre l’exposition à la cicatrice et la quête d’un sens pour son existence...

تقترب التقاليد الفلسفية من الأخلاق اعتمادًا بشكل أساسي على المفاهيم والنظريات الميتافيزيقية واللاهوتية. ومن بين مفاهيم الأخلاق التقليدية، يُعتبر نظرية الأمر الإلهي (DCT) الأكثر بروزًا. وفقًا لهذه النظرية، يمنح الله الأسس الأخلاقية للبشرية من خلال الخلق والوحي. الأخلاق والألوهية لا ينفصلان منذ أقدم الحضارات. هذه المفاهيم تنغمس في إطار لاهوتي وتُقبل بشكل واسع من قبل معظم أتباع التقاليد الإبراهيمية الثلاثة: اليهودية، المسيحية، والإسلام، التي تشمل الجزء الأكبر من سكان العالم. وبما أن نظرية الأمر الإلهي تعتمد على الإيمان والوحي كأساس، فهي (...) ليست خاضعة تمامًا للإثبات العلمي. وقد حاول معارضو التصور الأخلاقي المستند إلى الأمر الإلهي، بناءً على استحالة إثبات افتراضاته الميتافيزيقية والدينية، لعدة قرون (وإن كان ذلك دون نجاح) تقليل أهميته. واستندوا إلى الحجة القائلة بأنه لا يظهر أدلة مادية ولا اتساقًا منطقيًا، ولهذا السبب، لا يمكن اعتباره لأغراض علمية أو فلسفية. إنه مجرد اعتقاد، ويجب فهمه كذلك. إلى جانب هذه المعارضة الشديدة، هناك العديد من المفاهيم الأخرى التي تعارض نظريات الأمر الإلهي، بطريقة أو بأخرى، جزئيًا أو كليًا. العديد من الفلاسفة والعلماء الاجتماعيين، بدءًا من الفلسفة اليونانية الكلاسيكية وحتى يومنا هذا، على سبيل المثال، يؤكدون أن الأخلاق مجرد بناء، وبالتالي فهي نسبية ثقافيًا ومحددة ثقافيًا. ومع ذلك، يثير هذا العديد من النقاشات الأخرى ويفرض تحديًا لتحديد معنى الثقافة، وأي عناصر من الثقافة تُعتبر محددة أخلاقيًا، وأخيرًا، ما هي حدود هذه النسبية. يدعي الحتميون الأخلاقيون أن كل شيء يتعلق بالسلوك البشري، بما في ذلك الأخلاق، محدد مسبقًا، نظرًا لعدم وجود إرادة حرة. وفي الآونة الأخيرة، جادل المفكرون الحديثون بأن هناك علمًا صارمًا للأخلاق. ومع ذلك، فإن المنهج العلمي وحده، رغم تفسيره للعديد من الحقائق والأدلة، لا يمكنه إلقاء الضوء على المحتوى الكامل والمعنى الشامل للأخلاق. فهم الأخلاق يتطلب تصورًا أوسع، واتفاقًا بين الفلاسفة، وهو أمر لم يتحقق أبدًا. كل هذه الأسئلة تأخذ أشكالًا مختلفة اعتمادًا على كل اتجاه فلسفي، وتبدأ تحليلات معقدة ونقاشات لا تنتهي، حيث أن العديد منها يتضارب بشكل متبادل. الكون والأجواء المحيطة بهذه الأطروحات هي ميادين كل هذه الصراعات المفاهيمية، التي تُلاحظ من منظور موضوعي وتطوري. بغض النظر عن هذه الظروف وأهميتها الجوهرية، فإن هذه الأسئلة بعيدة كل البعد عن النهج المنهجي لمناقشة تحليلية حول الأخلاق الموضوعية، وهو بالفعل هدف ونطاق هذا العمل. يجب علينا استعراض هذه النظريات التقليدية البارزة باختصار لأن هذه الأطروحة تحتوي على دراسة مقارنة، وفرضياتها تختلف على الأقل بشكل عميق عن جميع النظريات التقليدية. لذلك، يصبح من الضروري تقديم عناصر مباشرة ومحددة للمقارنة للقارئ، لأجل النقد الصحيح، دون الحاجة إلى أبحاث مقاطعة. ومع ذلك، حتى عند استعراض النظريات التقليدية، لأغراض هذا العرض المقارن والنقدي، ستظل هذه النظريات جانبًا من اهتماماتنا الرئيسية، كـ"مواد خارجية". بغض النظر عن صحة أي أو جميع عناصر هذا النقاش، ومعناها كجزء من الكون الفلسفي لهذه الأطروحة، فإن الغرض من هذا العمل هو إثبات وتبرير وجود ومعنى النماذج الأخلاقية البدائية التي نشأت مباشرة من الاحتياجات الاجتماعية الأولى وجهود البقاء. هذه النماذج هي تعريف الأساس الأساسي للأخلاق، وارتباطها باللاوعي الجمعي والتنظيم المنطقي المقابل لها وانتقالها إلى المراحل التطورية للجينوم البشري وعلاقات الزمان والمكان المختلفة، بغض النظر عن أي تجربة معاصرة للأفراد. النظام الذي تحدده هذه النماذج يشكل نموذجًا اجتماعيًا تطوريًا للبشر. هل هذا موقف ميتاأخلاقي؟ نعم، هو كذلك. وعلاوة على ذلك، كما هو الحال في أي تفكير ميتاأخلاقي، يجب علينا أن نبحث بعناية عن أفضل الطرق وأكثرها اتساقًا، كما تقدمها الفلسفة التحليلية. وبالتالي، يجب أن يُظهر هذا العمل بشكل معقول أن الأخلاق ليست نتاجًا ثقافيًا للإنسان المتحضر أو المجتمعات الحديثة، وأنه على الرغم من خضوعها للعديد من الإضافات والطرح الثقافي النسبي، فإن أسسها الأساسية هي نماذج بدائية ولم تتغير هيكليًا أبدًا. هذا التفكير يستنتج أن الأخلاق هي صفة أصلية لـ"الإنسان العاقل"، فهي ليست ملكية ولا حادثة: إنها تدمج جوهر الإنسان وتنتمي إلى مجال الهوية الأنطولوجية للإنسان. الظاهرة البشرية هي عملية مستمرة، تلعب دورها بين التحديد العشوائي والإرادة الحرة، ويجب أن نتساءل كيف بدأت الأخلاق وكيف وصلت إلينا في الحاضر. -/- . (shrink)

I provide an opinionated discussion of two recent volumes on the structure, ethics, and politics of bad conversations. In Just Words (2019), Mary Kate McGowan argues that despite our best intentions, we sometimes inadvertently bring oppressive norms to bear on our interactions. In Grandstanding (2020), Justin Tosi and Brandon Warmke argue that the human desire to cut a good moral figure before others systematically distorts moral discourse. Though their authors have different political outlooks, both books converge on a similar theme: (...) conversational bad behavior isn’t always just morally obnoxious. It can be silencing. (shrink)

Why is destroying heritage pro tanto wrong? Why does heritage destruction require justification, unlike the destruction of rubbish? The property rights view answers: heritage belongs to people, communities and cultures. The reverence view answers: we are obliged to respect things with non-instrumental value. The moral rights view answers: our predecessors, contemporaries and successors have rights to have their cherishings respected and cultural and epistemic goods protected. The moral harm view answers: destroying heritage causes morally significant harm. I argue that these (...) views all fail to account for the basic obligation to not destroy heritage. I propose that heritage essentially gives us experiences of connections to historically significant things, and these experiences are aesthetically valuable and irreplaceable. Destroying heritage is pro tanto wrong because it leads to the premature and irreversible extinction of these precious and vulnerable experiences. My account makes sense of genuineness as an aesthetic property, vindicates the idea of purely aesthetic obligations, and entails that heritage can be of the present and future, not only the past. (shrink)

The view that morality consists of laws has a rich, particularly religious, tradition. In current debates on ethics, however, it is anything but philosophical commonsense. Not least due to the return to the advantages of virtue ethics, principle-oriented ethics such as the moral law approach have lost popularity. Despite this, the advantages of law-based ethics can also be defended; one paradigm here is still Immanuel Kant’s attempt to ground the objectivity of morality on the concept of a moral law. Accordingly, (...) the aim of this text is to explore the systematic potential of ethics based on the concept of law. For this purpose, I will examine the historical roots of a connection between the concept of morality and that of law and then focus on Kant’s approach to morality. Finally, I will outline the advantages of his conception of morality as autonomy over alternative models of justification of morality. (shrink)

Negli ultimi due anni sono stati pubblicati due importanti libri sul progresso morale: 'Moral Progress' di Philp Kitcher e 'A Better Ape' di Victor Kumar e Richmond Campbell. In questa nota critica, recensisco entrambi i libri e problematizzo il modo in cui cercano rispettivamente di legare tra loro il tema del progresso morale con la teoria dell'evoluzione.

In this paper, I make a case for the view that we have special relationship duties (also known as “associative duties”) that are not identical to or derived from our non-associative impartial moral obligations. I call this view “moral partialism”. On the version of moral partialism I defend, only loving relationships can normatively ground special relationship duties. I propose that for two capable adults to have a loving relationship, they must have mutual non-trivial desires to promote each other’s interests or (...) flourishing and to respect each other’s core values. Along the way, I critically ascertain three alternative accounts of what normatively grounds special relationship duties and argue that my proposed view avoids the problems plaguing the alternatives. (shrink)

A growing body of literature has revealed ordinary causal judgement to be sensitive to normative factors, such that a norm-violating agent is regarded more causal than their non-norm-violating counterpart. In this paper, we explore two competing explanations for this phenomenon: the Responsibility View and the Bias View. The Bias View, but not the Responsibility View, predicts features peripheral to the agent’s responsibility to impact causal attributions. In a series of three preregistered experiments (N = 1162), we present new evidence that (...) the Norm Effect arises from such peripheral features, namely from nonpertinent or entirely silly norm violations. Furthermore, we show that this effect cannot be explained by recourse to the agent’s foreknowledge or desire of the outcome, nor by its foreseeability: the Norm Effect arises even when participants judge the norm-violating agent’s doing as equally foreseeable. This, we argue, provides evidence in favour of the Bias View. (shrink)

In this essay, I argue that the objections that have been raised against the view that equality is intrinsically valuable also provide objections to the view that all practical reasons can be explained in terms of value. Plausible egalitarian principles entail that under certain conditions people have claims to an equal share. These claims entail reasons to distribute goods equally that cannot be explained by value if equality has no intrinsic value.

In this paper I articulate and respond to Kent Hurtig's objection to the fitting attitude account of value (FA). According to the objection, when a good or bad state of affairs is indexed to the actual world, but is such that the actual world does not contain anyone for whom it is fitting to (dis)favor it, it cannot be fitting for anyone in a non-actual world to (dis)favor it. So there are good or bad states of affairs that it is (...) not fitting for anyone to (dis)favor. First I comment on a solution proposed by Toni Rønnow-Rasmussen. Then I argue that if, due to their location in modal space, the relevant states of affairs cannot even be evaluated as good or bad (and a fortiori favored or disfavored) by readers, then such cases are dialectically powerless against FA; if, on the other hand, they can be evaluated as good or bad—despite their location in modal space—then they can also be favored or disfavored, and it will be fitting for us (if for no one else) to favor or disfavor them, thus defusing the challenge. (shrink)

The epistemological debate about radical skepticism has focused on whether our beliefs in apparently obvious claims, such as the claim that we have hands, amount to knowledge. Arguably, however, our concept of knowledge is only one of many knowledge-like concepts that there are. If this is correct, it follows that even if our beliefs satisfy our concept of knowledge, there are many other relevantly similar concepts that they fail to satisfy. And this might give us pause. After all, we might (...) wonder: What is so great about the concept of knowledge that we happen to have? Might it be more important, epistemically speaking, to investigate whether our beliefs satisfy some other relevantly similar concept instead? And how should questions such as these even be understood? This paper discusses the epistemological significance of these issues. In particular, a novel skeptical stance called ‘meta-skepticism’ is introduced, which is a kind of skepticism about the idea that some knowledge-like concepts are epistemically more important than others. It suggested that it is unclear whether this form of skepticism can be avoided. (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)

The costs of the COVID-19 pandemic are yet to be calculated, but they include the loss of millions of lives and the destruction of countless livelihoods. What is certain is that the SARS-CoV-2 virus has changed the way we live for the foreseeable future. It has forced many to live in ways they would have previously thought impossible. As well as challenging scientists and medical professionals to address urgent value conflicts in the short term, COVID-19 has raised slower-burning value questions (...) for corporations, public institutions, governments, and policymakers. In simple terms, the pandemic has brought what we care about into sharp relief, both collectively and individually. Whether this revaluation of our values will last beyond the current pandemic is unknown. Once COVID-19 has been tamed, will the desire to return to our previous lives be irresistible? Or will living under pandemic conditions have taught us something that will be incorporated into how we design our future lives and technologies? These are hard questions for the ethics of technology, which this volume aims to explore and address. (shrink)

Ronald de Sousa has vindicated the importance of emotions in our lives. This transpires clearly through his emphasis on “emotional truth”. Like true beliefs, emotions can reflect the evaluative landscape and be true to ourselves. This article develops his insights on emotional truth by exploring the analogous phenomenon regarding desire: “desiderative truth”. According to the dominant view championed by de Sousa, goodness is the formal object of desire: a desire is fitting when its content is good. Desiderative truth is evaluative. (...) I propose an alternative, deontic approach: a desire is accurate when its content ought to be. I contrast these two accounts by examining one type of flawed desire that has eluded philosophers’ attention: caprice. Capricious desires – as the desires expressed in children’s tantrums – are fascinating yet unfitting. What is wrong with them? I argue that evaluative truth fails to explain their inadequacy. Surprisingly, capricious desires can be about good states; in fact, this is often where the culprit lies: the object of desire is too good to be worth desiring. By contrast, the deontic account nicely captures what goes wrong with capricious desires. Although they can be good, the states desired are not such that they ought to be for one to be happy. Capricious people are too demanding and misunderstand the boundaries of happiness. As the flaw in caprice is deontic, desiderative truth is deontic truth. (shrink)

We are subject to many different norms telling us how to act, from moral norms to etiquette rules and the law. While some norms may simply be ignored, we live under the impression that others matter for what we ought to do. How can we make sense of this normative authority some norms have? Does it fit into our naturalist worldview? Many philosophers claim it does not. Normativity is conceived to be distinct from ordinary natural properties, making it mysterious. The (...) mystery fuels a radical yet prominent scepticism about the existence of normative properties: if they are too strange to actually exist, there is nothing we ought to do. Some take this to mean, moreover, that nothing is morally right or wrong. We must critically examine the ideas behind these theories, which put both morality and normativity in general on the line. -/- The aim of this thesis is to unravel the mystery of normativity. It uncovers and objects to the influential non-natural conception of it, arguing that we can capture normativity with natural properties. In particular, it explores how the authority of norms can be explained by the commitments of the people subject to them. In connection to this, it challenges the conceptual claim behind the view that all moral judgements are mistaken. Finally, it reveals that treating morality as a mere fiction has revolutionary practical implications. This emphasises the importance of the overall conclusion: we need not conceive of either moral or normative properties as too mysterious to exist. (shrink)

According to an attractive and widely held view, all practical reasons are explained in terms of the (instrumental or final) value of the action supported by the reason. I argue that this theory is incompatible with plausible assumptions about the practical reasons that correspond to certain moral rights, including the right to a promised action and the right to an exclusive use of one’s property. The argument is an explanatory rather than extensional one: while the actions supported by the relevant (...) reasons (e.g. keeping a valid promise or respecting property) can be argued to have a certain kind of value, I argue that this value presupposes a moral right, and therefore cannot explain the reason. Reflection on such cases suggest the conclusion that reasons that are subject to normative powers are generally not value-based. This also has important implications for the dialectic between ‘value-first’ and ‘reasons-first’ approaches to normativity. (shrink)

Technology should be aligned with our values. We make the case that attempts to align emerging technologies with our values should reflect critically on these values. Critical thinking seems like a natural starting point for the critical assessment of our values. However, extant conceptualizations of critical thinking carve out no space for the critical scrutiny of values. We will argue that we need critical thinking that focuses on values instead of taking them as unexamined starting points. In order to play (...) a crucial role in helping to align values and technology, critical thinking needs to be modified and refocused on values. Here, we outline what value-centred critical thinking could look like. (shrink)

The present article critiques standard attempts to make philosophy appear relevant to the scientific study of well-being, drawing examples in particular from works that argue for fundamental differences between different forms of wellbeing (by Besser-Jones, Kristjánsson, and Kraut, for example), and claims concerning the supposedly inherent normativity of wellbeing research (e.g., Prinzing, Alexandrova, and Nussbaum). Specifically, it is argued that philosophers in at least some relevant cases fail to apply what is often claimed to be among their core competences: conceptual (...) rigor—not only in dealing with the psychological construct of flow, but also in relation to apparently philosophical concepts such as normativity, objectivity, or eudaimonia. Furthermore, the uncritical use of so-called thought experiments in philosophy is shown to be inappropriate for the scientific study of wellbeing. As an alternative to such philosophy-as-usual, proper attention to other philosophical traditions is argued to be promising. In particular, the philosophy of ZhuangZi (a contemporary of Aristotle and one of the most important figures in Chinese intellectual history) appears to concord well with today’s psychological knowledge, and to contain valuable ideas for the future development of positive psychology. (shrink)

As rational agents, we are governed by reasons. The fact that there’s beer at the pub might be a reason to go there and a reason to believe you’ll enjoy it. As this example illustrates, there are reasons for both action and for belief. There are also many other responses for which there seem to be reasons – for example, desire, regret, admiration, and blame. This diversity raises questions about how reasons for different responses relate to each other. Might certain (...) such reasons be more fundamental than others? Should certain reasons and not others be treated as paradigmatic? At least implicitly, many philosophers treat reasons for action as the fundamental or paradigmatic case. In contrast, this paper articulates and defends an alternative approach, on which reasons for attitudes are fundamental, and reasons for action are both derivative and, in certain ways, idiosyncratic. After outlining this approach, we focus on defending its most contentious thesis, that reasons for action are fundamentally reasons for intention. We offer two arguments for this thesis, which turn on central roles of reasons: that reasons can be responded to, and that reasons can feature as premises of good reasoning. We then examine objections to the thesis and argue that none succeed. We conclude by sketching some ways in which our approach is significant for theorising about reasons. (shrink)

Norm-attitude accounts of value say that for something to be valuable is for there to be norms that support valuing that thing. For example, according to fitting-attitude accounts, something is of value if it is fitting to value, and according to buck-passing accounts, something is of value if the reasons support valuing it. Norm-attitude accounts face the partiality problem: in cases of partiality, what it is fitting to value, and what the reasons support valuing, may not line up with what’s (...) valuable. Buck-passers have a solution to this problem and may claim that this gives them an advantage over fitting-attitude accounts. In this paper, we show how fitting-attitudes accounts can offer a broadly analogous, and equally attractive, solution to the problem. (shrink)

Traditional paradigm on marriage equality focused on a humanitarian appeal and was set as a path dependency model on marriage equality for the suppressed regions. However, such gender based focus has largely neglected the multilateral movements underlying the macro- political-economic structures that shaped law as a power political means. Consequentially, LGBTQI existence became marginalized from the public consciousness with structural realist state hierarchies that further undermines the fundamental freedoms of the LGBTQI popula- tion. This makes the question on LGBTQI equal (...) marriage from a simple humanitarian value based discourse to a macro-political-economy question. The article adopts the Maslow’s hier- archy of needs as the analytical framework on the developing country as the People’s Republic of China (PRC) in relation to multilateralism and global economy on the necessity to legalize LGBTQI marriage. (shrink)

Does algorithmic political bias contribute to an entrenchment and polarization of political positions? Franke argues that it may do so because the bias involves classifications of people as liberals, conservatives, etc., and individuals often conform to the ways in which they are classified. I provide a novel example of this phenomenon in human–computer interactions and introduce a social psychological mechanism that has been overlooked in this context but should be experimentally explored. Furthermore, while Franke proposes that algorithmic political classifications entrench (...) political identities, I contend that they may often produce the opposite result. They can lead people to change in ways that disconfirm the classifications. Consequently and counterintuitively, algorithmic political bias can in fact decrease political entrenchment and polarization. (shrink)

It is often suggested that social media is a hostile environment for critical thinking and that a major source for epistemic problems concerning social media is that it facilitates emotions. We argue that emotions per se are not the source of the epistemic problems concerning social media. We propose that instead of focusing on emotions, we should focus on the affective scaffolding of social media. We will show that some affective scaffolds enable desirable epistemic practices, while others obstruct beneficial epistemic (...) practices, or enable hostile epistemic practices. Particularly, we will show that emotions play a crucial role in the epistemic practice of critical thinking and that the affective scaffolding of social media can support, or hinder, online critical thinking. The upshot of our argument is that affective scaffoldings of social media can harness emotions to support beneficial epistemic practices, like online critical thinking. (shrink)

Do aesthetic reasons have normative authority over us? Could there be anything like an aesthetic ‘ought’ or an aesthetic obligation? I argue that there are no aesthetic obligations. We have reasons to act certain ways regarding various aesthetic objects – most notably, reasons to attend to and appreciate those objects. But, I argue, these reasons never amount to duties. This is because aesthetic reasons are merely evaluative, not deontic. They can only entice us or invite us – they can never (...) compel us. Beauty gives us goods without shoulds. (shrink)

While no one denies that science depends on epistemic values, many philosophers of science have wrestled with the appropriate role of non-epistemic values, such as social, ethical, and political values. Recently, philosophers of science have overwhelmingly accepted that non-epistemic values should play a legitimate role in science. The recent philosophical debate has shifted from the value-free ideal in science to questions about how science should incorporate non-epistemic values. This article engages with such questions through an exploration of the environmental sciences. (...) These sciences are a mosaic of diverse fields characterized by interdisciplinarity, problem-orientation, policy-directedness, and ubiquitous nonepistemic values. This article addresses a frequently voiced concern about many environmental science practices: that they ‘crowd out’ or displace significant non-epistemic values by either (1) entailing some non-epistemic values, rather than others, or by (2) obscuring discussion of non-epistemic values altogether. With three detailed case studies e monetizing nature, nature-society dualism, and ecosystem health e we show that the alleged problem of crowding out emerges from active debates within the environmental sciences. In each case, critics charge that the scientific practice in question displaces nonepistemic values in at least one of the two senses distinguished above. We show that crowding out is neither necessary nor always harmful when it occurs. However, we do see these putative objections to the application of environmental science as teaching valuable lessons about what matters for successful environmental science, all things considered. Given the significant role that many environmental scientists see for non-epistemic values in their fields, we argue that these cases motivate lessons about the importance of value-flexibility (that practices can accommodate a plurality of non-epistemic values), transparency about value-based decisions that inform practice, and environmental pragmatism. (shrink)

Do we love for reasons? It can seem as if we do, since most cases of non‐familial love seem *selective*: coming to love a non‐family‐member often begins with our being drawn to them for what they are like. I argue, however, that we can vindicate love's selectivity, even if we maintain that there are no reasons for love; indeed, that gives us a simpler, and hence better, explanation of love's selectivity. We don't, in short, come to love *for* reasons. That (...) which seemed like evidence for thinking that there are reasons for love, then, turns out to militate against that view: how can these purported reasons be reasons for love, if they don't engender (in virtue of rationalizing) it? (shrink)

Morally speaking, what should one do when one is morally uncertain? Call this the Moral Uncertainty Question. In this paper, I argue that a non-ideal moral theory provides the best answer to the Moral Uncertainty Question. I begin by arguing for a strong ought-implies-can principle---morally ought implies agentially can---and use that principle to clarify the structure of a compelling non-ideal moral theory. I then describe the ways in which one's moral uncertainty affects one's moral prescriptions: moral uncertainty constrains the set (...) of moral prescriptions one is subject to, and at the same time generates new non-ideal moral reasons for action. I end by surveying the problems that plague alternative answers to the Moral Uncertainty Question, and show that my preferred answer avoids most of those problems. (shrink)

In this paper I intend to raise a problem for so-called Frankfurt examples. I begin by describing the examples and what they are used for. Then I describe the problem.

Kurth wants us to understand and appreciate our anxiety more than we typically do. His concise and crisply written monograph makes a good case that we should. It deepens our understanding of what anxiety is, and of how it animates different facets of our mental and moral lives. The case he builds that, roughly, anxiety is one of the brain’s ways of affectively signaling and responding to uncertainty is clearly argued and meticulously organized. Kurth hits the targets he sets for (...) himself, and advances his agenda in a way that I found largely convincing. The result is a book that is a must-read for anyone working on anxiety and other moral emotions, and that will reward anyone who is curious about the nature and value of this increasingly, and perhaps alarmingly, prominent component of our minds. (shrink)

The world has surpassed three million deaths from COVID-19, and faces potentially catastrophic tipping points in the global climate system. Despite the urgency, governments have struggled to address either problem. In this paper, we argue that COVID-19 and anthropogenic climate change (ACC) are critical examples of an emerging type of governance challenge: severe collective action problems that require significant individual behavior change under conditions of hyper- partisanship and scientific misinformation. Building on foundational political science work demonstrating the potential for norms (...) (or informal rules of behavior) to solve collective action problems, we analyze more recent work on norms from neighboring disciplines to offer novel recommendations for more difficult challenges like COVID-19 and ACC. Key insights include more attention to (1) norm-based messaging strategies that appeal to individuals across the ideological spectrum or that reframe collective action as consistent with resistant subgroups’ pre-existing values, (2) messages that emphasize both the prevalence and the social desirability of individual behaviors required to address these challenges, (3) careful use of public policies and incentives that make individual behavior change easier without threatening norm internalization, and (4) greater attention to epistemic norms governing trust in different information sources. We conclude by pointing out that COVID-19 and climate change are likely harbingers of other polarized collective action problems that governments will face in the future. By connecting work on norms and political governance with a broader, interdisciplinary literature on norm psychology, motivation, and behavior change, we aim to improve the ability of political scientists and policy makers to respond to these and future collective action challenges. (shrink)

Normative explanations of why things are wrong, good, or unfair are ubiquitous in ordinary practice and normative theory. This paper argues that normative explanation is subject to a justification condition: a correct complete explanation of why a normative fact holds must identify features that would go at least some way towards justifying certain actions or attitudes. I first explain and motivate the condition I propose. I then support it by arguing that it fits well with various theories of normative reasons, (...) makes good sense of certain legitimate moves in ordinary normative explanatory discourse, and helps to make sense of our judgments about explanatory priority in certain cases of normative explanation. This last argument also helps to highlight respects in which normative explanation won’t be worryingly discontinuous with explanations in other domains even though these other explanations aren’t subject to the justification condition. Thus the paper aims not only to do some constructive theorizing about the relatively neglected topic of normative explanation but also to cast light on the broader question of how normative explanation may be similar to and different from explanations in other domains. (shrink)

McCarthy et al.’s proposal gains much of its plausibility by relying on a superficial treatment of justice, human dignity, sin, and the common good within the Christian tradition. Upon closer inspection of what these terms mean within the context of Christianity, it becomes clear that despite using the same phrases (e.g., a commitment to “protecting vulnerable populations,” the goal of “promoting justice,” etc.) contemporary secular bioethical goals are often deeply at odds with goals of Christian bioethics. So, while the authors (...) are right that there is room for dialogue (and even agreement) concerning general moral principles, the process of specification and application of these principles will often be heavily influenced by competing ethical traditions. Such divergent influences will often frustrate cooperative ventures between secular and religious bioethical projects. Thus, when put into action, McCarthy et al.’s proposal will—at best—produce a divided kingdom; one that cannot hope to stand. (shrink)

In recent attempts to define ‘harm’, the most promising approach has often been thought to be the counterfactual comparative account of harm. Nevertheless, this account faces serious difficulties. Moreover, it has been argued that ‘harm’ cannot be defined without reference to a substantive theory of well-being, which is itself a fraught issue. This has led to the call for the concept to simply be dropped from the moral lexicon altogether. I reject this call, arguing that the non-comparative approach to defining (...) harm has not been sufficiently explored. I then develop such an account that avoids the difficulties faced by comparative accounts whilst not presupposing a substantive theory of well-being. I conclude that this definition renders a concept of harm that can be meaningfully employed in our moral discourse. (shrink)

The article explores the question of temporal factors of moral luck. The author demonstrates that there are cases where changes in morality can be a factor leading to moral luck. As an illustration, an example is analyzed related to a change in ideas about the morally acceptable and about the necessary grounds for holding one morally responsible. It is concluded that the resultant luck is accompanied by a temporal factor, because not only the result is important, but also how its (...) moral assessment has changed by the time it was achieved. (shrink)

Etycy nie poświęcali dotąd wiele uwagi niepewności, koncentrując się często na skrajnie wyidealizowanych hipotetycznych sytuacjach, w których zarówno kwestie empiryczne (np. stan świata, spektrum możliwych decyzji oraz ich konsekwencje, związki przyczynowe między zdarzeniami), jak i normatywne (np. treść norm, skale wartości) były jasno określone i znane podmiotowi. W poniższym artykule – który jest rezultatem projektu dotyczącego różnych typów decyzji w sytuacjach niepewności związanej z postępem w naukach i technologiach biomedycznych – przedstawię analizę sytuacji niepewności normatywnej, czyli takich, w których podmiot (...) musi podjąć decyzję, nie mając pewności co do tego, jaka norma postępowania jest właściwa, np. dlatego, że ma sprzeczne intuicje normatywne na temat dopuszczalności danej decyzji. Stanowisko, które określa się niekiedy mianem komparatywizmu, głosi, że w tego typu sytuacjach należy uwzględniać nie tylko stopnie przekonań podmiotu w kwestii różnych norm, ale także to, na ile możliwe decyzje warte są podjęcia wedle tych norm. Przedstawię tu analizę kilku przypadków niepewności normatywnej, a także charakterystyczny argument przeciwko dotychczasowym wersjom komparatywizmu, wskazujący, że nie uwzględniają one różnych nastawień do ryzyka w sytuacjach niepewności normatywnej, choć dopuszczają jednocześnie różne nastawienia do ryzyka w sytuacjach niepewności empirycznej. Pokażę też, że zasada ostrożności dotycząca statusu moralnego w upraszczający sposób przedstawia sytuacje niepewności normatywnej. (shrink)

Philosophers have long theorised about which things make people’s lives go well (and why) and the extent to which morality and self-interest can be reconciled. By contrast, we have spent little time on meta-prudential questions, questions about prudential discourse. This is surprising given that prudence is, prima facie, a normative form of discourse and, as such, cries out for further investigation of how exactly it functions and whether it has problematic commitments. It also marks a stark contrast from moral discourse, (...) which has been extensively theorised about. -/- In this paper I first examine whether there is a distinct set of prudential reasons, generated by evaluative prudential properties. I then investigate whether prudential discourse is normative, arguing that prudential judgements are normatively on a par with moral judgements. (shrink)

Philosophers have long theorized about which things make people’s lives go well, and why, and the extent to which morality and self-interest can be reconciled. Yet little time has been spent on meta-prudential questions, questions about prudential discourse. This is surprising given that prudence is, prima facie, a normative form of discourse and, as such, cries out for further investigation. Chapter 4 takes up two major meta-prudential questions. It first examines whether there is a set of prudential reasons, generated by (...) evaluative prudential properties, and defends the view that evaluative well-being facts generate agent-relative reasons for the relevant agent. It also investigates whether prudential discourse is normative. It is proposed that prudential discourse is normative by arguing that prudential judgements are normative judgements. The case for this is presented by analogy with moral discourse by showing that the features of moral judgements that metaethicists appeal to when articulating, explaining, and justifying the claim that moral judgements are normative are also possessed by prudential judgements. Various objections to the analogy are also considered. (shrink)