The claim that God is perfectly beautiful has played a key role within the history of a number of religious traditions. However, this view has received surprisingly little attention from philosophers of religion in recent decades. In this article I aim to remedy this neglect by addressing some key philosophical issues surrounding the doctrine of divine beauty. I begin by considering how best to explicate the claim that God is perfectly beautiful before moving on to ask what consequences accepting this (...) claim will have for our broader theorizing in philosophy. (shrink)

It is frequently claimed that we can learn very little, if anything, about the aesthetic character of an artwork on the basis of testimony. Such disparaging assessments of the epistemic value of aesthetic testimony contrast markedly with our acceptance of testimony as an important source of knowledge in many other areas. There have, however, been a number of challenges to this orthodoxy of late; from those who seek to deny that such a contrast exists as well as attempts by those (...) who accept the distinction to provide an explanation and defence of the contrast. In Section I, I outline a little of the nature and history of the debate over aesthetic testimony. Section II, focuses on the opposing positions on aesthetic testimony, optimism and pessimism, and takes steps to clarify what exactly is at issue between them. In Section III, I survey considerations which have been adduced in favour of pessimism ranging from brute appeal to intuition to complex argumentation before turning in Section IV, to look at motivations for optimism. Finally, in Section V, I consider some alternative views which claim that, for a variety of reasons, it is a mistake to construe the debate over aesthetic testimony as concerned with the epistemic standing of aesthetic beliefs formed on the basis of testimony. (shrink)

Quasi-realists aspire to accommodate core features of ordinary normative thought and discourse in an expressivist framework. One apparent such feature is that we can be more or less confident in our normative judgments—they vary in credence. Michael Smith has argued that quasi-realists cannot plausibly accommodate these distinctions simply because they understand normative judgments as desires, but desires lack the structure needed to distinguish these three features. Existing attempts to meet Smith’s challenge have accepted Smith’s presupposition that the way to meet (...) the challenge is to show that normative judgments have more structure than they initially seem to have. I argue that accepting this presupposition is accepting too much. The orthodox view of certitude, insofar as there is one, understands certitude very roughly in terms of counterfactual betting behaviour. Counterfactual betting behaviour, though, is not in any useful sense a structural feature of a given judgment. It is rather a more holistic feature of a given agent’s cognitive system. Insofar as it can meet the other challenges it faces, quasi-realism can characterize credences in terms of counterfactual betting behaviour and effectively say exactly what many realists will want to say about credences, thus meeting Smith’s challenge much more directly. (shrink)

This paper is divided into two parts. In the first one I distinguish between weak and strong Anti-Archimedeanisms, the latter being the view that metaethics, just as any other discipline attempting to work out a second-order conceptual, metaphysical non-committed discourse about the first-order discourse composing normative practices, is conceptually impossible or otherwise incoherent. I deal in particular with Ronald Dworkin’s famous exposition of the view. I argue that strong Anti-Archimedeanism constitutes an untenable philosophical stance, therefore making logical space for the (...) practice of a discipline such as metaethics—conceived as ethically neutral. This makes space, concurrently, for neutral conceptual jurisprudence. In the second part of the article, I attempt to show two things. On the one hand, that Dworkin’s widely discussed ‘challenge of disagreements’ to legal positivism is founded upon strong Anti-Archimedeanism. On the other hand, that having rejected strong Anti-Archimedeanism we should consequently reject the challenge as a serious challenge to positivism. This move, of course, does not thereby imply that accounting for legal disagreements is not an important jurisprudential task. But it marks—contra Dworkin—that there is no principled or a priori impossibility of doing so within a positivist framework. (shrink)

In the literature seeking to explain concepts in terms of their point, talk of ‘the point’ of concepts remains under-theorised. I propose a typology of points which distinguishes practical, evaluative, animating, and inferential points. This allows us to resolve tensions such as that between the ambition of explanations in terms of the points of concepts to be informative and the claim that mastering concepts requires grasping their point; and it allows us to exploit connections between types of points to understand (...) why they come apart, and whether they do so for problematic ideological reasons or for benignly functional reasons. (shrink)

In this piece I characterise global expressivism, as I understand it, by contrasting it with five other views: the so-called Canberra Plan; Moorean non-naturalism and platonism; ‘relaxed realism’ and quietism; local expressivism; and response-dependent realism. Some other familiar positions, including fictionalism, error theories, and idealism, are also mentioned, but as sub-cases to one of these five.

In recent work Allan Gibbard claims to be both a local quasi-realist, in Blackburn’s sense, and a global expressivist. His local quasi-realism rests on an argument that for naturalistic discourse but not ethical discourse, the semantic relation of denotation and the causal relation of tracking can and should be identified; that denoting simply is tracking, for naturalistic vocabulary. I argue that Gibbard’s case for this conclusion is unconvincing, and poorly motivated by his own expressivist standards. I also argue that even (...) if it were successful, it is doubtful whether the resulting position would count as global expressivism, as Gibbard and I both use that term. (shrink)

This paper investigates an objection often raised against metaethical error theory. The challenge runs as follows. Metaethical error theory says that all substantive ethical sentences are false. But if a sentence p is false, then given a standard semantics for “not,” ¬p must be true, and vice versa. On the face of it, one can’t hold that p and ¬p are both false. After presenting a more refined version of the challenge (in the form of a set of initially plausible (...) and yet jointly inconsistent principles), the paper examines a common way out of the puzzle, finds it unsatisfactory, and offers some alternative escape routes that, it is submitted, fare better than the standard one. (shrink)

This paper develops and defends the view that substantively normative uses of words like “good”, “right” and “ought” are irresolvably indeterminate: any single case of application is like a borderline case for a vague or indeterminate term, in that the meaning-fixing facts, together with the non-linguistic facts, fail to determine a truth-value for the target sentence in context. Normative claims, like vague or indeterminate borderline claims, are not meaningless, though. By making them, the speaker communicates information about the precisifications that (...) s/he accepts. The analogy with vague/indeterminate language, I argue, lays out a new and interesting foundation for a subjectivist approach to normativity. (shrink)

In this essay, the tension that Benacerraf identifies for theories of mathematical truth is used as the vehicle for arguing against a particular desideratum for semantic theories. More specifically, I place in question the desideratum that a semantic theory, provided for some area of discourse, should run in parallel with the semantic theory holding for the rest of the language. The importance of this desideratum is also made clear by means of tracing out the subtle implications of its rejection.

A prevalent assumption in metaethics is that people believe in moral objectivity. If this assumption were true then people should believe in the possibility of objective moral progress, objective moral knowledge, and objective moral error. We developed surveys to investigate whether these predictions hold. Our results suggest that, neither abstractly nor concretely, people dominantly believe in the possibility of objective moral progress, knowledge and error. They attribute less objectivity to these phenomena than in the case of science and no more, (...) or only slightly more, than in the cases of social conventions and personal preferences. This finding was obtained for a regular sample as well as for a sample of people who are particularly likely to be reflective and informed (philosophers and philosophy students). Our paper hence contributes to recent empirical challenges to the thesis that people believe in moral objectivity. (shrink)

Philosophers often hold that the aim of conceptual analysis is to discover the representational content of a given concept such as freewill, belief, or law. In From Metaphysics to Ethics and other recent work, Frank Jackson has developed a theory of conceptual analysis that is one of the most advanced systematizations of this widespread idea. I argue that this influential way of characterizing conceptual analysis is too narrow. I argue that it is possible that an expressivist account could turn out (...) to be correct as a genuine conceptual analysis of a genuine concept. I claim that since an expressivist analysis does not aim to discover the representational content of a given concept—and, indeed, might itself be based on the idea that the concept in question is not even representational in nature—the possibility of expressivist conceptual analysis shows that Jackson’s theory of conceptual analysis is incomplete as it currently stands. I conclude that Jackson needs to either shift his basic understanding of the nature of conceptual analysis or commit to a particular normative reinterpretation of his project. (shrink)

In order to establish that judgments about practical reasons can be objective, it is necessary to show that the applicable standards provide an adequate account of truth and error. This in turn requires that these standards yield an extensive set of substantive, publicly accessible judgments that are presumptively true. This output requirement is not satisfied by the standards of universalizability, consistency, coherence, and caution alone. But it is satisfied if we supplement them with the principle that desire is a source (...) of minimal reasons. This principle is justified despite currently fashionable arguments against the claims of desire. (shrink)

Given quasi-realism, the claim is that any attempt to naturalise modal epistemology would leave out absolute necessity. The reason, according to Simon Blackburn, is that we cannot offer an empirical psychological explanation for why we take any truth to be absolutely necessary, lest we lose any right to regard it as absolutely necessary. In this paper, I argue that not only can we offer such an explanation, but also that the explanation won’t come with a forfeiture of the involved necessity. (...) Using ‘squaring the circle’ as evidence, I show that, contrary to quasi-realism, absolute necessity won’t be left out in attempts to naturalise modal epistemology. (shrink)

In this paper, I defend the view that the values of concrete objects and persons are reducible to the final values of tropes. This reductive account has recently been discussed and rejected by Rabinowicz and Rønnow-Rasmussen (2003). I begin by explaining why the reduction is appealing in the first place. In my rejoinder to Rabinowicz and Rønnow-Rasmussen I defend trope-value reductionism against three challenges. I focus mainly on their central objection, that holds that the reduction is untenable since different evaluative (...) attitudes have, ontologically speaking, different objects. I grant that this may well be so, but argue that the objection is based on an unwarranted, loose reading of the notion 'value for its own sake'. On the more reasonable strict reading, it is plausible to maintain that tropes are the sole ontological category that can properly be ascribed final value. (shrink)

In Part IV of Book I of Hume’s Treatise Hume frequently appeals to an identity ascribing mechanism of the imagination. A psychological mechanism of which it is a special case, to ‘compleat the union’, is also prominent. These mechanisms belong to the imagination narrowly conceived according to a distinction in section ix of Part III. The role and significance of these mechanisms in the development of Hume’s scepticism is explored. Appreciation of their significance is also argued to cast light on (...) Hume’s refusal to locate necessity in objects and to suggest a plausible explanation of his second thoughts about personal identity. (shrink)

Blackburn argues against naturalistic moral realism. He argues that there is no conceptual entailment from satisfying a naturalistic predicate to satisfying a moral predicate. But the moral is conceptually supervenient on the natural. However, this conjunction of conceptual supervenience with lack of conceptual entailment is something the non-realist can explain, but the realist cannot. I argue first that Blackburn’s best formulation of his challenge is his first one. Subsequently he reformulates it as a demand for a ‘ban on mixed worlds’. (...) Critics have directed their arguments against this formulation but they are ineffective against Blackburn’s first formulation. My second thesis is, even so formulated the realist can meet the challenge. The bare conceptual supervenience of the moral on the natural can be given a realist explanation by understanding names of moral properties as descriptive names of natural properties. (shrink)

Putnam has given a different twist to the ethical issues in his philosophical writing on ethics. In his book on ‘Ethics Without Ontology,’ he has given the different interpretation to the ethical issues. Putnam states that there is no ‘ontology’ in ethics. For him, there is nothing wrong with ethics, rather there is something wrong with metaphysics. The ethics cannot be justified from a non-ethical standpoint of view. In this way, Putnam challenges both inflationary ontological ethics and deflationary ontological ethics (...) and he bids goodbye to all varieties of ontologies. This idea of ethics goes against the possibility of Vedanta, Buddhism, Aristotelian metaphysics, Platonic forms, Islam, Kantian category, Levinas’s ‘being’, and Heidegger’s ontology. He replaced ‘ethical ontology’ with that of pragmatic pluralism: the recognition that we employ in our everyday lives different kinds of discourses, discourses subject to different standards and possessing different sorts of applications that all contribute to the description of reality. Putnam is right in many of his criticisms of metaphysical ethics, but it is not clear how he can avoid the idea of absolute values, which are transcendental as proposed by Wittgenstein. Wittgenstein accepts both aspects of ethical life, i.e., transcendental and empirical. I shall try to show that we have every reason to accept Wittgenstein’s view that there is ontology in ethics. (shrink)

The article deals with the charge of irrelevance levelled against D. Lewis’s modal realism, notably known as a reductionist account of modality. The charge of irrelevance is apparently one of the most popular objections to modal realism though it often seems that the debate surrounding this charge is not very fruitful since in this context it is common to appeal, implicitly or explicitly, to different criteria for theory choice. As a result, the article deals with the problem in a slightly (...) different manner. The article addresses arguments aimed to show that, contrary to what is often stated, modal realism does not violate our pre-theoretical intuitions, as well as arguments aimed to respond to the charge of irrelevance without appealing to criteria for theory choice at all but providing different reasons instead. However, the aim of this article is to show that all these arguments are rather unconvincing. (shrink)

1. If it is true that ‘an ethic is the propositional reflection of the dispositions and attitudes, policies and stances, of people,’ as Simon Blackburn says in summary of the quasi-realism that he champions in this excellent and wonderfully provocative book, then it seems to follow that different dispositions, attitudes, policies and stances—different conative states, for short—will issue in different ethics, each with an equal claim to truth; and this in turn seems to be one thing that could be reasonably (...) meant by that slippery polyseme ‘relativism’. If such relativism does follow, a good deal remains to be said about how much force it has. At the limit it might do no more than signal the abstract possibility of an ethic rivalling that of humans. More potently, it might somehow legitimize the different ethics of different groups of humans in actual conflict with one another. But without the possibility of some such variability of ethic to match a possible variability of conative state, the quasi-realist’s claim that an ethic ‘reflects’ a particular combination of conative states appears hollow. (shrink)

In the 1970s and 1980s, Simon Blackburn published a number of much-discussed works in which he argued that the supervenience of the moral on the natural generates a serious problem for moral realism, a problem which his own brand of moral projectivism can avoid. As we will see below, Blackburn construed moral supervenience in terms of what is known as weak supervenience. Partly in response to Blackburn, a number of philosophers have argued that weak supervenience is too weak to capture (...) the intuitive sense in which the moral supervenes on the natural. Instead, it is argued, we should opt for strong supervenience, and, further, that strong supervenience completely disables Blackburn's argument against moral realism. This idea – that strong supervenience undermines Blackburn's argument – is very common in recent metaethics, and the purpose of the present paper is to develop a challenge to this near-orthodoxy. (shrink)

Relativists make room for the possibility of “faultless disagreement” by positing the existence of subjective propositions, i.e. propositions true from some points of view and not others. We discuss whether the adoption of this position with respect to a certain domain of discourse is compatible with a realist attitude towards the matters arising in that domain. At first glance, the combination of relativism and realism leads to an unattractive metaphysical picture on which reality comprises incoherent facts. We will sketch the (...) contours of a realist-relativist position called “subjectivism”, which avoids this result by giving up the assumption that the points of view of different subjects are all metaphysically “on a par”. (shrink)

Given Taylor’s status as one of the most important thinkers in contemporary moral and political philosophy, it is somewhat surprising that so little attention has been paid to the implications of h...

I assume that there exists a general phenomenon, the phenomenon of the explanatory gap, surrounding consciousness, normativity, intentionality, and more. Explanatory gaps are often thought to foreclose reductive possibilities wherever they appear. In response, reductivists who grant the existence of these gaps have offered countless local solutions. But typically such reductivist responses have had a serious shortcoming: because they appeal to essentially domain-specific features, they cannot be fully generalized, and in this sense these responses have been not just local but (...) parochial. Here I do better. Taking for granted that the explanatory gap is a genuine phenomenon, I offer a fully general diagnosis that unifies these previously fragmented reductivist responses. (shrink)

One class of central debates between normative realists appears to concern whether we should be naturalists or reductionists about the normative. However, metaethical discussion of naturalism and reduction is often inconsistent, murky, or uninformative. This can make it hard to see why commitments relative to these metaphysical categories should matter to normative realists. This paper aims to clarify the nature of these categories, and their significance in debates between normative realists. I develop and defend what I call the joint-carving taxonomy, (...) which builds on David Lewis’ notion of elite properties. I argue that this taxonomy is clear and metaphysically interesting, and answers to distinctive taxonomic interests of normative realists. I also suggest that it has important implications for the project of adjudicating debates among normative realists. (shrink)

G. E. Moore famously argued against skepticism and idealism by appealing to their inconsistency with alleged certainties, like the existence of his own hands. Recently, some philosophers have offered analogous arguments against revisionary views about ethics such as metaethical error theory. These arguments appeal to the inconsistency of error theory with seemingly obvious moral claims like “it is wrong to torture an innocent child just for fun.” It might seem that such ‘Moorean’ arguments in ethics will stand or fall with (...) Moore’s own arguments in metaphysics and epistemology, in virtue of their shared structure. I argue that this is not so. I suggest that the epistemic force of the canonical Moorean arguments can best be understood to rest on asymmetries in indirect evidence. I then argue that this explanation suggests that Moorean arguments are less promising in ethics than they are against Moore’s own targets. I conclude by examining the competing attempt to vindicate Moorean arguments by appealing to Rawls’s method of reflective equilibrium. (shrink)

This paper addresses an important but relatively unexplored question about the relationship between conceptual ethics and other philosophical inquiry: how does the epistemology of conceptual ethics relate to the epistemology of other, more “traditional” forms of philosophical inquiry? This paper takes as its foil the optimistic thought that the epistemology of conceptual ethics will be easier and less mysterious than relevant “traditional” philosophical inquiry. We argue against this foil by focusing on the fact that that conceptual ethics is a form (...) of normative inquiry. Because of the epistemic difficulties that face normative inquiry, we should not expect conceptual ethics to constitute an epistemic panacea. Instead, although the epistemological upshots can vary from case to case, there are systematic reasons why this shift may exacerbate, rather than mitigate, the epistemic difficulties we face in pursuing philosophical inquiry. (shrink)

One of the primary goals of Pettit’s The Birth of Ethics is to offer a novel defense of a form of naturalistic realism in metaethics, drawing on a kind of “counterfactual genealogy” for ethical thought and talk, in a community he dubs “Erewhon”. We argue that Pettit’s argument faces a deep dilemma. The dilemma begins by noting the reasonable controversy about which metaethical view is true of our ethical thought and talk. We then ask: is the thought and talk in (...) Pettit’s Erewhon apt for the same reasonable controversy? If so, this raises doubts about Pettit’s case for naturalistic realism about Erewhonian “ethical” thought and talk. If not, this disanalogy between Erewhonian “ethical” thought and talk and our ethical thought and talk renders it difficult to argue smoothly from Erewhonian premises to conclusions about our own ethical thought and talk. We then consider an alternative use that someone might make of Pettit’s discussion of Erewhon: as part of a conceptual ethics argument that we should use “ethical” concepts that are relevantly similarly to the ones described in Erewhon. We conclude by reflecting on the broader methodological significance of the sort of dilemma that we have posed. (shrink)

In this essay, I argue that, all else being equal, theism is more probable than naturalism on the assumption that human beings are able to arrive at a body of moral knowledge that is largely accurate and complete. I put forth this thesis on grounds that, if naturalism is true, the explanation of the content of our moral intuitions terminates either in biological-evolutionary processes or in social conventions adopted for pragmatic reasons; that, if this is so, our moral intuitions were (...) selected for their utility, not their truth; and that, if our moral intuitions were so selected, they are probably false. I defend the argument against three objections: first, that the argument amounts to a generic skeptical challenge; second, that ethical naturalism explains how our moral intuitions could have been selected for their truth; and third, that there is a pre-established harmony between the utility of moral beliefs and their truth-values. (shrink)

Case B. You tell me that eating meat is immoral. Although I believe that, left to my own devices, I would not think this, no matter how long I reflected, I adopt your attitude as my own. It is not that I believe that you are better informed about potentially relevant non-moral facts (e.g., about the conditions under which livestock is kept, or about the typical effects of eliminating meat from one’s diet). On the contrary, I know that I have (...) all of the non-moral information relevant to the issue that you have. (shrink)

I describe a number of views in which metaphysical fundamentality is accounted for in normative terms. After describing many different ways this key idea could be developed, I turn to developing the idea in one specific way. After all, the more detailed the proposal, the easier it is to assess whether it works. The rough idea is that what it is for a property to be fundamental is for it to be prima facie obligatory to theorize in terms of that (...) property. (shrink)

It can be tempting to read Iris Murdoch as subscribing to the same position as standard contemporary moral realists. Her language is often similar to theirs and they share some key commitments, most importantly the rejection of the fact-value dichotomy. However, it is a mistake to assume that her realism amounts to the same thing theirs does. In this paper I offer a sketch of her alternative conception of realism, which centres on the idea that truth and reality are fundamentally (...) ethical concepts. For Murdoch, I suggest, realism is a matter of doing justice to the objects one is confronted with—something that cannot be understood except in ethical terms. (shrink)

In many situations, people are unsure in their moral judgements. In much recent philosophical literature, this kind of moral doubt has been analysed in terms of uncertainty in one’s moral beliefs. Non-cognitivists, however, argue that moral judgements express a kind of conative attitude, more akin to a desire than a belief. This paper presents a scientifically informed reconciliation of non-cognitivism and moral doubt. The central claim is that attitudinal ambivalence—the degree to which one holds conflicting attitudes towards the same object—can (...) play the role of moral doubt for non-cognitivists. I will demonstrate that ambivalence has all of the features that we would expect it to have in order to play the role of moral doubt. It is gradable, can vary through time, covaries with strength of motivation, and is suitably distinct from the other features of our moral judgements. As well as providing a defence of non-cognitivism, this insight poses a new challenge for the view: deciding how to act under moral ambivalence. (shrink)

David Lewis claims that his theory of modality successfully reduces modal items to nonmodal items. This essay will clarify this claim and argue that it is true. This is largely an exercise within ‘Ludovician Polycosmology’: I hope to show that a certain intuitive resistance to the reduction and a set of related objections misunderstand the nature of the Ludovician project. But these results are of broad interest since they show that would-be reductionists have more formidable argumentative resources than is often (...) thought. Lewis’s reduction depends on a set of methodological commitments each of which is fairly plausible or at least currently popular, and none of which is particular to modality. The choice of which of these commitments to reject I leave to the discerning antireductionist. The essay proceeds as follows: §1 discusses reduction generally and one or two relevant puzzles; §2 discusses Lewis’s reduction in particular; the longest section, §3 replies to four objections. (shrink)

An epistemological interpretation of quantum mechanics hinges on the claim that the distinctive features of quantum mechanics can be derived from some distinctive features of an observational basis. Old and new variations of this theme are listed. The program has a limited success in non-relativistic quantum mechanics. The crucial issue is how far it can be extended to quantum field theory without introducing significant ontological postulates. A C*-formulation covers algebraic quantum field theory, but not the standard model. Julian Schwinger’s anabatic (...) methodology extended a strict measurement-based formulation of quantum mechanics through field theory. His extension also excluded the quark hypothesis and the standard model. Quarks and local gauge invariance are postulates that go beyond the limits of an epistemological interpretation of quantum mechanics. The ontological significance ascribed to these advances depends on the role accorded ontology. (shrink)

Some contemporary philosophers have argued that expressivism or non-cognitivism, if suitably developed, can solve the well-known Frege–Geach problem. Of course, whether this is true is a matter of debate. Recently, Cian Dorr has advanced an argument that, if successful, would show that this debate is unimportant. For, according to Dorr, a solution to the Frege–Geach problem will not save expressivism from a new and distinct problem, namely that an expressivist theory—even assuming a solution to the Frege–Geach problem—entails that intuitively rational (...) beliefs are in fact irrational. If Dorr is correct about this, then the new problem he raises would be as devastating as the old Frege–Geach problem is often thought to be. I will argue that Dorr is not correct. Rather than constituting a new and potent objection, the issue Dorr raises—at least absent further argument—does not pose a threat to any expressivist theory which is able to solve the Frege–Geach problem and is otherwise acceptable. (shrink)

Supervenience has provided a way for nonreductive materialists to explain how the mental can be physically irreducible but still physically respectable. In recent years, doubts about this research program have emerged from a number of quarters. Consequently, Terence Horgan has argued that nonreductive materialists must appeal to an upgraded "superdupervenience," if supervenience is to do any materialist work. We argue that nonreductive materialism cannot meet this challenge. Superdupervenience is impossible.

El presente artículo ofrece una solución al problema metaético que florece en la ética humeana a propósito de la conciliación entre el cognitivismo derivado de la exigencia del General Point of View y el internalismo moral que se deriva de su argumento de la motivación. Asumiendo una descripción evolutiva en la construcción de la perspectiva evaluativa representada por el General Point of View, al tiempo que un proyectivismo epistemológico para los juicios causales que conectan las motivaciones, acciones y utilidad de (...) los distintos caracteres que surgen en el origen de la justicia, se puede conciliar -sin riesgo para la consistencia del planteamiento humeano- la existencia de individuos capaces de generar juicios morales cognitivos que derivan en una motivación moral internalista, identificada con el sentido del deber, e individuos con motivaciones claramente externalistas basadas en el uso instrumental de la razón. (shrink)

One of the central tasks of meta-ethical inquiry is to accommodate the common-sense assumptions deeply embedded in our moral discourse. A comparison of the potential of secular and theistic ethics shows that, in the end, theists have a greater facility in achieving this accommodation task; it is easier to appreciate the action-guiding authority and binding nature of morality in a theistic rather than in a secular context. Theistic ethics has a further advantage in being able to accommodate not only this (...) essential conceptual feature of morality, but also the existence of moral requirements and their source of normativity. (shrink)

With regard to intrinsically morally relevant factors it is natural to suppose that if a variation in a given factor makes a moral difference anywhere, then it makes the same moral difference everywhere (henceforth: the constancy assumption). Jonathan Dancy (and other moral particularists) reject the constancy assumption. Partly on the basis thereof, they infer that ethical decisions should be made “case by case, without the comforting support of moral principles”. In this article, I challenge Dancy's defence and use of a (...) denial of the constancy assumption on three points. First, Dancy's appeal to moral intuitions do not justify denying a significant version of the constancy assumption. Second, if we reject the constancy assumption, surprisingly, it may in one crucial respect be very hard to defend moral particularism as commonly articulated. Third, rejecting the constancy assumption does not motivate seeing moral reasoning as essentially a case‐by‐case matter. (shrink)

In his book The Moral Problem and in a recent issue of this journal, Michael Smith claims to refute any theory which construes the relationship between moral judgements and motivation as contingent and rationally optional. Smith’s argument fails. In showing how it fails, I shall make three claims. First, a concern for what is right, where this is read de dicto, does not amount to moral fetishism. Second, it is not always morally preferable to care about what is right, where (...) this is read de re. Third, the externalist can account for why a good and strong-willed person is reliably motivated in accordance with her moral judgements without appealing to a basic moral motive to do what is right, where this is read de dicto. (shrink)

The paper explores the consequences of adopting a moral error theory targeted at the notion of reasonable convergence. I examine the prospects of two ways of combining acceptance of such a theory with continued acceptance of moral judgements in some form. On the first model, moral judgements are accepted as a pragmatically intelligible fiction. On the second model, moral judgements are made relative to a framework of assumptions with no claim to reasonable convergence on their behalf. I argue that the (...) latter model shows greater promise for an error theorist whose commitment to moral thought is initially serious. (shrink)