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Moral Reasons

Philosophy 69 (267):114-116 (1993)

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  1. Three Paradoxes of Supererogation.Daniel Muñoz - 2020 - Noûs 55 (3):699-716.
    Supererogatory acts—good deeds “beyond the call of duty”—are a part of moral common sense, but conceptually puzzling. I propose a unified solution to three of the most infamous puzzles: the classic Paradox of Supererogation (if it’s so good, why isn’t it just obligatory?), Horton’s All or Nothing Problem, and Kamm’s Intransitivity Paradox. I conclude that supererogation makes sense if, and only if, the grounds of rightness are multi-dimensional and comparative.
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  • Incommensurability, Incomparability, and Practical Reason.Ruth Chang (ed.) - 1997 - Cambridge, MA, USA: Harvard.
    Can quite different values be rationally weighed against one another? Can the value of one thing always be ranked as greater than, equal to, or less than the value of something else? If the answer to these questions is no, then in what areas do we find commensurability and comparability unavailable? And what are the implications for moral and legal decision making? This book struggles with these questions, and arrives at distinctly different answers.".
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  • Émotions et Valeurs.Christine Tappolet - 2000 - Paris: Presses Universitaires de France.
    Pour contrer le scepticisme au sujet de la connaissance des valeurs, la plupart soutiennent avec John Rawls qu’une croyance comme celle qu’une action est bonne est justifiée dans la mesure où elle appartient à un ensemble de croyances cohérent, ayant atteint un équilibre réfléchi. Christine Tappolet s’inspire des travaux de Max Scheler et d’Alexius von Meinong pour défendre une conception opposée au cohérentisme. La connaissance des valeurs est affirmée dépendre de nos émotions, ces dernières étant conçues comme des perceptions des (...)
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  • Rational Requirements and the Primacy of Pressure.Daniel Fogal - 2020 - Mind 129 (516):1033-1070.
    There are at least two threads in our thought and talk about rationality, both practical and theoretical. In one sense, to be rational is to respond correctly to the reasons one has. Call this substantive rationality. In another sense, to be rational is to be coherent, or to have the right structural relations hold between one’s mental states, independently of whether those attitudes are justified. Call this structural rationality. According to the standard view, structural rationality is associated with a distinctive (...)
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  • Emotional Justification.Santiago Echeverri - 2019 - Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 98 (3):541-566.
    Theories of emotional justification investigate the conditions under which emotions are epistemically justified or unjustified. I make three contributions to this research program. First, I show that we can generalize some familiar epistemological concepts and distinctions to emotional experiences. Second, I use these concepts and distinctions to display the limits of the ‘simple view’ of emotional justification. On this approach, the justification of emotions stems only from the contents of the mental states they are based on, also known as their (...)
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  • (1 other version)Revisionary intuitionism.Michael Huemer - 2008 - Social Philosophy and Policy 25 (1):368-392.
    I argue that, given evidence of the factors that tend to distort our intuitions, ethical intuitionists should disown a wide range of common moral intuitions, and that they should typically give preference to abstract, formal intuitions over more substantive ethical intuitions. In place of the common sense morality with which intuitionism has traditionally allied, the suggested approach may lead to a highly revisionary normative ethics.
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  • Intrinsic vs. extrinsic value.Michael J. Zimmerman - 2019 - Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.
    Intrinsic value has traditionally been thought to lie at the heart of ethics. Philosophers use a number of terms to refer to such value. The intrinsic value of something is said to be the value that that thing has “in itself,” or “for its own sake,” or “as such,” or “in its own right.” Extrinsic value is value that is not intrinsic.
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  • Moral Particularism.Jonathan Dancy - 2012 - In Ed Zalta (ed.), Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. Stanford, CA: Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.
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  • Pleasure is Goodness; Morality is Universal.Neil Sinhababu - 2024 - Ethical Theory and Moral Practice 27 (5):725-741.
    This paper presents the Universality Argument that pleasure is goodness. The first premise defines goodness as what should please all. The second premise reduces 'should' to perceptual accuracy. The third premise invokes a universal standard of accuracy: qualitative identity. Since the pleasure of all is accurate solely about pleasure, pleasure is goodness, or universal moral value. The argument proceeds from a moral sense theory that analyzes moral concepts as concerned with what all should hope for, feel guilty about, and admire. (...)
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  • Metaethics and the Nature of Properties.Jussi Suikkanen - 2024 - Aristotelian Society Supplementary Volume 98 (1):113-131.
    This paper explores the connection between two philosophical debates concerning the nature of properties. The first metaethical debate is about whether normative properties are ordinary natural properties or some unique kind of non-natural properties. The second metaphysical debate is about whether properties are sets of objects, transcendent or immanent universals, or sets of tropes. I argue that nominalism, transcendent realism, and immanent realism are not neutral frameworks for the metaethical debate but instead lead to either metaethical naturalism or non-naturalism. We (...)
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  • Recent Work on Motivational Internalism.Fredrik Björklund, Gunnar Björnsson, John Eriksson, Ragnar Francén Olinder & Caj Strandberg - 2012 - Analysis 72 (1):124-137.
    Reviews work on moral judgment motivational internalism from the last two decades.
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  • The reactive theory of emotions.Olivier Massin - 2023 - European Journal of Philosophy 31 (3):785-802.
    Evaluative theories of emotions purport to shed light on the nature of emotions by appealing to values. Three kinds of evaluative theories of emotions dominate the recent literature: the judgment theory equates emotions with value judgments; the perceptual theory equates emotions with perceptions of values, and the attitudinal theory equates emotions with evaluative attitudes. This paper defends a fourth kind of evaluative theory of emotions, mostly neglected so far: the reactive theory. Reactive theories claim that emotions are attitudes which arise (...)
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  • Are There Indefeasible Epistemic Rules?Darren Bradley - 2019 - Philosophers' Imprint 19.
    What if your peers tell you that you should disregard your perceptions? Worse, what if your peers tell you to disregard the testimony of your peers? How should we respond if we get evidence that seems to undermine our epistemic rules? Several philosophers have argued that some epistemic rules are indefeasible. I will argue that all epistemic rules are defeasible. The result is a kind of epistemic particularism, according to which there are no simple rules connecting descriptive and normative facts. (...)
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  • Grounding and Normative Explanation.Pekka Väyrynen - 2013 - Aristotelian Society Supplementary Volume 87 (1):155-178.
    This paper concerns non-causal normative explanations such as ‘This act is wrong because/in virtue of__’. The familiar intuition that normative facts aren't brute or ungrounded but anchored in non- normative facts seems to be in tension with the equally familiar idea that no normative fact can be fully explained in purely non- normative terms. I ask whether the tension could be resolved by treating the explanatory relation in normative explanations as the sort of ‘grounding’ relation that receives extensive discussion in (...)
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  • Axiological Absolutism and Risk.Seth Lazar & Chad Lee-Stronach - 2019 - Noûs 53 (1):97-113.
    Consider the following claim: given the choice between saving a life and preventing any number of people from temporarily experiencing a mild headache, you should always save the life. Many moral theorists accept this claim. In doing so, they commit themselves to some form of ‘moral absolutism’: the view that there are some moral considerations that cannot be outweighed by any number of lesser moral considerations. In contexts of certainty, it is clear what moral absolutism requires of you. However, what (...)
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  • Moral Attitudes for Non-Cognitivists: Solving the Specification Problem.Gunnar Björnsson & Tristram McPherson - 2014 - Mind 123 (489):1-38.
    Moral non-cognitivists hope to explain the nature of moral agreement and disagreement as agreement and disagreement in non-cognitive attitudes. In doing so, they take on the task of identifying the relevant attitudes, distinguishing the non-cognitive attitudes corresponding to judgements of moral wrongness, for example, from attitudes involved in aesthetic disapproval or the sports fan’s disapproval of her team’s performance. We begin this paper by showing that there is a simple recipe for generating apparent counterexamples to any informative specification of the (...)
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  • What are Thick Concepts?Matti Eklund - 2011 - Canadian Journal of Philosophy 41 (1):25-49.
    Many theorists hold that there is, among value concepts, a fundamental distinction between thin ones and thick ones. Among thin ones are concepts like good and right. Among concepts that have been regarded as thick are discretion, caution, enterprise, industry, assiduity, frugality, economy, good sense, prudence, discernment, treachery, promise, brutality, courage, coward, lie, gratitude, lewd, perverted, rude, glorious, graceful, exploited, and, of course, many others. Roughly speaking, thick concepts are value concepts with significant descriptive content. I will discuss a number (...)
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  • What's Aristotelian about neo‐Aristotelian Virtue Ethics?Sukaina Hirji - 2019 - Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 98 (3):671-696.
    It is commonly assumed that Aristotle's ethical theory shares deep structural similarities with neo-Aristotelian virtue ethics. I argue that this assumption is a mistake, and that Aristotle's ethical theory is both importantly distinct from the theories his work has inspired, and independently compelling. I take neo-Aristotelian virtue ethics to be characterized by two central commitments: (i) virtues of character are defined as traits that reliably promote an agent's own flourishing, and (ii) virtuous actions are defined as the sorts of actions (...)
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  • Supererogation, Sacrifice, and the Limits of Duty.Alfred Archer - 2016 - Southern Journal of Philosophy 54 (3):333-354.
    It is often claimed that all acts of supererogation involve sacrifice. This claim is made because it is thought that it is the level of sacrifice involved that prevents these acts from being morally required. In this paper, I will argue against this claim. I will start by making a distinction between two ways of understanding the claim that all acts of supererogation involve sacrifice. I will then examine some purported counterexamples to the view that supererogation always involves sacrifice and (...)
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  • Practical judgment as reflective judgment: On moral salience and Kantian particularist universalism.Sabina Vaccarino Bremner - 2023 - European Journal of Philosophy 31 (3):600-621.
    Moral particularists and generalists alike have struggled over how to incorporate the role of moral salience in ethical reasoning. In this paper, I point to neglected resources in Kant to account for the role of moral salience in maxim formation: Kant's theory of reflective judgment. Kant tasks reflective judgment with picking out salient empirical particulars for formation into maxims, associating it with purposiveness, or intentional activity (action on ends). The unexpected resources in Kantian reflective judgment suggest the possibility of a (...)
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  • Moral Obligation, Self-Interest and The Transitivity Problem.Alfred Archer - 2016 - Utilitas 28 (4):441-464.
    Is the relation ‘is a morally permissible alternative to’ transitive? The answer seems to be a straightforward yes. If Act B is a morally permissible alternative to Act A and Act C is a morally permissible alternative to B then how could C fail to be a morally permissible alternative to A? However, as both Dale Dorsey and Frances Kamm point out, there are cases where this transitivity appears problematic. My aim in this paper is to provide a solution to (...)
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  • Another Look at the Modal Collapse Argument.Omar Fakhri - 2021 - European Journal for Philosophy of Religion 13 (1):1-23.
    On one classical conception of God, God has no parts, not even metaphysical parts. God is not composed of form and matter, act and potency, and he is not composed of existence and essence. God is absolutely simple. This is the doctrine of Absolute Divine Simplicity. It is claimed that ADS implies a modal collapse, i.e. that God’s creation is absolutely necessary. I argue that a proper way of understanding the modal collapse argument naturally leads the proponent of ADS to (...)
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  • Reasons and Moral Principles.Pekka Väyrynen - 2018 - In Daniel Star (ed.), The Oxford Handbook of Reasons and Normativity. New York, NY, United States of America: Oxford University Press. pp. 839-61.
    This paper is a survey of the generalism-particularism debate and related issues concerning the relationship between normative reasons and moral principles.
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  • The Amoralist and the Anaesthetic.Alex King - 2018 - Pacific Philosophical Quarterly 99 (4):632-663.
    This article puts pressure on moral motivational internalism and rejects normative motivational internalism by arguing that we should be aesthetic motivational externalists. Parallels between aesthetic and moral normativity give us new reason to doubt moral internalism. I address possible disanalogies, arguing that either they fail, or they succeed, but aren’t strong enough to underwrite a motivational difference between the domains. Furthermore, aesthetic externalism entails normative externalism, providing further presumptive evidence against moral internalism. I also make the case that, regardless of (...)
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  • Reason claims and contrastivism about reasons.Justin Snedegar - 2013 - Philosophical Studies 166 (2):231-242.
    Contrastivism about reasons is the view that ‘reason’ expresses a relation with an argument place for a set of alternatives. This is in opposition to a more traditional theory on which reasons are reasons for things simpliciter. I argue that contrastivism provides a solution to a puzzle involving reason claims that explicitly employ ‘rather than’. Contrastivism solves the puzzle by allowing that some fact might be a reason for an action out of one set of alternatives without being a reason (...)
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  • Untying a Knot From the Inside Out: Reflections on the “Paradox” of Supererogation.Terry Horgan - 2010 - Social Philosophy and Policy 27 (2):29-63.
    In his 1958 seminal paper “Saints and Heroes”, J. O. Urmson argued that the then dominant tripartite deontic scheme of classifying actions as being exclusively either obligatory, or optional in the sense of being morally indifferent, or wrong, ought to be expanded to include the category of the supererogatory. Colloquially, this category includes actions that are “beyond the call of duty” (beyond what is obligatory) and hence actions that one has no duty or obligation to perform. But it is a (...)
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  • Are Acts of Supererogation Always Praiseworthy?Alfred Archer - 2015 - Theoria 82 (3):238-255.
    It is commonly assumed that praiseworthiness should form part of the analysis of supererogation. I will argue that this view should be rejected. I will start by arguing that, at least on some views of the connection between moral value and praiseworthiness, it does not follow from the fact that acts of supererogation go beyond what is required by duty that they will always be praiseworthy to perform. I will then consider and dismiss what I will call the Argument from (...)
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  • Seeing and Caring: The Role of Affect in Feminist Moral Epistemology.Margaret Olivia Little - 1995 - Hypatia 10 (3):117 - 137.
    I develop two different epistemic roles for emotion and desire. Caring for moral ends and people plays a pivotal though contingent role in ensuring reliable awareness of morally salient details; possession of various emotions and motives is a necessary condition for autonomous understanding of moral concepts themselves. Those who believe such connections compromise the "objective" status of morality tend to assume rather than argue for the bifurcated conception of reason and affect this essay challenges.
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  • The reliability of moral intuitions: A challenge from neuroscience.Folke Tersman - 2008 - Australasian Journal of Philosophy 86 (3):389 – 405.
    A recent study of moral intuitions, performed by Joshua Greene and a group of researchers at Princeton University, has recently received a lot of attention. Greene and his collaborators designed a set of experiments in which subjects were undergoing brain scanning as they were asked to respond to various practical dilemmas. They found that contemplation of some of these cases (cases where the subjects had to imagine that they must use some direct form of violence) elicited greater activity in certain (...)
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  • Creditworthiness and Matching Principles.Jonathan Way - 2017 - In Mark C. Timmons (ed.), Oxford Studies in Normative Ethics, Vol 7. Oxford University Press.
    You are creditworthy for φ-ing only if φ-ing is the right thing to do. Famously though, further conditions are needed too – Kant’s shopkeeper did the right thing, but is not creditworthy for doing so. This case shows that creditworthiness requires that there be a certain kind of explanation of why you did the right thing. The reasons for which you act – your motivating reasons – must meet some further conditions. In this paper, I defend a new account of (...)
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  • Moral Principles as Generics.Ravi Thakral - 2024 - Journal of the American Philosophical Association 10 (2):205-224.
    I argue that moral principles involve the same sort of generalization as ordinary yet elusive generic generalizations in natural language such as ‘Tigers are striped’ or ‘Peppers are spicy’. A notable advantage of the generic view is that it simultaneously allows for pessimism and optimism about the role and status of moral principles in our lives. It provides a new perspective on the nature of moral principles on which principles are not apt for determining the moral status of particular actions (...)
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  • Motivational internalism.Christian Basil Miller - 2008 - Philosophical Studies 139 (2):233-255.
    Cases involving amoralists who no longer care about the institution of morality, together with cases of depression, listlessness, and exhaustion, have posed trouble in recent years for standard formulations of motivational internalism. In response, though, internalists have been willing to adopt narrower versions of the thesis which restrict it just to the motivational lives of those agents who are said to be in some way normal, practically rational, or virtuous. My goal in this paper is to offer a new set (...)
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  • Reasoning with moral conflicts.John F. Horty - 2003 - Noûs 37 (4):557–605.
    Let us say that a normative conflict is a situation in which an agent ought to perform an action A, and also ought to perform an action B, but in which it is impossible for the agent to perform both A and B. Not all normative conflicts are moral conflicts, of course. It may be that the agent ought to perform the action A for reasons of personal generosity, but ought to perform the action B for reasons of prudence: perhaps (...)
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  • Moral motivation.Connie S. Rosati - 2006 - Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.
    In our everyday lives, we confront a host of moral issues. Once we have deliberated and formed judgments about what is right or wrong, good or bad, these judgments tend to have a marked hold on us. Although in the end, we do not always behave as we think we ought, our moral judgments typically motivate us, at least to some degree, to act in accordance with them. When philosophers talk about moral motivation, this is the basic phenomenon they seek (...)
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  • Are There Irreducibly Normative Properties?Bart Streumer - 2008 - Australasian Journal of Philosophy 86 (4):537-561.
    Frank Jackson has argued that, given plausible claims about supervenience, descriptive predicates and property identity, there are no irreducibly normative properties. Philosophers who think that there are such properties have made several objections to this argument. In this paper, I argue that all of these objections fail. I conclude that Jackson's argument shows that there are no irreducibly normative properties.
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  • The Pragmatics of Moral Motivation.Caj Strandberg - 2011 - The Journal of Ethics 15 (4):341-369.
    One of the most prevalent and influential assumptions in metaethics is that our conception of the relation between moral language and motivation provides strong support to internalism about moral judgments. In the present paper, I argue that this supposition is unfounded. Our responses to the type of thought experiments that internalists employ do not lend confirmation to this view to the extent they are assumed to do. In particular, they are as readily explained by an externalist view according to which (...)
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  • Introduction.Daniel Star - 2018 - In The Oxford Handbook of Reasons and Normativity. New York, NY, United States of America: Oxford University Press.
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  • Cognitive Penetrability and Ethical Perception.Robert Cowan - 2014 - Review of Philosophy and Psychology 6 (4):665-682.
    In recent years there has been renewed philosophical interest in the thesis that perceptual experience is cognitively penetrable, i.e., roughly, the view that the contents and/or character of a subject's perceptual experience can be modified by what a subject believes and desires. As has been widely noted, it is plausible that cognitive penetration has implications for perception's epistemic role. On the one hand, penetration could make agents insensitive to the world in a way which epistemically 'downgrades' their experience. On the (...)
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  • Scientific Explanation and Moral Explanation.Uri D. Leibowitz - 2011 - Noûs 45 (3):472-503.
    Moral philosophers are, among other things, in the business of constructing moral theories. And moral theories are, among other things, supposed to explain moral phenomena. Consequently, one’s views about the nature of moral explanation will influence the kinds of moral theories one is willing to countenance. Many moral philosophers are (explicitly or implicitly) committed to a deductive model of explanation. As I see it, this commitment lies at the heart of the current debate between moral particularists and moral generalists. In (...)
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  • From Justified Emotions to Justified Evaluative Judgements.Julien A. Deonna & Fabrice Teroni - 2012 - Dialogue 51 (1):55-77.
    ABSTRACT: Are there justified emotions? Can they justify evaluative judgements? We first explain the need for an account of justified emotions by emphasizing that emotions are states for which we have or lack reasons. We then observe that emotions are explained by their cognitive and motivational bases. Considering cognitive bases first, we argue that an emotion is justified if and only if the properties the subject is aware of constitute an instance of the relevant evaluative property. We then investigate the (...)
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  • Consciousness, higher-order content, and the individuation of vehicles.Uriah Kriegel - 2003 - Synthese 134 (3):477-504.
    One of the distinctive properties of conscious states is the peculiar self- awareness implicit in them. Two rival accounts of this self-awareness are discussed. According to a Neo-Brentanian account, a mental state M is conscious iff M represents its very own occurrence. According to the Higher-Order Monitoring account, M is merely accompanied by a numerically distinct representation of its occurrence. According to both, then, M is conscious in virtue of figuring in a higher-order content. The disagreement is over the question (...)
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  • Motivation in agents.Christian Miller - 2008 - Noûs 42 (2):222–266.
    The Humean theory of motivation remains the default position in much of the contemporary literature in meta-ethics, moral psychology, and action theory. Yet despite its widespread support, the theory is implausible as a view about what motivates agents to act. More specifically, my reasons for dissatisfaction with the Humean theory stem from its incompatibility with what I take to be a compelling model of the role of motivating reasons in first-person practical deliberation and third-person action explanations. So after first introducing (...)
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  • Moral Particularism and Moral Generalism.Michael Ridge & Sean McKeever - 2016 - Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.
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  • Defeasible reasoning.Robert C. Koons - 2008 - Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.
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  • Recent Faces of Moral Nonnaturalism.Terence Cuneo - 2007 - Philosophy Compass 2 (6):850-879.
    Despite having occupied a peripheral position in contemporary metaethics, moral nonnaturalism has recently experienced a revival of sorts. But what is moral nonnaturalism? And what is there to be said in favor of it? In this article, I address these two questions. In the first place, I offer an account of what moral nonnaturalism is. According to the view I propose, nonnaturalism is better viewed not as a position, but as a theoretical stance. And, second, I critically engage with three (...)
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  • (1 other version)Nomic moral naturalness.Alexios Stamatiadis-Bréhier - 2024 - Inquiry: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Philosophy 67 (9):3306-3327.
    Moral realists often disagree about the nature of moral properties. These properties can be natural (as per naturalistic moral realism) or non-natural. But it is unclear how we should understand the notion of naturalness employed in these discussions. In this paper I propose a novel account of moral naturalness. I suggest that a property F is natural iff F falls within the scope of a natural law. In turn, a law is natural when it figures in a nomic nexus involving (...)
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  • State of the Art: The Duty to Obey the Law.William A. Edmundson - 2004 - Legal Theory 10 (4):215–259.
    Philosophy, despite its typical attitude of detachment and abstraction, has for most of its long history been engaged with the practical and mundane-seeming question of whether there is a duty to obey the law. As Matthew Kramer has recently summarized: “For centuries, political and legal theorists have pondered whether each person is under a general obligation of obedience to the legal norms of the society wherein he or she lives. The obligation at issue in those theorists' discussions is usually taken (...)
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  • Rules and reasons in the theory of precedent.John F. Horty - 2011 - Legal Theory 17 (1):1-33.
    The doctrine of precedent, as it has evolved within the common law, has at its heart a form of reasoning—broadly speaking, alogic—according to which the decisions of earlier courts in particular cases somehow generalize to constrain the decisions of later courts facing different cases, while still allowing these later courts a degree of freedom in responding to fresh circumstances. Although the techniques for arguing on the basis of precedent are taught early on in law schools, mastered with relative ease, and (...)
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  • The indifference argument.Nick Zangwill - 2008 - Philosophical Studies 138 (1):91 - 124.
    I argue against motivational internalism. First I recharacterise the issue over moral motivation. Second I describe the indifference argument against motivation internalism. Third I consider appeals to irrationality that are often made in the face of this argument, and I show that they are ineffective. Lastly, I draw the motivational externalist conclusion and reflect on the nature of the issue.
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  • The nature of evil.Eve Garrard - 1998 - Philosophical Explorations 1 (1):43 – 60.
    We readily claim that great moral catastrophes such as the Holocaust involve evil in some way, although it' not clear what this amounts to in a secular context. This paper seeks to provide a secular account of what evil is. It examines what is intuitively the most plausible account, namely that the evil act involves the production of great suffering (or other disvalue), and argues that such outcomes are neither necessary nor sufficient for an act to be evil. Only an (...)
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