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Why idealize?

Ethics 115 (4):759-787 (2005)

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  1. Moral Responsibility and Merit.Matt King - 2012 - Journal of Ethics and Social Philosophy 6 (2):1-18.
    In the contemporary moral responsibility debate, most theorists seem to be giving accounts of responsibility in the ‘desert-entailing sense’. Despite this agreement, little has been said about the notion of desert that is supposedly entailed. In this paper I propose an understanding of desert sufficient to help explain why the blameworthy and praiseworthy deserve blame and praise, respectively. I do so by drawing upon what might seem an unusual resource. I appeal to so-called Fitting-Attitude accounts of value to help inform (...)
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  • Can there be a global, interesting, coherent constructivism about practical reason?David Enoch - 2009 - Philosophical Explorations 12 (3):319-339.
    More and more people seem to think that constructivism - in political philosophy, in moral philosophy, and perhaps in practical reasoning most generally - is the way to go. And yet it is surprisingly hard to even characterize the view. In this paper, I go to some lengths trying to capture the essence of a constructivist position - mostly in the realm of practical reason - and to pinpoint its theoretical attractions. I then give some reason to suspect that there (...)
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  • Sobel on Pleasure, Reason, and Desire.Attila Tanyi - 2011 - Ethical Theory and Moral Practice 14 (1):101-115.
    The paper begins with a well-known objection to the idea that reasons for action are provided by desires. The objection holds that since desires are based on reasons (first premise), which they transmit but to which they cannot add (second premise), they cannot themselves provide reasons for action. In the paper I investigate an attack that has recently been launched against the first premise of the argument by David Sobel. Sobel invokes a counterexample: hedonic desires, i.e. the likings and dislikings (...)
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  • Darwin and moral realism: Survival of the iffiest.Knut Olav Skarsaune - 2011 - Philosophical Studies 152 (2):229-243.
    This paper defends moral realism against Sharon Street’s “Darwinian Dilemma for Realist Theories of Value” (this journal, 2006). I argue by separation of cases: From the assumption that a certain normative claim is true, I argue that the first horn of the dilemma is tenable for realists. Then, from the assumption that the same normative claim is false, I argue that the second horn is tenable. Either way, then, the Darwinian dilemma does not add anything to realists’ epistemic worries.
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  • Desires as additional reasons? The case of tie-breaking.Attila Tanyi - 2011 - Philosophical Studies 152 (2):209-227.
    According to the Desire-Based Reasons Model reasons for action are provided by desires. Many, however, are critical about the Model holding an alternative view of practical reason, which is often called valued-based. In this paper I consider one particular attempt to refute the Model, which advocates of the valued-based view often appeal to: the idea of reason-based desires. The argument is built up from two premises. The first claims that desires are states that we have reason to have. The second (...)
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  • Subjectivism and idealization.David Sobel - 2009 - Ethics 119 (2):336-352.
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  • Plan‐based expressivism and innocent mistakes.Steve Daskal - 2009 - Ethics 119 (2):310-335.
    In this paper I develop an objection to the version of expressivism found in Allan Gibbard’s book Thinking How to Live, and I suggest that the difficulty faced by Gibbard’s analysis is symptomatic of a problem for expressivism more generally. The central claim is that Gibbard’s expressivism is unable to account for certain normative judgments that arise in the process of evaluating cases of innocent mistakes. I begin by considering a type of innocent mistake that Gibbard’s view is able to (...)
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  • The epistemological challenge to metanormative realism: how best to understand it, and how to cope with it.David Enoch - 2009 - Philosophical Studies 148 (3):413-438.
    Metaethical—or, more generally, metanormative— realism faces a serious epistemological challenge. Realists owe us—very roughly speaking—an account of how it is that we can have epistemic access to the normative truths about which they are realists. This much is, it seems, uncontroversial among metaethicists, myself included. But this is as far as the agreement goes, for it is not clear—nor uncontroversial—how best to understand the challenge, what the best realist way of coping with it is, and how successful this attempt is. (...)
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  • (1 other version)Value and the right kind of reason.Mark Schroeder - 2010 - Oxford Studies in Metaethics 5:25-55.
    Fitting Attitudes accounts of value analogize or equate being good with being desirable, on the premise that ‘desirable’ means not, ‘able to be desired’, as Mill has been accused of mistakenly assuming, but ‘ought to be desired’, or something similar. The appeal of this idea is visible in the critical reaction to Mill, which generally goes along with his equation of ‘good’ with ‘desirable’ and only balks at the second step, and it crosses broad boundaries in terms of philosophers’ other (...)
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  • The Welfare-Nihilist Arguments against Judgment Subjectivism.Anthony Bernard Kelley - 2021 - Journal of Ethics and Social Philosophy 19 (3):291-310.
    Judgment subjectivism is the view that x is good for S if and only if, because, and to the extent that S believes, under the proper conditions, that x is good for S. In this paper, I offer three related arguments against the theory. The arguments are about what judgment subjectivism implies about the well-being of welfare nihilists, people who believe there are no welfare properties, or at least that none are instantiated. I maintain that welfare nihilists can be benefited (...)
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  • Agency, shmagency: Why normativity won't come from what is constitutive of action.David Enoch - 2006 - Philosophical Review 115 (2):169-198.
    There is a fairly widespread—and very infl uential—hope among philosophers interested in the status of normativity that the solution to our metaethical and, more generally, metanormative problems will emerge from the philosophy of action. In this essay, I will argue that these hopes are groundless. I will focus on the metanormative hope, but—as will become clear—showing that the solution to our metanormative problems will not come from what is constitutive of action will also devastate the hope of gaining significant insight (...)
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  • An Instrumentalist Theory of Political Legitimacy.Matthias Brinkmann - 2024 - Oxford: Oxford University Press.
    What justifies political power? Most philosophers argue that consent or democracy are important, in other words, it matters how power is exercised. But this book argues that outcomes primarily matter to justifying power.
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  • A defence of the desire theory of well-being.Atus Mariqueo-Russell - 2023 - Dissertation, University of Southampton
    Desire theories of well-being claim that how well someone’s life goes for them is entirely determined by the fulfilment and frustration of their desires. This thesis considers the viability of theories of this sort. It examines a series of objections that threaten to undermine these views. These objections claim that desire theories of well-being are incorrect because they have implausible implications. I consider four main objections over the course of this thesis. The first claims that these theories are incorrect because (...)
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  • Structural Rationality.Benjamin Kiesewetter & Alex Worsnip - 2023 - Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.
    This entry is composed of three sections. In §1, we survey debates about what structural rationality is, including the emergence of the concept in the contemporary literature, its key characteristics, its relationship to substantive rationality, its paradigm instances, and the questions of whether these instances are unified and, if so, how. In §2, we turn to the debate about structural requirements of rationality – including controversies about whether they are “wide-scope” or “narrow-scope”, synchronic or diachronic, and whether they govern processes (...)
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  • An Adam Smithian Account of Humanity.Nir Ben-Moshe - 2023 - Ergo: An Open Access Journal of Philosophy 10 (32):908-936.
    In The Sources of Normativity, Korsgaard argues for what can be called “The Universality of Humanity Claim” (UHC), according to which valuing humanity in one’s own person entails valuing it in that of others. However, Korsgaard’s reliance on the claim that reasons are essentially public in her attempt to demonstrate the truth of UHC has been repeatedly criticized. I offer a sentimentalist defense, based on Adam Smith’s moral philosophy, of a qualified, albeit adequate, version of UHC. In particular, valuing my (...)
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  • The Intransparency of Political Legitimacy.Matthias Brinkmann - 2023 - Philosophers' Imprint 23.
    Some moral value is transparent just in case an agent with average mental capacities can feasibly come to know whether some entity does, or does not, possess that value. In this paper, I consider whether legitimacy—that is, the property of exercises of political power to be permissible—is transparent. Implicit in much theorising about legitimacy is the idea that it is. I will offer two counter-arguments. First, injustice can defeat legitimacy, and injustice can be intransparent. Second, legitimacy can play a critical (...)
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  • Response‐dependence and normativity.Yifan Sun - 2022 - Theoria 88 (6):1128-1143.
    A non‐normative, response‐dependent view about morality can avoid metaphysical extravagance and explain why the extension of some non‐normative concepts can non‐accidentally match the extension of moral concepts. These features make it a plausible reductive account of moral properties. However, some philosophers believe that a response‐dependent account of morality must contain an irreducibly normative component. I argue that it is impossible to defend such a position while retaining the response‐dependent nature of morality in the ordinary sense. However, I believe that philosophers' (...)
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  • A More Liberal Public Reason Liberalism.Roberto Fumagalli - 2023 - Moral Philosophy and Politics 10 (2):337-366.
    In recent years, leading public reason liberals have argued that publicly justifying coercive laws and policies requires that citizens offer both adequate secular justificatory reasons and adequate secular motivating reasons for these laws and policies. In this paper, I provide a critical assessment of these two requirements and argue for two main claims concerning such requirements. First, only some qualified versions of the requirement that citizens offer adequate secular justificatory reasons for coercive laws and policies may be justifiably regarded as (...)
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  • (1 other version)Well‐being, part 2: Theories of well‐being.Eden Lin - 2022 - Philosophy Compass 17 (2):e12813.
    Theories of well-being purport to identify the features of lives, and of intervals within lives, in virtue of which some people are high in well-being and others are low in well-being. They also purport to identify the properties that make some events or states of affairs good for a person and other events or states of affairs bad for a person. This article surveys some of the main theories of well-being, with an emphasis on work published since the turn of (...)
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  • Implicit Metaethical Intuitions: Validating and Employing a New IAT Procedure.Johannes M. J. Wagner, Thomas Pölzler & Jennifer C. Wright - 2023 - Review of Philosophy and Psychology 14 (1):1-31.
    Philosophical arguments often assume that the folk tends towards moral objectivism. Although recent psychological studies have indicated that lay persons’ attitudes to morality are best characterized in terms of non-objectivism-leaning pluralism, it has been maintained that the folk may be committed to moral objectivism _implicitly_. Since the studies conducted so far almost exclusively assessed subjects’ metaethical attitudes via explicit cognitions, the strength of this rebuttal remains unclear. The current study attempts to test the folk’s implicit metaethical commitments. We present results (...)
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  • A Defense of Modest Ideal Observer Theory: The Case of Adam Smith’s Impartial Spectator.Nir Ben-Moshe - 2021 - Ethical Theory and Moral Practice 24 (2):489-510.
    I build on Adam Smith’s account of the impartial spectator in The Theory of Moral Sentiments in order to offer a modest ideal observer theory of moral judgment that is adequate in the following sense: the account specifies the hypothetical conditions that guarantee the authoritativeness of an agent’s (or agents’) responses in constituting the standard in question, and, if an actual agent or an actual community of agents are not under those conditions, their responses are not authoritative in setting this (...)
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  • Hume's general point of view: A two‐stage approach.Nir Ben-Moshe - 2020 - Pacific Philosophical Quarterly 101 (3):431-453.
    I offer a novel two-stage reconstruction of Hume’s general-point-of-view account, modeled in part on his qualified-judges account in ‘Of the Standard of Taste.’ In particular, I argue that the general point of view needs to be jointly constructed by spectators who have sympathized with (at least some of) the agents in (at least some of) the actor’s circles of influence. The upshot of the account is two-fold. First, Hume’s later thought developed in such a way that it can rectify the (...)
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  • CHOICE: an Objective, Voluntaristic Theory of Prudential Value.Walter Horn - 2020 - Philosophia 48 (1):191-215.
    It is customary to think that Objective List (“OL), Desire-Satisfaction (“D-S”) and Hedonistic (“HED”) theories of prudential value pretty much cover the waterfront, and that those of the three that are “subjective” are naturalistic (in the sense attacked by Moore, Ross and Ewing), while those that are “objective” must be Platonic, Aristotelian or commit the naturalist fallacy. I here argue for a theory that is both naturalistic (because voluntaristic) and objective but neither Platonic, Aristotelian, nor (I hope) fallacious. In addition, (...)
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  • Evolutionary models and the normative significance of stability.Arnon Levy - 2018 - Biology and Philosophy 33 (5-6):33.
    Many have expected that understanding the evolution of norms should, in some way, bear on our first-order normative outlook: How norms evolve should shape which norms we accept. But recent philosophy has not done much to shore up this expectation. Most existing discussions of evolution and norms either jump headlong into the is/ought gap or else target meta-ethical issues, such as the objectivity of norms. My aim in this paper is to sketch a different way in which evolutionary considerations can (...)
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  • (1 other version)Taking Prudence Seriously.Guy Fletcher - 2019 - In Russ Shafer-Landau (ed.), Oxford Studies in Metaethics Volume 14. Oxford University Press. pp. 70-94.
    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, (...)
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  • The Ideal Observer Theory and Motivational Internalism.Daniel Rönnedal - 2015 - Kriterion - Journal of Philosophy 29 (1):79-98.
    In this paper I show that one version of motivational internalism follows from the so-called ideal observer theory. Let us call the version of the ideal observer theory used in this essay (IOT). According to (IOT), it is necessarily the case that it ought to be that A if and only if every ideal observer wants it to be the case that A. We shall call the version of motivational internalism that follows from (IOT) (moral) conditional belief motivational internalism (CBMI). (...)
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  • Which Desires Are Relevant to Well‐Being?Chris Heathwood - 2017 - Noûs 53 (3):664-688.
    The desire-satisfaction theory of well-being says, in its simplest form, that a person’s level of welfare is determined by the extent to which their desires are satisfied. A question faced by anyone attracted to such a view is, *Which desires*? This paper proposes a new answer to this question by characterizing a distinction among desires that isn’t much discussed in the well-being literature. This is the distinction between what a person wants in a merely behavioral sense, in that the person (...)
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  • Rational Internalism.Samuel Asarnow - 2016 - Ethics 127 (1):147-178.
    I describe and motivate Rational Internalism, a principle concerning the relationship between motivating reasons (which explain actions) and normative reasons (which justify actions). I use this principle to construct a novel argument against Objectivist theories of normative reasons, which hold that facts about normative reasons can be analyzed in terms of an independently specified class of normative or evaluative facts. I then argue for an alternative theory of normative reasons, the Reasoning View, which is consistent with both Rational Internalism and (...)
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  • Who cares what the people think? Revisiting David Miller’s approach to theorising about justice.Alice Baderin, Andreas Busen, Thomas Schramme, Luke Ulaş & David Miller - 2018 - Contemporary Political Theory 17 (1):69-104.
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  • (1 other version)Deliberators Must Be Imperfect.Derek Baker - 2016 - Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 93 (2):321-347.
    This paper argues that, with certain provisos, predicting one's future actions is incompatible with rationally deliberating about whether to perform those actions. It follows that fully rational omniscient agents are impossible, since an omniscient being could never rationally deliberate about what to do. Consequently, theories that explain practical reasons in terms of the choices of a perfectly rational omniscient agent must fail. The paper considers several ways of defending the possibility of an omniscient agent, and concludes that while some of (...)
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  • Problems and solutions for a hybrid approach to grounding practical normativity.Jeff Behrends - 2015 - Canadian Journal of Philosophy 45 (2):159-178.
    Source Hybridism about practical reasons is the position that facts that constitute reasons sometimes derive their normative force from external metaphysical grounds, and sometimes from internal. Although historically less popular than either Source Internalism or Source Externalism, hybridism has lately begun to garner more attention. Here, I further the hybridist's cause by defending Source Hybridism from three objections. I argue that we are not warranted in rejecting hybridism for any of the following reasons: that hybridists cannot provide an account of (...)
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  • (1 other version)Deliberators Must Be Imperfect.Derek Clayton Baker - 2015 - Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 90 (3):321-347.
    This paper argues that, with certain provisos, predicting one's future actions is incompatible with rationally deliberating about whether to perform those actions. It follows that fully rational omniscient agents are impossible, since an omniscient being could never rationally deliberate about what to do . Consequently, theories that explain practical reasons in terms of the choices of a perfectly rational omniscient agent must fail. The paper considers several ways of defending the possibility of an omniscient agent, and concludes that while some (...)
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  • In defense of Taking Morality Seriously: reply to Manne, Sobel, Lenman, and Joyce. [REVIEW]David Enoch - 2014 - Philosophical Studies 168 (3):853-865.
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  • Fittingness and Idealization.Antti Kauppinen - 2014 - Ethics 124 (3):572-588.
    This note explores how ideal subjectivism in metanormative theory can help solve two important problems for Fitting Attitude analyses of value. The wrong-kind-of-reason problem is that there may be sufficient reason for attitude Y even if the object is not Y-able. The many-kinds-of-fittingness problem is that the same attitude can be fitting in many ways. Ideal subjectivism addresses both by maintaining that an attitude is W-ly fitting if and only if endorsed by any W-ly ideal subject. A subject is W-ly (...)
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  • Disagreeing about how to disagree.Kate Manne & David Sobel - 2014 - Philosophical Studies 168 (3):823-34.
    David Enoch, in Taking Morality Seriously, argues for a broad normative asymmetry between how we should behave when disagreeing about facts and how we should behave when disagreeing due to differing preferences. Enoch claims that moral disputes have the earmarks of a factual dispute rather than a preference dispute and that this makes more plausible a realist understanding of morality. We try to clarify what such claims would have to look like to be compelling and we resist his main conclusions.
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  • Subjectivism and blame.David Sobel - 2007 - Canadian Journal of Philosophy 37 (5):pp. 149-170.
    My favorite thing about this paper is that I think I usefully explicate and then mess with Bernard Williams's attempt to explain how his internalism is compatible with our ordinary practices of blame. There are a surprising number of things wrong with Williams's position. Of course that leaves my own favored subjectivism in a pickle, but still...
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  • Subjective Theories of Ill-Being.Anthony Kelley - 2022 - Midwest Studies in Philosophy 46:109-135.
    According to subjectivism about ill-being, the token states of affairs that are basically bad for you must be suitably connected, under the proper conditions, to your negative attitudes. This article explores the prospects for this family of theories and addresses some of its challenges. This article (i) shows that subjectivism about ill-being can be derived from a more general doctrine that requires a negatively valenced relationship between any welfare subject and the token states that are of basic harm to that (...)
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  • Why Be a Subjectivist about Wellbeing?Peter Königs - 2022 - Canadian Journal of Philosophy 52 (2):165-179.
    Subjectivism about wellbeing rests on the idea that what is good for a person must ‘fit’ her, ‘resonate’ with her, not be ‘alien’ to her, etc. This idea has been called the ‘beating heart’ of subjectivism. In this article, I present the No-Beating-Heart Challenge for subjectivism, which holds that there is no satisfactory statement of this idea. I proceed by first identifying three criteria that any statement of the idea must meet if it is to provide support for subjectivism: Distinctness, (...)
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  • (1 other version)Well‐being, part 1: The concept of well‐being.Eden Lin - 2022 - Philosophy Compass 17 (2):e12813.
    Philosophy Compass, Volume 17, Issue 2, February 2022.
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  • The varieties of idealization and the politics of economic growth: a case study on modality and the methodology of normative political philosophy.David Plunkett - 2024 - Inquiry: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Philosophy 67 (6):1908-1946.
    Are societies required to pursue continual economic growth as a matter of justice? In “The Value of Economic Growth”, Julie Rose considers three arguments in favor of the need for continual economic growth, each of which revolves around the instrumental value of economic growth for promoting an important good that is needed for a just society. In each case, Rose argues that there are mechanisms other than economic growth that could allow a society to deliver the relevant goods, and thus (...)
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  • The Disjunctive Hybrid Theory of Prudential Value: An Inclusive Approach to the Good Life.Joseph Van Weelden - 2018 - Dissertation, Mcgill University
    In this dissertation, I argue that all extant theories of prudential value are either a) enumeratively deficient, in that they are unable to accommodate everything that, intuitively, is a basic constituent of prudential value, b) explanatorily deficient, in that they are at least sometimes unable to offer a plausible story about what makes a given thing prudentially valuable, or c) both. In response to the unsatisfactory state of the literature, I present my own account, the Disjunctive Hybrid Theory or DHT. (...)
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  • Formulating Moral Objectivity.Elizabeth Tropman - 2018 - Philosophia 46 (4):1023-1040.
    Objective moral facts are supposed to be independent from us, but it has proven difficult to provide a clear account of this independence condition. Objective moral facts cannot be overly independent of us, as even an objective morality would depend, in important respects, on features of us. The challenge is to respect these moral mind-dependencies without inappropriately counting too many moral facts as objective. In this paper, I delineate and evaluate several different versions of the independence condition in moral objectivity. (...)
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  • A Stringent but Critical Actualist Subjectivism about Well-Being.Stéphane Lemaire - 2016 - Les ateliers de l'éthique/The Ethics Forum 11 (2-3):133-150.
    Stéphane Lemaire | : Subjectivists about well-being claim that an object is good for someone if and only if this individual holds a certain type of pro-attitude toward this object. In this paper, I focus on the dispute among subjectivists that opposes those who think that the relevant pro-attitudes are actual to those who think that they are counterfactual under some idealized conditions. My main claim is that subjectivism should be stringently actualist, though our actual pro-attitudes may be criticized from (...)
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  • The Possibility of Modified Hedonism.Sandy Berkovski - 2012 - Theoria 78 (3):186-212.
    A popular objection to hedonist accounts of personal welfare has been the experience machine argument. Several modifications of traditional hedonism have been proposed in response. In this article I examine two such responses, recently expounded by Feldman and Sumner respectively. I argue that both modifications make hedonism indistinguishable from anti-hedonism. Sumner's account, I claim, also fails to satisfy the demands of theoretical unity.
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  • Practical reasoning for serial hyperspecializers.Elijah Millgram - 2009 - Philosophical Explorations 12 (3):261-278.
    Some species are weedy: they move from one ecological niche to another. Other species are specialized: they are exquisitely adapted to exploit a particular niche. Human beings are the design solution in which a species is simultaneously weedy and specialized - the trick being to manage the exquisite niche-specific adaptations in software rather than in the hardware. We are built to reprogram ourselves on the fly, to select new goals, new priorities and new guidelines appropriate to novel niches. Understanding ourselves (...)
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  • Too many cooks.Alex Horne - 2022 - Synthese 200 (4):1-22.
    The existing literature on the rational underdetermination problem often construes it as one resulting from the ubiquity of objective values. It is therefore sometimes argued that subjectivists need not be troubled by the underdetermination problem. But on closer examination, it turns out, they should. Or so I will argue. The task of the first half of this paper is explaining why. The task of the second half is finding a subjectivist solution the rational underdetermination problem. The basic problem, I argue, (...)
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  • (1 other version)The Entanglement Problem and Idealization in Moral Philosophy.Olle Risberg - forthcoming - Philosophical Quarterly.
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  • How is Moral Disagreement a Problem for Realism?David Enoch - 2009 - The Journal of Ethics 13 (1):15-50.
    Moral disagreement is widely held to pose a threat for metaethical realism and objectivity. In this paper I attempt to understand how it is that moral disagreement is supposed to present a problem for metaethical realism. I do this by going through several distinct (though often related) arguments from disagreement, carefully distinguishing between them, and critically evaluating their merits. My conclusions are rather skeptical: Some of the arguments I discuss fail rather clearly. Others supply with a challenge to realism, but (...)
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  • Humanity, virtue, justice: a framework for a capability approach.Benjamin James Bessey - unknown
    This Thesis reconsiders the prospects for an approach to global justice centring on the proposal that every human being should possess a certain bundle of goods, which would include certain members of a distinctive category: the category of capabilities. My overall aim is to present a clarified and well-developed framework, within which such claims can be made. To do this, I visit a number of regions of normative and metanormative theorising. I begin by introducing the motivations for the capability approach, (...)
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  • Constructivist experimental philosophy on well-being and virtue.Matthew Braddock - 2010 - Southern Journal of Philosophy 48 (3):295-323.
    What is the nature of human well-being? This paper joins the ancient debate by rejuvenating an ancient claim that is quite unfashionable among moral philosophers today, namely, the Aristotelian claim that moral virtue is (non-instrumentally) necessary for human well-being. Call it the Aristotelian Virtue Condition (AVC). This view can be revived for contemporary debate by a state-of-the-art approach that we might call constructivist experimental philosophy, which takes as its goal the achievement of a reasonable constructivist account of well-being and takes (...)
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