Switch to: References

Add citations

You must login to add citations.
  1. Modal normativism on semantic rules.Rohan Sud - 2024 - Inquiry: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Philosophy 67 (8):2361-2380.
    According to Amie Thomasson’s modal normativism, the function of modal discourse is to convey semantic rules. But what is a "semantic rule"? I raise three worries according to which there is no conception of a semantic rule that can serve the needs of a modal normativist. The first worry focuses on de re and a posteriori necessities. The second worry concerns Thomasson's inferential specification of the meaning of modal terms. The third worry asks about the normative status of semantic rules.
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   2 citations  
  • XIII—Moral Criticism and the Metaphysics of Bluff.Michael Della Rocca - 2022 - Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society 122 (3):291-318.
    By invoking surprising rationalist considerations that Bernard Williams does not anticipate, this paper defends Williams’s claim that that moral criticism on the basis of purported external reasons amounts to ‘bluff’. After strengthening this rejection of external reasons by drawing parallels to compelling rationalist arguments in other domains, the paper mounts a similarly rationalist critique of internal reasons invoked by Kantian moral philosophers. The paper closes with an apocalyptic line of thought that develops the preceding rationalist arguments into a challenge to (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark  
  • Pleasure is goodness; morality is universal.Neil Sinhababu - forthcoming - Ethical Theory and Moral Practice:1-17.
    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. (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   2 citations  
  • 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' (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark  
  • The Epistemic vs. the Practical.Antti Kauppinen - 2023 - Oxford Studies in Metaethics 18:137-162.
    What should we believe if epistemic and practical reasons for belief point in different directions? I argue that there’s no single answer, but rather a Dualism of Theoretical and Practical Reason is true: what we epistemically ought to believe and what we practically ought to believe may come apart, and both are independently authoritative. I argue in particular against recently popular views that subordinate the epistemic to the practical: it’s not the case that epistemic reasons bear on what we ‘just (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   4 citations  
  • (1 other version)Schopenhauer and Modern Moral Philosophy.Stephen Puryear - 2023 - In David Bather Woods & Timothy Stoll (eds.), The Schopenhauerian mind. New York, NY: Routledge. pp. 228-40.
    Anscombe counsels us to dispense with those moral concepts that presuppose a divine law conception of ethics, among which she numbers the concepts of “moral obligation and moral duty, […] of what is morally right and wrong, and of the moral sense of ‘ought’.” Schopenhauer made a similar point more than a century earlier, though his critique implicates a narrower range of concepts. Through reflection on his accounts of right and wrong and of duty and obligation, this chapter attempts to (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark  
  • Epistemic Normativity is Independent of our Goals.Alex Worsnip - 2024 - In Blake Roeber, Ernest Sosa, Matthias Steup & John Turri (eds.), Contemporary Debates in Epistemology, 3rd edition. Wiley-Blackwell.
    In epistemology and in ordinary life, we make many normative claims about beliefs. As with all normative claims, philosophical questions arise about what – if anything – underwrites these kinds of normative claims. On one view, epistemic instrumentalism, facts about what we (epistemically) ought to believe, or about what is an (epistemic, normative) reason to believe what, obtain at least partly in virtue of our goals (or aims, ends, intentions, desires, etc.). The converse view, anti-instrumentalism, denies this, and holds that (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark  
  • Kant’s Account of Epistemic Normativity.Reza Hadisi - 2024 - Archiv für Geschichte der Philosophie 106 (3):576-610.
    According to a common interpretation, most explicitly defended by Onora O’Neill and Patricia Kitcher, Kant held that epistemic obligations normatively depend on moral obligations. That is, were a rational agent not bound by any moral obligation, then she would not be bound by any epistemic obligation either. By contrast, in this paper, I argue that, according to Kant, some epistemic obligations are normatively independent from moral obligations, and are indeed normatively absolute. This view, which I call epistemicism, has two parts. (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   1 citation  
  • Determinism, ‘Ought’ Implies ‘Can’ and Moral Obligation.Nadine Elzein - 2020 - Dialectica 74 (1):35-62..
    Haji argues that determinism threatens deontic morality, not via a threat to moral responsibility, but directly, because of the principle that ‘ought’ implies ‘can’. Haji’s argument requires not only that we embrace an ‘ought’ implies ‘can’ principle, but also that we adopt the principle that ‘ought’ implies ‘able not to’. I argue that we have little reason to adopt the latter principle, and examine whether deontic morality might be destroyed on the basis of the more commonly embraced ‘ought’ implies ‘can’ (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark  
  • The Problem of Public Shaming.Harrison Frye - 2021 - Journal of Political Philosophy 30 (2):188-208.
    Journal of Political Philosophy, Volume 30, Issue 2, Page 188-208, June 2022.
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   1 citation  
  • Robust Normativity, Morality, and Legal Positivism.David Plunkett - 2019 - In Toh Kevin, Plunkett David & Shapiro Scott (eds.), Dimensions of Normativity: New Essays on Metaethics and Jurisprudence. New York: Oxford University Press. pp. 105-136.
    This chapter discusses two different issues about the relationship between legal positivism and robust normativity (understood as the most authoritative kind of normativity to which we appeal). First, the chapter argues that, in many contexts when discussing “legal positivism” and “legal antipositivism”, the discussion should be shifted from whether legal facts are ultimately partly grounded in moral facts to whether they are ultimately partly grounded in robustly normative facts. Second, the chapter explores an important difference within the kinds of arguments (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   10 citations  
  • Professional Responsibility: A Deontological Case-Study Approach.Iñaki Xavier Larrauri Pertierra - 2019 - Solidarity: The Journal of Catholic Social Thought and Secular Ethics 8 (2):1-22.
    Kantian Deontological Ethics concerns itself with the will as grounded in universalisable maxims. Such maxims are in turn based on rationally conceived laws that, in a professional setting, find expression in the autonomously made agreements constituting professional protocols and regulations. When applied to a case-study wherein public safety has been possibly jeopardised by company products, we can argue for priority in the agreed-to responsibility towards the good of professional autonomy, expressed as a rational mandate of nondisclosure of confidential product information, (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark  
  • Sellars, we-intentions and ought-statements.Stefanie Dach - 2021 - Synthese 198 (5):4415-4439.
    My paper is concerned with the relation between ought-statements and intentions in Wilfrid Sellars’s philosophy. According to an entrenched view in Sellars scholarship, Sellars considers ought-statements as expressions of we-intentions. The aim of my paper is to question this reading and to propose an alternative. According to this alternative reading of Sellars, ought-statements are metalinguistic statements about the implication relations between intentions. I show that the entrenched understanding faces many unacknowledged problems and generates incompatibilities with Sellars’s commitments about intentions. I (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   9 citations  
  • Schopenhauer's Rejection of the Moral Ought.Stephen Puryear - 2021 - In Patrick Hassan (ed.), Schopenhauer's Moral Philosophy. Abingdon, Oxon: Routledge. pp. 12-30.
    More than a century before Anscombe counseled us to jettison concepts such as that of the moral ought, or moral law, Schopenhauer mounted a vigorous attack on such prescriptive moral concepts, particularly as found in Kant. In this chapter I consider the four objections that constitute this attack. According to the first, Kant begs the question by merely assuming that ethics has a prescriptive or legislative-imperative form, when a purely descriptive-explanatory conception such as Schopenhauer’s also presents itself as a possibility. (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   1 citation  
  • Attitudinal Theories of Pleasure and De Re Desires.Elizabeth Ventham - 2021 - Utilitas 33 (3):361-369.
    This article has two main aims. First, it will defend an ‘attitudinal’ account of pleasure, that is, an account of what it is that makes an experience pleasurable for a subject that explains it in terms of a certain kind ofde redesire that the subject has towards that experience. Second, in doing so, the article aims to further our understanding of unconscious desires, and of what the subjects of such desires can be. The article begins by introducing two existing accounts (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   1 citation  
  • Trusting our own minds.Dennis Kalde - 2019 - Dissertation, Ludwig Maximilians Universität, München
    When it comes to the metaethical task of explaining and making sense of what it is that we are doing while doing ethics, the subject of moral objectivity occupies an important and special place within that task. Thus, it is often agreed that being able to explain and justify the objective features of common moral practice is one of if not the most important task for any metaethical theory to undertake. In this dissertation, I tackle the issue of ethical objectivity (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark  
  • Disagreement unhinged, constitutivism style.Annalisa Coliva & Michele Palmira - 2021 - Metaphilosophy 52 (3-4):402-415.
    Hinge epistemology has to dispel the worry that disagreeing over hinges is rationally inert. Building on a companion piece (Coliva and Palmira 2020), this paper offers a constitutivist solution to the problem of rational inertia by maintaining that a Humean sceptic and a hinge epistemologist disagree over the correct explication of the concept of epistemic rationality. The paper explores the implications of such a solution. First, it clarifies in what sense a disagreement over hinges would be a conceptual disagreement. Secondly, (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   9 citations  
  • Aesthetic obligations.Robbie Kubala - 2020 - Philosophy Compass 15 (12):e12712.
    Are there aesthetic obligations, and what would account for their binding force if so? I first develop a general, domain‐neutral notion of obligation, then critically discuss six arguments offered for and against the existence of aesthetic obligations. The most serious challenge is that all aesthetic obligations are ultimately grounded in moral norms, and I survey the prospects for this challenge alongside three non‐moral views about the source of aesthetic obligations: individual practical identity, social practices, and aesthetic value primitivism. I conclude (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   4 citations  
  • Ought-contextualism and reasoning.Darren Bradley - 2021 - Synthese 199 (1-2):2977-2999.
    What does logic tells us how about we ought to reason? If P entails Q, and I believe P, should I believe Q? I will argue that we should embed the issue in an independently motivated contextualist semantics for ‘ought’, with parameters for a standard and set of propositions. With the contextualist machinery in hand, we can defend a strong principle expressing how agents ought to reason while accommodating conflicting intuitions. I then show how our judgments about blame and guidance (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   3 citations  
  • Moral Realism and the Existence of God: Improving Parfit’s Metaethics.Martin Jakobsen - 2020 - Leuven, Belgia: Peeters.
    Can there be an objective morality without God? Derek Parfit argues that it can and offers a theory of morality that is neither theistic nor naturalistic. This book provides a critical assessment of Parfit's metaethical theory. Jakobsen identifies some problems in Parfit’s theory – problems concerning moral normativity, the ontological status of morality, and evolutionary influence on our moral beliefs – and argues that theological resources can help solve them. By showing how Parfit’s theory may be improved by the help (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark  
  • Which Reasons? Which Rationality?Daniel Fogal & Alex Worsnip - 2021 - Ergo: An Open Access Journal of Philosophy 8.
    The slogan that rationality is about responding to reasons has a turbulent history: once taken for granted; then widely rejected; now enjoying a resurgence. The slogan is made harder to assess by an ever-increasing plethora of distinctions pertaining to reasons and rationality. Here we are occupied with two such distinctions: that between subjective and objective reasons, and that between structural rationality (a.k.a. coherence) and substantive rationality (a.k.a. reasonableness). Our paper has two main aims. The first is to defend dualism about (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   23 citations  
  • Aesthetic practices and normativity.Robbie Kubala - 2021 - Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 103 (2):408–425.
    What should we do, aesthetically speaking, and why? Any adequate theory of aesthetic normativity must distinguish reasons internal and external to aesthetic practices. This structural distinction is necessary in order to reconcile our interest in aesthetic correctness with our interest in aesthetic value. I consider three case studies—score compliance in musical performance, the look of a mowed lawn, and literary interpretation—to show that facts about the correct actions to perform and the correct attitudes to have are explained by norms internal (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   21 citations  
  • Deliberative Authority and Representational Determinacy: A Challenge for the Normative Realist.Tristram McPherson - 2019 - Ergo: An Open Access Journal of Philosophy 6.
    Controversy about the credibility of normative realism is endemic to contemporary metaethics. Some take realism to be “obviously, the default position,” while others, to put it mildly, do not., In the face of such persistent controversy, it can be valuable to step back from the myriad arguments for and against realism, and seek to understand the challenges that face this view in their deepest and most general form. This paper aims to achieve this deeper understanding with respect to a pair (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   2 citations  
  • Morality and Practical Reasons.Douglas W. Portmore - 2021 - Cambridge, United Kingdom: Cambridge University Press.
    As Socrates famously noted, there is no more important question than how we ought to live. The answer to this question depends on how the reasons that we have for living in various different ways combine and compete. To illustrate, suppose that I've just received a substantial raise. What should I do with the extra money? I have most moral reason to donate it to effective charities but most self-interested reason to spend it on luxuries for myself. So, whether I (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   3 citations  
  • Immorality and Irrationality.Alex Worsnip* - 2019 - Philosophical Perspectives 33 (1):220-253.
    Does immorality necessarily involve irrationality? The question is often taken to be among the deepest in moral philosophy. But apparently deep questions sometimes admit of deflationary answers. In this case we can make way for a deflationary answer by appealing to dualism about rationality, according to which there are two fundamentally distinct notions of rationality: structural rationality and substantive rationality. I have defended dualism elsewhere. Here, I’ll argue that it allows us to embrace a sensible – I will not say (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   2 citations  
  • Why Epistemic Reductionism Won’t Save the Moral Error Theorist.Alex Murphy - 2020 - Ethical Theory and Moral Practice 23 (1):53-69.
    Moral error theorists often respond to the epistemic companions in guilt strategy by adopting the Disparity Response: reject the putative parity between moral and epistemic reasons and claim that though the former are irreducibly normative, the latter aren’t. I argue such a response fails. Expanding on Das’ Australas J Philos 95:58–69, work I present a master argument against Disparity Responses: the arguments moral error theorists use to advance their conceptual claim apply in the epistemic domain also. This prohibits the error (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark  
  • Standard and alternative error theories about moral reasons.Kipros Lofitis - 2020 - Ratio 33 (1):37-45.
    An error theory about moral reasons is the view that ordinary thought is committed to error, and that the alleged error is the thought that moral norms (expressing alleged moral requirements) invariably supply agents with sufficient normative reasons (for action). In this paper, I sketch two distinct ways of arguing for the error theorist's substantive conclusion that moral norms do not invariably supply agents with sufficient normative reasons. I am primarily interested in the somewhat neglected way, which I call the (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   2 citations  
  • What’s So Queer About Morality?Luke Taylor - 2020 - The Journal of Ethics 24 (1):11-29.
    Mackie famously argued for a moral error theory on the basis that objective moral values, if they existed, would be very queer entities. Unfortunately, his argument is very brief and it is not totally obvious from what he says exactly where the queerness of moral values is supposed to lie. In this paper I will firstly show why a typical interpretation of Mackie is problematic and secondly offer a new interpretation. I will argue that, whether or not we have reason (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   3 citations  
  • Kant, Universality Test, and a Criterion of Morality.R. G. Apressyan - 2018 - Russian Journal of Philosophical Sciences 11:70-85.
    The universality test is a significant reflective procedure, owing to which Kant’s categorical imperative is brought into proximity with moral practice and with an agent’s decisions made in particular circumstances and at the face of value collisions. The test is to be done in every single case by a moral agent her/himself and it aims to examine a selected maxim for its universality, that is to its congruity to universal and necessary moral law and hence to its moral dignity. This (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark  
  • Two types of epistemic instrumentalism.Charles Côté-Bouchard - 2019 - Synthese 198 (6):5455-5475.
    Epistemic instrumentalism views epistemic norms and epistemic normativity as essentially involving the instrumental relation between means and ends. It construes notions like epistemic normativity, norms, and rationality, as forms of instrumental or means-end normativity, norms, and rationality. I do two main things in this paper. In part 1, I argue that there is an under-appreciated distinction between two independent types of epistemic instrumentalism. These are instrumentalism about epistemic norms and instrumentalism about epistemic normativity. In part 2, I argue that this (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   5 citations  
  • Schopenhauerian virtue ethics.Patrick Hassan - 2022 - Inquiry: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Philosophy 65 (4):381-413.
    ABSTRACT The aim of this paper is to elucidate Schopenhauer’s moral philosophy in terms of an ethics of virtue. This paper consists of four sections. In the first section I outline three major objections Schopenhauer raises for Kant’s moral philosophy. In section two I extract from these criticisms a framework for Schopenhauer’s own position, identifying how his moral psychology underpins a unified and hierarchical conception of virtue and vice. I then ascertain some strengths of this view. In section three I (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   7 citations  
  • (1 other version)Probabilistic promotion and ability.Luke Elson - 2019 - Ergo: An Open Access Journal of Philosophy 6.
    We often have some reason to do actions insofar as they promote outcomes or states of affairs, such as the satisfaction of a desire. But what is it to promote an outcome? I defend a new version of 'probabilism about promotion'. According to Minimal Probabilistic Promotion, we promote some outcome when we make that outcome more likely than it would have been if we had done something (anything) else. This makes promotion easy and reasons cheap.
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   4 citations  
  • Anscombe on the mesmeric force of ‘ought’ and a spurious kind of moral realism.Sergio Volodia Marcello Cremaschi - 2017 - Etica E Politica 19 (2):51-86.
    I discuss the second of the three theses advanced by Anscombe in ‘Modern Moral Philosophy’. The focus is the nature of entities to which – if Anscombe’s diagnosis is correct – ought and cognate modals are assumed by modern moral philosophers to refer. I reconstruct the alternative account offered by Anscombe of viable and justified ‘Aristotelian’ modals – as contrasted with mysterious and unjustified ‘Kantian’ modals; I discuss the nature and status of ‘Aristotelian necessity’ to which such legitimate modals refer (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   1 citation  
  • (1 other version)III-Moral Obligation: Form and Substance.Stephen Darwall - 2010 - Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society 110 (1pt1):31-46.
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   2 citations  
  • (1 other version)VIII-An Argument Against Motivational Internalism.Elinor Mason - 2008 - Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society 108 (1part2):135-156.
    In this paper I argue that I argue that motivational internalism should not be driving metaethics. I first show that many arguments for motivational internalism beg the question by resting on an illicit appeal to internalist assumptions about the nature of reasons. Then I make a distinction between weak internalism and the weakest form of internalism. Weak internalism allows that agents fail to act according to their normative judgments when they are practically irrational. I show that when we clarify the (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   5 citations  
  • Revenge is sweet.Joshua Gert - 2020 - Philosophical Studies 177 (4):971-986.
    The first half of this paper defends the claim revenge is a personal good. That is, it is the sort of thing, the pursuit of which, for oneself, always provides a reason for action. This makes trouble for the dominant philosophical view of the relation between morality and practical reason: a view held by theorists we can call ‘Angels’. Angels hold that moral requirements are also rational requirements. Devils, on the other hand, hold that immoral behavior is at least sometimes (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark  
  • Aristotelian Naturalism vs. Mutants, Aliens and the Great Red Dragon.Scott Woodcock - 2018 - American Philosophical Quarterly 55 (4):313-328.
    In this paper I present a new objection to the Aristotelian Naturalism defended by Philippa Foot. I describe this objection as a membership objection because it reveals the fact that AN invites counterexamples when pressed to identify the individuals bound by its normative claims. I present three examples of agents for whom the norms generated by AN are not obviously authoritative: mutants, aliens, and the Great Red Dragon. Those who continue to advocate for Foot's view can give compelling replies to (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   2 citations  
  • Reasons: Wrong, Right, Normative, Fundamental.Kurt Sylvan & Errol Lord - 2019 - Journal of Ethics and Social Philosophy 15 (1).
    Reasons fundamentalists maintain that we can analyze all derivative normative properties in terms of normative reasons. These theorists famously encounter the Wrong Kind of Reasons problem, since not all reasons for reactions seem relevant for reasons-based analyses. Some have argued that this problem is a general one for many theorists, and claim that this lightens the burden for reasons fundamentalists. We argue in this paper that the reverse is true: the generality of the problem makes life harder for reasons fundamentalists. (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   18 citations  
  • Recent Work on Internal and External Reasons.John Brunero - 2017 - American Philosophical Quarterly 54 (2):99-118.
    This paper examines some recent arguments for internalism that (i) appeal to an analogy between practical and theoretical reasons, (ii) look toward our practices of reasoning with others, or (iii) tie reasons to good deliberation. The conclusion of this paper is a skeptical one: none of these new arguments gives us sufficient reason to think that internalism is true.
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   8 citations  
  • Introduction.Jussi Suikkanen - 2018 - In Jussi Suikkanen & Antti Kauppinen (eds.), Methodology and Moral Philosophy. New York: Routledge. pp. 1-20.
    This chapter begins by explaining two widespread attitudes towards the methods of moral philosophy. The first common attitude is that the appropriate method for doing ethics was described by John Rawls when he formulated the reflective equilibrium method. Another common attitude is that moral philosophy has no method – anything goes in ethical theorising as long as the results are significant enough. The chapter then motivates the volume by arguing that these attitudes are not helpful. The reflective equilibrium method has (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   3 citations  
  • Beliefs That Wrong.Rima Basu - 2018 - Dissertation, University of Southern California
    You shouldn’t have done it. But you did. Against your better judgment you scrolled to the end of an article concerning the state of race relations in America and you are now reading the comments. Amongst the slurs, the get-rich-quick schemes, and the threats of physical violence, there is one comment that catches your eye. Spencer argues that although it might be “unpopular” or “politically incorrect” to say this, the evidence supports believing that the black diner in his section will (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   9 citations  
  • Footing the Cost (of Normative Subjectivism).Jack Woods - 2018 - In Jussi Suikkanen & Antti Kauppinen (eds.), Methodology and Moral Philosophy. New York: Routledge.
    I defend normative subjectivism against the charge that believing in it undermines the functional role of normative judgment. In particular, I defend it against the claim that believing that our reasons change from context to context is problematic for our use of normative judgments. To do so, I distinguish two senses of normative universality and normative reasons---evaluative universality and reasons and ontic universality and reasons. The former captures how even subjectivists can evaluate the actions of those subscribing to other conventions; (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   3 citations  
  • Virtue Ethics.Nafsika Athanassoulis - 2013 - London: Bloomsbury.
    What is virtue? How can we lead moral lives? Exploring how contemporary moral philosophy has led to a revival of interest in the concepts of 'virtue', 'character' and 'flourishing', this is an accessible and critical introduction to virtue ethics. The book includes chapter summaries and guides to further reading throughout to help readers explore, understand and develop a critical perspective towards this important school of contemporary ethical thought.
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   12 citations  
  • Ethical Reductionism.Neil Sinhababu - 2018 - Journal of Ethics and Social Philosophy 13 (1):32-52.
    Ethical reductionism is the best version of naturalistic moral realism. Reductionists regard moral properties as identical to properties appearing in successful scientific theories. Nonreductionists, including many of the Cornell Realists, argue that moral properties instead supervene on scientific properties without identity. I respond to two arguments for nonreductionism. First, nonreductionists argue that the multiple realizability of moral properties defeats reductionism. Multiple realizability can be addressed in ethics by identifying moral properties uniquely or disjunctively with properties of the special sciences. Second, (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   5 citations  
  • He/She/They/Ze.Robin Dembroff & Daniel Wodak - 2018 - Ergo: An Open Access Journal of Philosophy 5.
    In this paper, we defend two main claims. The first is a moderate claim: we have a negative duty to not use binary gender-specific pronouns he or she to refer to genderqueer individuals. We defend this with an argument by analogy. It was gravely wrong for Mark Latham to refer to Catherine McGregor, a transgender woman, using the pronoun he; we argue that such cases of misgendering are morally analogous to referring to Angel Haze, who identifies as genderqueer, as he (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   37 citations  
  • Mere formalities: fictional normativity and normative authority.Daniel Wodak - 2019 - Canadian Journal of Philosophy 49 (6):1-23.
    It is commonly said that some standards, such as morality, are ‘normatively authoritative’ in a way that other standards, such as etiquette, are not; standards like etiquette are said to be ‘not really normative’. Skeptics deny the very possibility of normative authority, and take claims like ‘etiquette is not really normative’ to be either empty or confused. I offer a different route to defeat skeptics about authority: instead of focusing on what makes standards like morality special, we should focus on (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   22 citations  
  • Eliminating Prudential Reasons.Alex Worsnip - 2018 - Oxford Studies in Normative Ethics 8:236-257.
    I argue, contrary to the consensus of most contemporary work in ethics, that there are no (fundamentally, distinctively) prudential reasons for action. That is to say: there is no class of reasons for action that is distinctively and fundamentally about the promotion of the agent’s own well-being. Considerations to do with the agent’s well-being can supply the agent with reasons only in virtue of her well-being mattering morally or in virtue of her caring about her own well-being. In both of (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   8 citations  
  • Thinking about Cases: Applying Kant's Universal Law Formula.Jochen Bojanowski - 2017 - European Journal of Philosophy 26 (4):1253-1268.
    According to a widespread view, Kant's claim that moral wrongness has its ground in a contradiction underlying every immoral action is a “bluff” rooted in “dogmatic moralism”. Ever since Benjamin Constant's exchange with Kant, counterexamples have played a crucial role in showing why Kant's “universalization procedure” fails to determine the moral validity of our judgments. Despite recent attempts to bring Kant's ethics closer to Aristotle's, these counterexamples have prevailed. Most recently, Jesse Prinz has launched another attack along the same lines. (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   5 citations  
  • Pain for the Moral Error Theory? A New Companions-in-Guilt Argument.Guy Fletcher - 2017 - Australasian Journal of Philosophy 96 (3):474-482.
    The moral error theorist claims that moral discourse is irredeemably in error because it is committed to the existence of properties that do not exist. A common response has been to postulate ‘companions in guilt’—forms of discourse that seem safe from error despite sharing the putatively problematic features of moral discourse. The most developed instance of this pairs moral discourse with epistemic discourse. In this paper, I present a new, prudential, companions-in-guilt argument and argue for its superiority over the epistemic (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   11 citations  
  • Sharing our normative worlds: A theory of normative thinking.Ivan Gonzalez-Cabrera - 2017 - Dissertation, Australian National University
    This thesis focuses on the evolution of human social norm psychology. More precisely, I want to show how the emergence of our distinctive capacity to follow social norms and make social normative judgments is connected to the lineage explanation of our capacity to form shared intentions, and how such capacity is related to a diverse cluster of prototypical moral judgments. I argue that in explaining the evolution of this form of normative cognition we also require an understanding of the developmental (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   1 citation