What does it take to count as competent with the meaning of a thin evaluative predicate like 'is the right thing to do'? According to minimalists like Allan Gibbard and Ralph Wedgwood, competent speakers must simply use the predicate to express their own motivational states. According to analytic descriptivists like Frank Jackson, Philip Pettit and Christopher Peacocke, competent speakers must grasp a particular criterion for identifying the property picked out by the term. Both approaches face serious difficulties. We suggest that (...) these difficulties derive from a shared background assumption that competence conditions must be explained in terms of a determinate conceptual role. We propose a new way of characterizing competence with evaluative terms: what's required for competence is participation in a shared epistemic practice with a term. Our approach, we argue, better explains the nature of evaluative inquiry and the extent of disagreement about evaluative questions. (shrink)

Some philosophers claim that emotions are, at best, hindrances to the discovery of evaluative truths, while others omit them entirely from their epistemology of value. I argue, however, that this is a mistake. Drawing an evaluative parallel with Frank Jackson’s Mary case, I show there is a distinctive way in which emotions epistemically enhance evaluative judgment. This is, in fact, a conclusion philosophers of emotion have been eager to endorse. However, after considering several influential proposals—such as the view that emotions (...) generate evaluative concepts, or the view that emotions justify evaluative beliefs on the model of perception—I conclude that the most promising contender is the notion that emotional experience acquaints us with evaluative properties. (shrink)

Although the discussion about feasibility in political theory is still in its infancy, some important progress has been made in the last years to advance our understanding. In this paper, we intend to make a contribution to this growing literature by investigating the proper place of feasibility considerations in political theory. A motivating force behind this study is a suspicion that many presumptions made about feasibility in several current debates—such as that between practice-independence and practice-dependence, ideal and non-ideal theory, and (...) political moralism and political realism—are too rigid and underestimate the numerous different ways in which feasibility concerns may enter into our theorizing. To chisel out this feasibility space, our aim is to suggest two metatheoretical constraints on normative political principles as intuitively plausible, the so-called ‘fitness constraint’ and the ‘functional constraint’, through which we elucidate five central aspects for determining proper feasibility constraints of an account in political theory. (shrink)

While all agree that score compliance in performance is valuable, the source of this value is unclear. Questions about what authenticity requires crowd out questions about our reasons to be compliant in the first place, perhaps because they seem trivial or uninteresting. I argue that such reasons cannot be understood as ordinary aesthetic, instrumental, epistemic, or moral reasons. Instead, we treat considerations of score compliance as having a kind of final value, one which requires further explanation. Taking as a model (...) the Humean account of fidelity as an artificial virtue, I sketch a practice-theoretic account of the nature and source of such reasons, one on which we can say that they are, after all, aesthetic, but only indirectly so. (shrink)

Morality seems important, in the sense that there are practical reasons — at least for most of us, most of the time — to be moral. A central theoretical motivation for consequentialism is that it appears clear that there are practical reasons to promote good outcomes, but mysterious why we should care about non-consequentialist moral considerations or how they could be genuine reasons to act. In this paper we argue that this theoretical motivation is mistaken, and that because many arguments (...) for consequentialism rely upon it, the mistake substantially weakens the overall case for consequentialism. We argue that there is indeed a theoretical connection between good states and reasons to act, because good states are those it is fitting to desire and there is a conceptual connection between the fittingness of a motive and reasons to perform the acts it motivates. But while some of our motives are directed at states, others are directed at acts themselves. We contend that just as the fittingness of desires for states generates reasons to promote the good, the fittingness of these act-directed motives generates reasons to do other things. Moreover, we argue that an act’s moral status consists in the fittingness of act-directed feelings of obligation to perform or avoid performing it, so the connection between fitting motives and reasons to act explains reasons to be moral whether or not morality directs us to promote the good. This, we contend, de-mystifies how there could be non-consequentialist reasons that are both moral and practical. (shrink)

An argument for the eponymous conclusion is given through a series of hypothetical syllogisms, the most basic of which is as follows: morality is necessary for self-respect; self-respect is necessary for happiness; therefore, morality is necessary for happiness. Some of the most obvious objections are entertained and rejected.

Recently, philosophers have identified certain fictional propositions with which one does not imaginatively engage, even where one is transparently intended by their authors to do so. One approach to explaining this categorizes it as 'resistance', that is, as deliberate failure to imagine that the relevant propositions are true; the phenomenon has become generally known (misleadingly) as 'the puzzle of imaginative resistance'. I argue that this identification is incorrect, and I dismiss several other explanations. I then propose a better one, that (...) in central cases of imaginative failure, the basis for the failure is the contingent incomprehensibility of the relevant propositions. Why the phenomenon is especially commonplace with respect to moral propositions is illuminated along the way. (shrink)

The notion of supererogation—going above and beyond the call of duty—is typically discussed in a moral context. However, in this paper we argue for the existence of rationally supererogatory actions: that is, actions that go above and beyond the call of rational duty. In order to establish the existence of such actions, we first need to overcome the so-called paradox of supererogation: we need to provide some explanation for why, if some act is rationally optimal, it is not the case (...) that we are rationally required to carry out that act. We argue that a response to this ‘paradox’ can be found by reflecting on normative conflicts: cases where what is best according to some normative domain is different from what is best according to some other normative domain. (shrink)

What does it take for lawyers and others to think or talk about the same legal topic—e.g., defamation, culpability? We argue that people are able to think or talk about the same topic not when they possess a matching substantive understanding of the topic, as traditional metasemantics says, but instead when their thoughts or utterances are related to each other in certain ways. And what determines the content of thoughts and utterances is what would best serve the core purposes of (...) the representational practice within which the thought or utterance is located. In thus favoring a “relational model” in metasemantics, we share Ronald Dworkin's goal of explaining fundamental legal disagreements, and also his reliance on constructive interpretation. But what we delineate is a far more general and explanatorily resourceful metasemantics than what Dworkin articulated, which also bypasses some controversial implications for the nature of law that Dworkin alleged. (shrink)

In this paper I present a novel account of achievement and I argue that, all other things being equal, the presence of this particular type of achievement in a person’s life makes that life more meaningful. In arguing for this conclusion, I explore the connections between m-achievements and a person’s self-conception and especially the idea that m-achievements provide a reason for the revision of one’s self-conception.

This paper has two related goals. First, we develop an expressivist account of negation which, in the spirit of Alan Gibbard, treats disagreement as semantically primitive. Our second goal is to make progress toward a unified expressivist treatment of modality. Metaethical expressivists must be expressivists about deontic modal claims. But then metaethical expressivists must either extend their expressivism to include epistemic and alethic modals, or else accept a semantics for modal expressions that is radically disjunctive. We propose that expressivists look (...) to Amie Thomasson’s work for a general strategy for offering a unified expressivist account of modality. Modals in general, we propose, are devices for expressing metalinguistic commitments within the object language, with deontic, epistemic, and metaphysical modals all expressing different kinds of metalinguistic commitments. (shrink)

People have various desires, but it is a contested moral issue when a desire becomes of such importance that it legitimizes a moral claim on others. This paper explores how the normative significance of desire satisfaction can be assessed and argues that a normatively significant desire can constitute a pro tanto obligation to help satisfy it. The paper presents a framework that relates the normative significance of a given desire to the general goal of living a reasonably valuable life and (...) inquires how the latter can be given determinate content without excluding a heterogeneity of the personal good. The paper contends that the set of possibly normatively significant desires is thus restricted by considerations about intelligibility, adequacy, and replaceability, which are mediated by societal background theories. (shrink)

Issues of methodology are central to the philosophy of moral progress. However, the idea that effective moral methodology, as well as being instrumental to progress, might also constitute progress has not been adequately explored. This paper will critically assess the merits of this idea – what I call ‘pure proceduralism about moral progress’ – taking Philip Kitcher's recent theory of ‘democratic contractualism’ (2021) as a test case. An epistemology of pure procedural moral progress will be sketched: namely, a naturalised epistemology (...) of paradigmatic instances of moral progress. Assuming an ideal procedure exists and has been at least approximately instantiated (an empirical claim), we learn about its form by studying paradigms of historical moral progress. From this epistemological method will be derived theoretical constraints on what can count as a theory of moral progress per se: it must capture the core semantic constraints on the term ‘moral progress,’ those features without which we would not recognise a change as moral progress. While this poses a tougher challenge for pure proceduralism than for more traditional approaches to moral methodology, it will be concluded that the potential of pure proceduralism as a viable metaethics of moral progress remains an exciting open question. (shrink)

In order to make progress in the welfare debate, we need a way to decide whether certain cases depict changes in well-being or not. I argue that an intuitive idea by Nagel has received insufficient attention in the literature and can be developed into a test to that purpose. I discuss a version of such a test proposed by Brad Hooker, and argue that it is unsuccessful. I then present my own test, which relies on the claim that if compassion (...) is fitting towards a person due to her having (or lacking) certain properties, then we know that having (or lacking) those properties affect the person’s well-being. I show how my test yields results in cases of deception, which have implications for central questions in the literature on well-being, such as whether what you do not experience can affect your well-being (the so-called Experience Requirement). (shrink)

This paper aims to connect philosophy of chemistry, green chemistry, and moral philosophy. We first characterize chemistry by underlining how chemists: co-define chemical bodies, operations, and transformations; always refer to active and context-sensitive bodies to explain the reactions under study; and develop strategies that require and intertwine with a molecular whole, its parts, and the surroundings at the same time within an explanation. We will then point out how green chemists are transforming their current activities in order to act upon (...) the world without jeopardizing life. This part will allow us to highlight that green chemistry follows the three aforementioned characteristics while including the world as a partner, as well as biodegradability and sustainability concerns, into chemical practices. In the third part of this paper, we will show how moral philosophy can help green chemists: identify the consequentialist assumptions that ground their reasoning; and widen the scope of their ethical considerations by integrating the notion of care and that of vulnerability into their arguments. In the fourth part of the paper, we will emphasize how, in return, this investigation could help philosophers querying consequentialism as soon as the consequences of chemical activities over the world are taken into account. Furthermore, we will point out how the philosophy of chemistry provides philosophers with new arguments concerning the key debate about the ‘intrinsic value’ of life, ecosystems and the Earth, in environmental ethics. To conclude, we will highlight how mesology, that is to say the study of ‘milieux’, and the concept of ‘ecumeme’ proposed by the philosopher and geographer Augustin Berque, could become important both for green chemists and moral philosophers in order to investigate our relationships with the Earth. (shrink)

A shared presumption among practice-dependent theorists is that a principle of justice is dependent on the function or aim of the practice to which it is supposed to be applied. In recent contributions to this debate, the condition of epistemic uncertainty plays a significant role for motivating and justifying a practice-dependent view. This paper analyses the role of epistemic uncertainty in justifying a practice-dependent approach. We see two kinds of epistemic uncertainty allegedly playing this justificatory role. What we call ‘normative (...) epistemic uncertainty’ emerges from dealing with the problem of value uncertainty in justifying applied principles when our higher-level principles are open-textured, that is, when their content is too vague or unclear to generate determinate prescriptions. What we call ‘descriptive epistemic uncertainty’ emerges from dealing with uncertainty about empirical facts, such as the problem of moral assurance, that is, the problem that the requirements of justice cannot go beyond arrangements that we can know with reasonable confidence that we can jointly establish and maintain. In both cases, practice-dependent theorists conclude that the condition of epistemic uncertainty justifies a practice-dependent approach, which puts certain restrictions on theorizing regulative principles and has wide-ranging practical implications for the scope of justice. Our claim in this paper is that neither kind of epistemic uncertainty justifies a practice-dependent approach. (shrink)

According to radical moral particularists such as Jonathan Dancy, there are no substantive moral principles. And yet, few particularists wish to deny that something very like moral principles do indeed play a significant role in our everyday moral practice. Loathe at dismissing this as mere error on the part of everyday moral agents, particularists have proposed a number of alternative accounts of the practice. The aim of all of these accounts is to make sense of our appeal to general moral (...) truths in both reaching and justifying our particular moral judgments without thereby violating the particularists' stricture against substantive moral principles. In this paper, I argue that the most prominent non-substantive accounts of moral generalities appealed to by radical particularists – the heuristic account and default reasons accounts – fail in this aim. (shrink)

In this paper, I argue that an externalist theory of thought content provides the means to resolve two debates in moral philosophy. The first—that between judgement internalism and judgement externalism—concerns the question of whether there is a conceptual connection between moral judgement and motivation. The second—that between reasons internalism and reasons externalism—concerns the relationship between moral reasons and an agent's subjective motivational set. The resolutions essentially stem from the externalist claim that concepts can be grasped partially, and a new moral (...) theory, which I call ‘moral externalism’, emerges. (shrink)

In the concluding lines of Part Three of The Claim of Reason, Stanley Cavell writes: ‘If the moralist is the human being who best grasps the human position, teaches us what our human position is, better than we know, in ways we cannot escape but through distraction and muddle, then our first task in subjecting ourselves to judgment is to tell the moralist from the moralizer’. Cavell then proceeds to characterize the moralizer as one who is ‘speaking in the name (...) of a position one does not occupy, confronting others in positions of which one will not imagine the acknowledgement’. Beginning with an exposition of Cavell’s notion of ‘moral position’, I will offer an interpretation of the distinction he draws between the moralist and the moralizer; I will then explain how the moral philosopher’s use of morally significant words may come to resemble the moralizer’s; and then I will argue that contemporary English-speaking moral philosophy as represented by the recent debates concerning ‘moral testimony’, or ‘moral deference’, has been failing its moralist aspirations, and that, by Cavell’s lights, the morality reflected in those debates is, in essence, that of the moralizer. (shrink)

Allan Gibbard () argues that the term ‘meaning’ expresses a normative concept, primarily on the basis of arguments that parallel Moore's famous Open Question Argument. In this paper I argue that Gibbard's evidence for normativity rests on idiosyncrasies of the Open Question Argument, and that when we use related thought experiments designed to bring out unusual semantic intuitions associated with normative terms we fail to find such evidence. These thought experiments, moreover, strongly suggest there are basic requirements for a theory (...) of meaning incompatible with Gibbard's ultimate goal of providing an expressivist account of meaning-related concepts. I conclude by considering a possible way in which meaning could be normative, consistent with the intuitions about disagreement; but this form of normativism about meaning appears incompatible with Gibbard's expressivism. (shrink)

The two dogmas at issue are the Humean dogma that “‘is’ statements do not imply ‘ought’ statements” and the Kantian dogma that “‘ought’ statements imply ‘can’” statements. The extant literature concludes these logically contradict each other. On the contrary, it is argued here that while there is no derivable formal contradiction, the juxtaposition of the dogmas manifests a philosophical disagreement over how to understand the logic of prescriptions. This disagreement bears on how to understand current metaethical debate between realists and (...) non-realists about morality in a way not heretofore investigated. The conclusion is that realists have the resources to account for both dogmas, while non-realists, if they strictly adhere to the “is”/“ought” gap, cannot give an adequate account of why “ought” implies “can”. (shrink)

I present and defend (1) an account of ethical judgments as judgments about our reasons to feel specific motivationally laden attitudes, (2) an account of what an agent should do in terms of what would achieve ends that she has reason to be motivated to pursue, and (3) an account of an agent’s reasons for motivation (and thus action) in terms of the prescriptions of the most fundamental principles that guide her deliberations. Using these accounts, I explain the connection between (...) ethics and reasons for action, how ethical judgments are both descriptive and intrinsically motivating, and how ethical facts arise from facts about agents’ deliberations. (shrink)

Tradução para o português do ensaio "Social Morality and Individual Ideal”. Publicado originalmente em Philosophy: The Journal of the Royal Institute of Philosophy, vol. XXXVI, n. 136, p. 1-17, Jan. 1961. Republicado em: STRAWSON, P. F. Freedom and Resentment and Other Essays. Londres: Methuen, 1974. [Routledge, 2008, p. 26-44]. ]. Publicado na coletânea: Ensaios sobre a filosofia de Strawson: com a tradução de Liberdade e ressentimento & Moralidade social e ideal individual. Organizadores: Jaimir Conte & Itamar Luís Gelain. Editora da (...) UFSC, 2015. ISBN: 9788532807250. (shrink)

This essay raises a challenge for the perceptual theory of emotion. According to the perceptual theory, emotions are perceptual states that represent values. But if emotions represent values, something should explain why. In virtue of what do emotions represent the values they do? A psychosemantics would answer this, and that’s what the perceptual theorist owes us. To date, however, the only perceptual theorist to attempt a psychosemantics for emotion is Jesse Prinz. And Prinz’s theory, I argue, faces an important difficulty: (...) It makes the pairing of any given emotion with its respective value entirely arbitrary. But that’s a problem. It seems—and this is a major contention of this essay—that an emotion, in virtue of how it feels, bears a natural or non-arbitrary link to the value it represents. And this datum makes it all the more difficult to provide a viable psychosemantics for the evaluative content of emotion. (shrink)

It is often assumed that the best explanation of why we should be moral must involve a substantive account of what there is reason to do and how this is related to what morality requires and recommends. In this paper I argue to the contrary that the best explanation of why we should be moral is neutral about the content of morality, and does not invoke an independent substantive account of what there is practical reason to do. I contend that (...) an act’s deontic status as recommended or required by morality is best understood as its being fitting for us to feel obligated to perform it, which essentially involves motivation to perform it. I argue, moreover, that our having reason to do something is a matter of its being fitting for us to be motivated to do it. Since an act’s being favored by morality conceptually entails the fittingness of our being motivated to perform it, and the fittingness of this motivation conceptually entails that there is reason to perform it, it is actually a conceptual truth that there are reasons to do what morality requires and recommends, whatever that turns out to be. I contend, finally, that this kind of account best explains why, although moral considerations are not always overriding, we necessarily have conclusive reasons to do what morality requires. I argue that an act counts as morally required only if the reasons to feel obligated to perform it are conclusive, which entails that it is unfitting to fail to be most strongly motivated to perform it. This, together with my account of the connection between fitting motives and practical reasons, entails that whatever considerations are weighty enough to make the act morally required are conclusive reasons to perform it. I believe that this conceptual account of reasons to be moral is important, because it removes the explanation of why we should be moral as a desideratum on normative ethical theories, which may significantly decrease the attractions of some and increase the attractions of others. (shrink)

The renaissance of Aristotelian virtue ethics has produced an extensive philosophical literature that criticizes markets for a lack of virtues. Drawing on Michael Sandel’s virtue-ethical critique of price gouging during natural disasters, we (1) identify and clarify serious misunderstandings in recurring price-gouging debates between virtue-ethical critics and economists. Subsequently, (2) we respond to Sandel’s call for interdisciplinary dialogue. However, instead of solely calling on economics to embrace insights from virtue ethics, we prefer a two-sided version of interdisciplinary dialogue and argue (...) that virtue ethics should embrace economic insights. In particular, we argue that if virtue ethics is to preserve its social relevance under modern conditions, it should re-conceptualize its notion of virtue and re-evaluate the self-interested but effective—and in this sense solidary—help among strangers via markets as virtuous rather than devaluate it as greed, that is, as vicious price gouging. (shrink)

Non-descriptivists in metaethics should say more about intuitions. For one popular theory has it that case-based intuitions are in the business of correctly categorizing or classifying merely by bringing to bear a semantic or conceptual competence. If so, then the fact that all normative predicates have case-based intuitions involving them shows that they too are in the business of categorizing or classifying things. This favors a descriptivist position in metaethics—normative predicates have descriptive content—and disfavors a purely non-descriptivist position, like pure (...) expressivism. However, we can say more. We can distinguish two different sorts of intuitional state, A-grade intuitions and B-grade intuitions, based on a cluster of properties that are distinctive of each. While a hypothesis about categorization best explains the cluster of properties enjoyed by A-grade intuitions, it does not best explain the cluster of properties enjoyed by B-grade intuitions. Indeed, a non-categorizational, attitude-expressive hypothesis about the relevant meanings best explains B-grade intuitions. And intuitions involving thin normative predicates are B-grade. So intuition theory supports non-descriptivism, not descriptivism, about thin normative predicates. (shrink)

The focus of this paper is the following claim: as a purely conceptual matter, the moral truths could be pretty much anything, and we should assume this in assessing our reliability at grasping moral truths. This claim, which I call No Content, plays a key role in an important skeptical argument against realist moral knowledge – the Normative Lottery Argument. In this paper, I argue that moral realists can, and should, reject No Content. My argument centers on the idea of (...) practical intelligibility. I explore different aspects of practical intelligibility, and I argue that such intelligibility sets a constraint on the possibilities we should consider when assessing our reliability at grasping moral truths. (shrink)

In Part I of this paper I attempt to present, in more or less summary fashion, some well-known difficulties in the concept of deontic morality , as shown by certain features of deontic moral discourse. I make no great claims for originality here, although perhaps there may be some virtue in the presentation and ordering. In any case, Part I is a necessary preliminary to Part II, where I attempt to defend the rationality of and the necessity for deontic language (...) against some recent attacks. (shrink)

Nancy Scheper-Hughes is one of the most prominent critics of markets in human organs. Unfortunately, Scheper-Hughes rejects the view that markets should be used to solve the current shortage of transplant organs without engaging with the arguments in favour of them. Scheper-Hughes’s rejection of such markets is of especial concern, given her influence over their future, for she holds, among other positions, the status of an adviser to the World Health Organization on issues related to global transplantation. Given her influence, (...) it is important that Scheper-Hughes’s moral condemnation of markets in human organs be subject to critical assessment. Such critical assessment, however, has not generally been forthcoming. A careful examination of Scheper-Hughes’s anti-market stance shows that it is based on serious mischaracterisations of both the pro-market position and the medical and economic realities that underlie it. In this paper, the author will expose and correct these mischaracterisations and, in so doing, show that her objections to markets in human organs are unfounded. (shrink)

We elucidate the conditions under which any hypothesis is explanatorily relevant by analyzing several tests of explanatory relevance and explanations based on those tests. A new causal criterion of explanatory relevance is developed and defended. We show how the causal criterion succeeds in establishing, at the very least, a very strong presumption against moral facts.

When a non-philosopher friend of mine asked me what I was writing about, I found it challenging to explain the guise of the good thesis to her, as it appeared almost analytic or trivial in her eyes...