Switch to: References

Add citations

You must login to add citations.
  1. States of affairs and our connection with the good.Miles Tucker - 2024 - Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 109 (2):694-714.
    Abstractionists claim that the only bearers of intrinsic value are abstract, necessarily existing states of affairs. I argue that abstractionism cannot succeed. Though we can model concrete goods such as lives, projects, and outcomes with abstract states, conflating models of goods with the goods themselves has surprising and unattractive consequences. I suggest that concrete states of affairs or facts are the only bearers of intrinsic value. I show how this proposal can overcome the concerns lodged against abstractionism and, in the (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark  
  • Metaethical intuitions in lay concepts of normative uncertainty.Maximilian Theisen - forthcoming - Philosophical Psychology.
    Even if we know all relevant descriptive facts about an act, we can still be uncertain about its moral acceptability. Most literature on how to act under such normative uncertainty operates on moral realism, the metaethical view that there are objective moral facts. Lay people largely report anti-realist intuitions, which poses the question of how these intuitions affect their interpretation and handling of normative uncertainty. Results from two quasi-experimental studies (total N = 365) revealed that most people did not interpret (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   1 citation  
  • Is jealousy justifiable?Catherine Wesselinoff - 2023 - European Journal of Philosophy 31 (3):703-710.
    Jealousy has been disparaged as psychologically debilitating and morally flawed since well before Shakespeare wrote Othello and is indeed represented—particularly well—as far back as in Homer's portrayal of gods and goddesses in The Iliad. According to some of these traditional views, often shared by philosophers, psychologists and the general public, jealousy is the sign, if not of an irredeemably corrupt mind, then at least of an excessively possessive and insecure character. But does jealousy always indicate some sort of flaw or (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   2 citations  
  • Fittingness first?: Reasons to withhold belief.Wooram Lee - 2022 - Philosophical Studies 179 (12):3565-3581.
    Recent years have seen the rise of fittingness-first views, which take fittingness to be the most basic normative feature, in terms of which other normative features can be explained. This paper poses a serious difficulty for the fittingness-first approach by showing that existing fittingness-first accounts cannot plausibly accommodate an important class of reasons: reasons not to believe a proposition. There are two kinds of reasons not to believe a proposition: considerations that are counterevidence; and considerations that count against believing the (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   3 citations  
  • The New Explanatory Objection Against the Fitting Attitude Account of Value.Francesco Orsi & Andrés G. Garcia - 2022 - Philosophia 50 (4):1845-1860.
    The explanatory objection against the fitting attitude account of value states that if the properties of attitudes explain fittingness facts, but do not always explain value facts, then value facts cannot be identical with or reduced to fittingness facts. One reply to this objection is to claim that the constitutive properties of attitudes also explain value facts, for they are enablers for the value possessed by an object. In this paper we argue that the enabling maneuver exposes FA to a (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   2 citations  
  • Normative Resilience.Henrik Andersson & Jakob Werkmäster - 2022 - Utilitas 34 (2):195-208.
    This article discusses the phenomenon of normative resilience, with a focus on evaluative resilience. An object can become more or less valuable. In addition to this change in an object's value, the object's value can become more or less resilient. If it is less resilient, it cannot withstand as much evaluative change without its degree of value changing, as compared to an object with more resilient value. The article consists of three parts. First, examples of resilience are presented to give (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   2 citations  
  • Kant and the Duty to Act from Duty.Michael Walschots - 2022 - History of Philosophy Quarterly 39 (1):59-75.
    Several interpreters argue that Kant believes we have a duty to act “from duty.” If there is such a duty, however, then Kant's moral theory faces a serious problem, namely that of an allegedly vicious infinite regress of duties. No serious attempt has been made to determine how Kant might respond to this problem and insufficient work has been done to determine whether he even believes we have a duty to act from duty. In this paper I argue that not (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   1 citation  
  • Which Attitudes for the Fitting Attitude Analysis of Value?Julien A. Deonna & Fabrice Teroni - 2021 - Theoria 87 (5):1099-1122.
    According to the fitting attitude (FA) analysis of value concepts, to conceive of an object as having a given value is to conceive of it as being such that a certain evaluative attitude taken towards it would be fitting. Among the challenges that this analysis has to face, two are especially pressing. The first is a psychological challenge: the FA analysis must call upon attitudes that shed light on our value concepts while not presupposing the mastery of these concepts. The (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   5 citations  
  • The explanatory objection to the fitting attitude analysis of value.Francesco Orsi & Andrés G. Garcia - 2020 - Philosophical Studies 178 (4):1207-1221.
    The fitting attitude analysis of value states that for objects to have value is for them to be the fitting targets of attitudes. Good objects are the fitting targets of positive attitudes, while bad objects are the fitting targets of negative attitudes. The following paper presents an argument to the effect that value and the fittingness of attitudes differ in terms of their explanations. Whereas the fittingness of attitudes is explained, inter alia, by both the properties of attitudes and those (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   5 citations  
  • Moore, Brentano, and Scanlon: a defense of indefinability.Miles Tucker - 2020 - Philosophical Studies 177 (8):2261-2276.
    Mooreans claim that intrinsic goodness is a conceptual primitive. Fitting-attitude theorists object: they say that goodness should be defined in terms of what it is fitting for us to value. The Moorean view is often considered a relic; the fitting-attitude view is increasingly popular. I think this unfortunate. Though the fitting-attitude analysis is powerful, the Moorean view is still attractive. I dedicate myself to the influential arguments marshaled against Moore’s program, including those advanced by Scanlon, Stratton-Lake and Hooker, and Jacobson; (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   3 citations  
  • The Nature of Desire.Federico Lauria & Julien Deonna (eds.) - 2017 - New York, USA: Oxford University Press.
    Desires matter. What are desires? Many believe that desire is a motivational state: desiring is being disposed to act. This conception aligns with the functionalist approach to desire and the standard account of desire's role in explaining action. According to a second influential approach, however, desire is first and foremost an evaluation: desiring is representing something as good. After all, we seem to desire things under the guise of the good. Which understanding of desire is more accurate? Is the guise (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   3 citations  
  • 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, (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark  
  • Fittingness.Christopher Howard - 2018 - Philosophy Compass 13 (11):e12542.
    The normative notion of fittingness figures saliently in the work of a number of ethical theorists writing in the late nineteenth and mid-twentieth centuries and has in recent years regained prominence, occupying an important place in the theoretical tool kits of a range of contemporary writers. Yet the notion remains strikingly undertheorized. This article offers a (partial) remedy. I proceed by canvassing a number of attempts to analyze the fittingness relation in other terms, arguing that none is fully adequate. In (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   82 citations  
  • What is Reasoning?Conor McHugh & Jonathan Way - 2018 - Mind 127 (505):167-196.
    Reasoning is a certain kind of attitude-revision. What kind? The aim of this paper is to introduce and defend a new answer to this question, based on the idea that reasoning is a goodness-fixing kind. Our central claim is that reasoning is a functional kind: it has a constitutive point or aim that fixes the standards for good reasoning. We claim, further, that this aim is to get fitting attitudes. We start by considering recent accounts of reasoning due to Ralph (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   50 citations  
  • Are Acts of Supererogation Always Praiseworthy?Alfred Archer - 2015 - Theoria 82 (3):238-255.
    It is commonly assumed that praiseworthiness should form part of the analysis of supererogation. I will argue that this view should be rejected. I will start by arguing that, at least on some views of the connection between moral value and praiseworthiness, it does not follow from the fact that acts of supererogation go beyond what is required by duty that they will always be praiseworthy to perform. I will then consider and dismiss what I will call the Argument from (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   17 citations  
  • The Good and the Right.Michael J. Zimmerman - 2007 - Utilitas 19 (3):326-353.
    T. M. Scanlon has revived a venerable tradition according to which something's being good consists in its being such that there is a reason to respond positively towards it. He has presented novel arguments for this thesis. In this article, I first develop some refinements of the thesis with a view to focusing on intrinsic value in particular, then discuss the relation between the thesis and consequentialism, then critically examine Scanlon's arguments for the thesis, and finally turn to the question (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   18 citations  
  • Overcoming the limits of empathic concern: the case for availability and its application to the medical domain.Elodie Malbois & Christine Clavien - 2020 - Medicine, Health Care and Philosophy 23 (2):191-203.
    Empathic concern is essential to our social lives because it motivates helping behavior. It has, however, well-known shortcomings such as its limitation in scope. Here, we highlight a further shortcoming of empathic concern: it contributes little to understanding the relevant features of complex social situations (e.g. the causes of somebody’s distress), and unaided by further cognitive inputs, likely fails to produce effective helping. We then elaborate on the conditions needed for an accurate assessment of others’ situations: the ability to pay (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark  
  • Simply Good: A Defence of the Principia.Miles Tucker - 2018 - Utilitas 30 (3):253-270.
    Moore's moral programme is increasingly unpopular. Judith Jarvis Thomson's attack has been especially influential; she says the Moorean project fails because ‘there is no such thing as goodness’. I argue that her objection does not succeed: while Thomson is correct that the kind of generic goodness she targets is incoherent, it is not, I believe, the kind of goodness central to the Principia. Still, Moore's critics will resist. Some reply that we cannot understand Moorean goodness without generic goodness. Others claim (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   2 citations  
  • Moral affordances and the demands of fittingness.Fabienne Peter - 2024 - Philosophical Psychology 37 (7):1948-1970.
    Some situations appear to make moral demands on us – they call for a certain response. How can we account for such paradigmatic moral experiences? And what normative properties or relations are involved? This paper argues that we can account for such moral experiences in terms of moral affordances, where moral affordances are opportunities for fitting action. The paper demonstrates that the concept of affordances helps to generate new insight in moral inquiry, especially in relation to the moral significance of (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   1 citation  
  • On the Good that Moves Us.Julien A. Deonna - 2020 - The Monist 103 (2):190-204.
    In this article, I provide a detailed characterization of being moved, which I claim is a distinct emotion. Being moved is the experience of being struck by the goodness of some specific positive value being exemplified. I start by expounding this account. Next, I discuss three issues that have emerged in the literature regarding it. These concern respectively the valence of being moved, the scope of the values that may constitute its particular objects, and the cognitive sophistication required for experiencing (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   6 citations  
  • Reasons and Normativity.Jakob Green Werkmäster - 2019 - Dissertation, Lund University
    Normative reasons are of constant importance to us as agents trying to navigate through life. For this reason it is natural and vital to ask philosophical questions about reasons and the normative realm. This thesis explores various issues concerning reasons and normativity. The thesis consists of five free-standingpapers and an extended introduction. The aim of the extended introduction is not merely to situate the papers within a wider philosophical context but also to provide an overview of some of the central (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark  
  • On the Fulfillment of Moral Obligation.Michael J. Zimmerman - 2006 - Ethical Theory and Moral Practice 9 (5):577-597.
    This paper considers three general views about the nature of moral obligation and three particular answers concerning the following question: if on Monday you lend me a book that I promise to return to you by Friday, what precisely is my obligation to you and what constitutes its fulfillment? The example is borrowed from W.D. Ross, who in The Right and the Good proposed what he called the Objective View of obligation, from which he inferred what is here called the (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark  
  • Creativity and the Value of Virtue.Glen Pettigrove - 2022 - Australasian Philosophical Review 6 (2):204-218.
    1. This is the second in a two-part investigation of the relationship between virtue and value. It focuses principally on two questions that part 1 [Pettigrove 2022] left readers asking.1 First, is...
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   3 citations  
  • No fact of the middle.Justin Khoo - 2021 - Noûs 56 (4):1000-1022.
    A middle fact is a true proposition about what would have happened had A been true (where A is in fact false), whose truth isn't entailed by any non-counterfactual facts. I argue that there are no middle facts; if there were, we wouldn't know them, and our ignorance of them would result in ignorance about whether regret is fitting in cases where we clearly know it is. But there's a problem. Consider an unflipped fair coin which is such that no (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   2 citations  
  • Normative Accounts of Fundamentality.Kris McDaniel - 2017 - Philosophical Issues 27 (1):167-183.
    I describe a number of views in which metaphysical fundamentality is accounted for in normative terms. After describing many different ways this key idea could be developed, I turn to developing the idea in one specific way. After all, the more detailed the proposal, the easier it is to assess whether it works. The rough idea is that what it is for a property to be fundamental is for it to be prima facie obligatory to theorize in terms of that (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   5 citations  
  • A Defense of the Objective/subjective Moral Ought Distinction.Kristian Olsen - 2017 - The Journal of Ethics 21 (4):351-373.
    In this paper, I motivate and defend the distinction between an objective and a subjective moral sense of “ought.” I begin by looking at the standard way the distinction is motivated, namely by appealing to relatively simple cases where an agent does something she thinks is best, but her action has a tragic outcome. I argue that these cases fail to do the job—the intuitions they elicit can be explained without having to distinguish between different senses of “ought.” However, these (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   8 citations  
  • Blame as a sentiment.Marta Johansson Werkmäster - 2022 - International Journal of Philosophical Studies 30 (3):239-253.
    The nature of blame is not to be identified solely with a judgment, or an overt act, or an angry emotion. Instead, blame should be identified with a sentiment: more specifically, a multi-track disposition that manifests itself in various different emotions, thoughts or actions in a range of different circumstances. This paper aims to argue for these two claims. I start by arguing that blame is not solely a judgment, overt act, or an angry emotion. Then I develop the view (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   1 citation  
  • On the Nature, Existence and Significance of Organic Unities.Michael J. Zimmerman - 2015 - Journal of Ethics and Social Philosophy 8 (3):1-25.
    Many philosophers have endorsed G. E. Moore’s principle of organic unities – according to which the value of a whole must not be assumed to be the same as the sum of the values of its parts – claiming this principle to be of fundamental importance to ethics. In this paper, I cast doubt on the principle. In Section 1, I provide a provisional reformulation of the principle of organic unities and contrast such unities with mere sums of value. In (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   2 citations  
  • Velleman on Reacting and Valuing.Justin D'Arms - 2014 - Abstracta 8 (S7):23-29.
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark  
  • Judith Jarvis Thomson, goodness and advice (princeton, NJ: Princeton university press, 2000), XVI + 188 pp. [REVIEW]Michael J. Zimmerman - 2004 - Noûs 38 (3):534–552.
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark  
  • (1 other version)Responsibility, Reaction, and Value.Michael J. Zimmerman - 2010 - The Journal of Ethics 14 (2):103-115.
    Many writers accept the following thesis about responsibility: (R) For one to be responsible for something is for one to be such that it is fitting that one be the object of some reactive attitude with respect to that thing. This thesis bears a striking resemblance to a thesis about value that is also accepted by many writers: (V) For something to be good (or neutral, or bad) is for it to be such that it is fitting that it be (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   9 citations