The need to distinguish between logical and extra-logical varieties of inference, entailment, validity, and consistency has played a prominent role in meta-ethical debates between expressivists and descriptivists. But, to date, the importance that matters of logical form play in these distinctions has been overlooked. That’s a mistake given the foundational place that logical form plays in our understanding of the difference between the logical and the extra-logical. This essay argues that descriptivists are better positioned than their expressivist rivals to provide (...) the needed account of logical form, and so better able to capture the needed distinctions. This finding is significant for several reasons: First, it provides a new argument against expressivism. Second, it reveals that descriptivists can make use of this new argument only if they are willing to take a controversial—but plausible—stand on claims about the nature and foundations of logic. (shrink)

A growing body of work argues that we should reform problematic emotions like anxiety, anger, and shame: doing this will allow us to better harness the contributions that these emotions can make to our agency and wellbeing. But feminist philosophers worry that prescriptions to correct these inappropriate emotions will only further marginalize women, minorities, and other members of subordinated groups. While much in these debates turns on empirical questions about how we can change problematic emotion norms for the better, to (...) date, little has been done by either side to assess how we might do this, much less in ways that are responsive to the feminists’ worries. Drawing on research in cognitive science, this paper argues that though the feminists’ worries are real, the leading proposals for remedying them are inadequate. It then develops an alternative strategy for reshaping problematic emotion norms—one that’s sensitive to the feminists’ concerns. (shrink)

Allan Gibbard maintains that his plan-based expressivism allows for a particular type of innocent mistake: I can agree that your plan to X makes sense (say, because it was based on advice from someone you trust), while nonetheless insisting that it is incorrect (e.g., because you chose a bad advisor). However, Steve Daskal has recently argued that there are significant limitations in Gibbard’s account of how we can be mistaken about the normative judgments we make. This essay refines Gibbard’s account (...) in order to show--contra Daskal--that expressivists can deliver a surprisingly robust form of normative objectivity. (shrink)

T.M. Scanlon’s ‘reasons fundamentalism’ is thought to face difficulties answering the normative question—that is, explaining why it’s irrational to not do what you judge yourself to have most reason to do (e.g., Dreier 2014a). I argue that this difficulty results from Scanlon’s failure to provide a theory of mind that can give substance to his account of normative judgment and its tie to motivation. A central aim of this paper is to address this deficiency. To do this, I draw on (...) broadly cognitivist theories of emotion (e.g., Nussbaum 2001, Roberts 2013). These theories are interesting because they view emotions as cognitive states from which motivation emerges. Thus, they provide a model Scanlon can use to develop a richer account of both the judgment-motivation connection and the irrationality of not doing what you judge yourself to have most reason to do. However, the success is only partial—even this more developed proposal fails to give a satisfactory answer to the normative question. (shrink)

Emotion plays an important role in securing social stability. But while emotions like fear, anger, and guilt have received much attention in this context, little work has been done to understand the role that anxiety plays. That’s unfortunate. I argue that a particular form of anxiety—what I call ‘practical anxiety’—plays an important, but as of yet unrecognized, role in norm-based social regulation. More specifically, it provides a valuable form of metacognition, one that contributes to social stability by helping individuals negotiate (...) the challenges that come from having to act in the face of unclear norms. (shrink)

Western philosophers have generally neglected honor as a moral phenomenon worthy of serious study. Appiah’s recent work on honor in moral revolutions is an important exception, but even he is careful to separate honor from morality, regarding it as only “an ally” of morality. In this paper we take Appiah to be right about the psychological, social, and historical role honor has played in three notable moral revolutions, but wrong about the moral nature of honor. We defend two new theses: (...) First, honor is an emotional and moral form of recognition respect that can hinder or aid moral progress. Second, honor, so conceived, can play a rational role in progressive moral change, as it did among the working class in the British abolition of slave trade, when the pressure of moral consistency moved them to protest American slavery as an affront to their honor without change in their moral belief that slavery is wrong. (shrink)

In recent times, comments have been made and arguments advanced in support of metaethical positions based on the phenomenology of ethical experience – in other words, the feel that accompanies our ethical experiences. In this paper I cast doubt on whether ethical phenomenology supports metaethical positions to any great extent and try to tease out what is involved in giving a phenomenological argument. I consider three such positions: independent moral realism (IMR), another type of moral realism – sensibility theory – (...) and noncognitivism. Phenomenological arguments have been used in support of the first two positions, but my general claim is that ethical phenomenology supports no metaethical position over any other.I discuss two types of phenomenological argument that might be offered in support of different types of moral realism, although I couch my debate in terms of IMR. The first argument asserts that ethical properties are not experienced in the way that rivals to IMR say we experience them. Against this I claim that it is odd to think that one could experience ethical properties as any metaethical theory characterizes them. The second argument is more complicated: the general thought is that an adequate metaethical theory should not distort our ethical experience unduly. I consider one aspect of our ethical experience – that there is some ethical authority to which our judgements answer – in order to illustrate this idea. I discuss why IMRealists might think that this phenomenon supports their position. Against them I claim that other metaethical positions might be able to accommodate the phenomenon of ethical authority. Even if they cannot, then, secondly, I argue that there are other aspects of our ethical experience that sit more naturally with other metaethical positions. Hence, one cannot argue that ethical phenomenology as a whole supports one theory over any others. (shrink)

This essay aims to delineate Mengzi’s view of emotion by analyzing his first ethical sprout, often referred to by the Chinese term cèyǐn zhī xīn 惻隱之心.Previous scholars usually translate this term as “compassion,” “sympathy,” or “commiseration,” in the sense of the painful feeling one feels at the misfortune of others. My goal in this article is to clarify the nature of this painful feeling, and specifically I argue that (1) cèyǐn zhī xīn is primarily construing another being’s misfortune with sympathetic (...) concern, and that (2) the painfulness of cèyǐn zhī xīn comes from this concern-based construal of the object of one’s compassion. My interpretation of cèyǐn zhī xīn as a concern-based construal is an attempt to construct an important alternative to the inclinational view of Mengzian emotions, and it could be also considered as making a crucial step toward a new interpretation of the Mengzian theory of emotional cultivation. (shrink)

Most management researchers pause at the threshold of objective right and wrong. Their hesitation is understandable. Values imply a “subjective,” personal dimension, one that can invite religious and moral interference in research. The dominant epistemological camps of positivism and subjectivism in management stumble over the notion of moral objectivity. Empirical research can study values in human behavior, but hard-headed scientists should not assume that one value can be objectively better than another. In this article, we invite management researchers to rethink (...) this presumption. We show how accepting at least a limited form of moral objectivity, namely, an epistemic orientation that seeks objective moral reasons, can benefit management research by 1. guiding research practice; 2. using patterns of moral objectivity as clues for formulating empirical hypotheses for psychological explanations; and 3. adding prescriptive power to empirical theories. (shrink)

According to perspectivism about moral obligation, our obligations are affected by our epistemic circumstances. But how exactly should this claim be understood? On Zimmerman’s “Prospective View”, perspectivism is spelled out as the thesis that an option is obligatory if and only if it maximizes what Zimmerman calls “prospective value”, which is in turn determined by the agent’s present evidence. In this article, I raise two objections to this approach. Firstly, I argue that spelling out the difference between perspectivism and anti-perspectivism (...) in terms of value creates a number of problems that can be avoided by an account that proceeds in terms of reasons. Secondly, I argue that Zimmerman focuses on the wrong body of evidence, and that this commits him to an implausible solution to the problem that perspectivists face with regard to advice from better-informed sources. (shrink)

I argue that not all context dependent expressions are alike. Pure (or ordinary) indexicals behave more or less as Kaplan thought. But quasi indexicals behave in some ways like indexicals and in other ways not like indexicals. A quasi indexical sentence φ allows for cases in which one party utters φ and the other its negation, and neither party’s claim has to be false. In this sense, quasi indexicals are like pure indexicals (think: “I am a doctor”/“I am not a (...) doctor” as uttered by different individuals). In such cases involving a pure indexical sentence, it is not appropriate for the two parties to reject each other’s claims by saying, “No.” However, in such cases involving a quasi indexical sentence, it is appropriate for the par- ties to reject each other’s claims. In this sense, quasi indexicals are not like pure indexicals. Drawing on experimental evidence, I argue that gradable adjectives like “rich” are quasi indexicals in this sense. e existence of quasi indexicals raises trouble for many existing theories of context dependence, including standard contextualist and relativist theories. I propose an alternative semantic and pragmatic theory of quasi indexicals, negotiated contextualism, that combines insights from Kaplan 1989 and Lewis 1979. On my theory, rejection is licensed with quasi indexicals (even when neither of the claims involved has to be false) because the two utterances involve conflicting proposals about how to update the conversational score. I also adduce evidence that conflicting truth value assessments of a single quasi indexical utterance exhibit the same behavior. I argue that negotiated contextualism can account for this puzzling property of quasi indexicals as well. (shrink)

There was a time when meta-ethical expressivism seemed to be the only game in town for meta-ethical non-representationalists. In recent years, though, meta-ethical inferentialism has emerged as a promising non-representationalist alternative. So far, however, inferentialists lack something that would really allow them to draw level with expressivists. This is an explanation for the distinctive difference between normative and descriptive vocabulary when it comes to disagreement—something expressivists can explain in terms of the difference between representational and desire-like states and which constitutes (...) one of the primary motivations for expressivism. This paper develops a novel and distinctive account for this difference on behalf of inferentialists, based on the different functions of these two vocabularies. Not only does this account help inferentialists, it also shows how non-representionalist accounts can capture the relevant disagreement phenomena without appealing to the sorts of desire-like states expressivists tend to appeal to. (shrink)

A core commitment of meta-ethical expressivism is that ordinary descriptive judgements are representational states, while normative judgements are non-representational directive states. Traditionally, this commitment has been understood as a psychological thesis about the nature of normative judgements, as the view that normative judgements consist in certain sorts of conative propositional attitudes. This paper’s aim is to challenge this reading and to show that changing our view on how this commitment is to be understood opens up space for attractive forms of (...) expressivism. The paper argues this by example: by presenting one of the possible expressivist views that can be developed on this reading and by arguing that this view has distinctive advantages over forms of expressivism that endorse the traditional interpretation of expressivism. (shrink)

Quasi-realism prominently figures in the expressivist research program. However, many complain that it has become increasingly unclear what exactly quasi-realism involves. This paper offers clarification. It argues that we need to distinguish two distinctive views that might be and have been pursued under the label “quasi-realism”: conciliatory expressivism and quasi-realism properly so-called. Of these, only conciliatory expressivism is a genuinely meta-ethical project, while quasi-realism is a first-order normative view. This paper demonstrates the fruitfulness of these clarifications by using them to (...) address Terence Cuneo’s recent challenge that quasi-realist expressivists lack the resources to plausibly accommodate certain sorts of data points. (shrink)

Despite the efforts of meta-ethical expressivists to rebut such worries, one objection raised over and over again against expressivism is that, if the theory is true, matters of morality must be mind-dependent in some objectionable way. This paper develops an argument which not only shows that this is and cannot be the case, but also – and perhaps more importantly – offers a diagnosis why philosophers are nevertheless so often led to think otherwise.

Much of the recent work in psychology (and affective science) has shown that humans regulate their emotions nearly constantly, sometimes well and sometimes poorly. I argue that properly regulating one’s emotions displays emotional rationality, and failing to do so displays emotional irrationality. If an agent feels an emotion that is obviously problematic for the agent to feel and she is aware that it is problematic, then the agent ought to regulate her emotions in future similar situations. To capture this aspect (...) of emotional rationality, I introduce the concept of imprudence, which is meant to capture a familiar way that we assess each other’s emotions, despite the fact that it has yet to be a factor in the literature on emotions in philosophy, psychology, or affective science. (shrink)

A longstanding debate regarding the nature of consent has marked a tri-fold division among philosophical and legal theorists according to whether they take consent to be a type of mental state, a form of behaviour, or some hybrid of the two. Theorists on all sides acknowledge that ordinary language cannot serve as a guide to resolving this ontological question, given the polysemy of the word “consent” in ordinary language. Similar observations have been noted about the function of consent in the (...) law and use of the word “consent” in legal contexts. This paper makes a parallel argument regarding consent’s characteristic normative role: roughly, to transform moral prohibitions into permissions. This role is neither unique nor essential to any one particular kind of thing, be it a mental state, form of behaviour, or hybrid of the two—rather, it is played by mental states and behaviour in independent and context-sensitive ways. The upshot is that insofar as we are interested in its normative implications, we ought to adopt a pluralistic approach to consent which gives independent weight to the moral contributions of facts about mental states and facts about behaviour relative to a context. (shrink)

My thesis is that contemporary ethics needs to reconceptualize its notion of the "ethical subject/agent." In developing this argument, I draw on three sources: (1) the field of moral psychology, (2) philosophical explorations of the concepts of "moral responsibility" and "moral community, and (3) the work of American philosophers such as Josiah Royce and John Dewey. Primary attention will be given to the latter two sources, though, given the short span of this essay, only brief references to Royce and Dewey (...) are possible, even though these philosophers provide the foundational theoretical framework for any reconceptualization efforts. Indeed, these philosophers, as well as William James, engaged in and drew upon .. (shrink)

It has become common to take reasons to form a basic normative category that is not amenable to non-circular analysis. This paper offers a novel characterization of reasons in terms of how we ought or it would be good for us to think in response to our awareness of facts, and thus rejects such Reason Primitivism. Briefly, for r to be a normative reason for A to φ is for it to be the case that A ought to conduct her (...) φ-relevant thinking in a φ-friendly manner, given her awareness of r. In mechanistic terms, this is to say that the psychological mechanisms responsible for A’s potentially φ-ing ought to be causally influenced in the direction of φ-ing by her awareness of r. For r to be an evaluative reason for A to φ is for it to be the case that it is desirable for A to conduct her φ-relevant thinking in a more or less φ-friendly manner, given her awareness of r. What someone ought to do or what it is desirable for someone to do is in turn to be understood in terms of fittingness of different positive or negative reactions. Linking the favoring relation between a fact and an action or belief explicitly with fittingness of attitudes towards the subject reveals the sense in which reasons are normative or evaluative. The paper also responds to six potential challenges to the view and argues it has certain advantages over competing reductionist proposals. (shrink)

We argue that an expressivist interpretation of "The Will to Believe" provides a fruitful way of understanding this widely-read but perplexing document. James approaches questions about our intellectual obligations from two quite different standpoints. He first defends an expressivist interpretation of judgments of intellectual obligation; they are "only expressions of our passional life". Only then does James argue against evidentialism, and both his criticisms of Clifford and his defense of a more flexible ethics of belief presuppose this independently-defended expressivism. James (...) puts forward his ethics of belief as healthy or appropriate, rather than as correct. (shrink)

The aim of the paper is to state a version of epistemic expressivism regarding knowledge, and to suggest how this expressivism about knowledge explains the value of knowledge. The paper considers how an account of the value of knowledge based on expressivism about knowledge responds to the Meno Problem, the Swamping Problem, and a variety of other questions that pertains to the value of knowledge, and the role of knowledge in our cognitive ecology.

This paper presents a series of arguments aimed at showing that, for an important subclass of social rules—non‐summary rules—no adequate metaphysical account has been given, and it tentatively suggests that no such account can be given. The category of non‐summary rules is an important one, as it includes the rules of etiquette, fashion, chess, basketball, California state law, descriptive English grammar, and so on. This paper begins with behavioristic accounts of the conditions for the existence of such rules, and proceeds (...) through progressively more complex accounts, all the way to what are labeled ‘normative attitude accounts,’ which are prima facie plausible and particularly popular. In each case it is argued that the type of account under consideration cannot explain the existence of the relevant type of social rule. (shrink)

In this paper, I present and defend a novel version of the Reactive Attitude account of moral blameworthiness. In Section 1, I introduce the Reactive Attitude account and outline Allan Gibbard's version of it. In Section 2, I present the Wrong Kind of Reasons Problem, which has been at the heart of much recent discussion about the nature of value, and explain why a reformulation of it causes serious problems for versions of the Reactive Attitude account such as Gibbard's. In (...) Section 3, I consider some ways in which Gibbard might attempt to avoid the Wrong Kind of Reason Problem. I argue that all of these ways fail to achieve their aim and further contend that the Wrong Kind of Reason Problem cannot be solved in a sufficiently convincing manner by the widely used method of making ad hoc distinctions among kinds of properties, kinds of attitudes, and kinds of reasons. In Section 4, I sketch my own version of the Reactive Attitude account of moral blameworthiness and show that it simply avoids the Wrong Kind of Reason Problem rather than attempting to solve the problem on a piecemeal basis. (shrink)

In this paper, I argue that theists are extremely well-situated with respect to developing metaethical accounts that qualify as ‘robust’ versions of moral realism. In the first part of the essay, a number of metaethical desiderata are identified. In the second part, theistic strategies for accommodating those desiderata are explained and defended. The upshot is that, contrary to the received philosophical wisdom, there are good theoretical reasons for theistic philosophers to seek to develop metaethical accounts that ground moral facts in (...) facts about God. (shrink)

In this article, I shall suggest an approach to the justification of normative moral principles which leads, I think, to utilitarianism. The approach is based on asking what moral norms we would each endorse if we had no prior moral commitments. I argue that we would endorse norms that lead to the satisfaction of all our nonmoral values or goals. The same approach leads to a view of utility as consisting of those goals that we would want satisfied. In the (...) second half of the article, I examine the implication of this view for several issues about the nature of utility, such as the use of past and future goals. The argument for utilitarianism is not completed here. The rest of it requires a defense of expected-utility theory, of interpersonal comparison, and of equal consideration. (shrink)

Prinz claims that empirical work on emotions and moral judgement can help us resolve longstanding metaethical disputes in favour of simple sentimentalism. I argue that the empirical evidence he marshals does not have the metaethical implications he claims: the studies purporting to show that having an emotion is sufficient for making a moral judgement are tendentiously described. We are entitled to ascribe competence with moral concepts to experimental subjects only if we suppose that they would withdraw their moral judgement on (...) learning that they were fully explained by hypnotically induced disgust. Genuine moral judgements must be reason-responsive. To capture the reason-responsiveness of moral judgement, we must turn to either neo-sentimentalism or to a non-sentimentalist metaethics, either of which is fully compatible with the empirical evidence Prinz cites. (shrink)

This paper employs Ruth Millikan’s biosemantic theory of representation to develop a proposal about the function of ethical claims and judgments. I propose that ethical claims and judgments (or ethical ‘affirmations’) have the function of simultaneously tracking the morally salient features of social situations and directing behavior that coordinates in a collectively beneficial way around those features. Thus, ethical affirmations count as a species of what Millikan labels ‘Pushmi-Pullyu’ representations that simultaneously have a descriptive and a directive direction of fit. (...) This proposal supports a version of motivational internalism that can accommodate a surprising range of actual failures of motivation. I also briefly situate this proposal in the metaethical literature, contrasting it with other hybrid views incorporating elements of cognitivism and expressivism. (shrink)

This paper employs Ruth Millikan’s biosemantic theory of representation to develop a proposal about the function of ethical claims and judgments. I propose that ethical claims and judgments (or ethical ‘affirmations’) have the function of simultaneously tracking the morally salient features of social situations and directing behavior that coordinates in a collectively beneficial way around those features. Thus, ethical affirmations count as a species of what Millikan labels ‘Pushmi-Pullyu’ representations that simultaneously have a descriptive and a directive direction of fit. (...) This proposal supports a version of motivational internalism that can accommodate a surprising range of actual failures of motivation. I also briefly situate this proposal in the metaethical literature, contrasting it with other hybrid views incorporating elements of cognitivism and expressivism. (shrink)

In a number of recent philosophical debates, it has become common to distinguish between two kinds of normative reasons, often called the right kind of reasons (henceforth: RKR) and the wrong kind of reasons (henceforth: WKR). The distinction was first introduced in discussions of the so-called buck-passing account of value, which aims to analyze value properties in terms of reasons for pro-attitudes and has been argued to face the wrong kind of reasons problem. But nowadays it also gets applied in (...) other philosophical contexts and to reasons for other responses than pro-attitudes, for example in recent debates about evidentialism and pragmatism about reasons for belief. While there seems to be wide agreement that there is a general and uniform distinction that applies to reasons for different responses, there is little agreement about the scope, relevance and nature of this distinction. Our aim in this article is to shed some light on this issue by surveying the RKR/WKR distinction as it has been drawn with respect to different responses, and by examining how it can be understood as a uniform distinction across different contexts. We start by considering reasons for pro-attitudes and emotions in the context of the buck-passing account of value (§1). Subsequently we address the distinction that philosophers have drawn with respect to reasons for other attitudes, such as beliefs and intentions (§2), as well as with respect to reasons for action (§3). We discuss the similarities and differences between the ways in which philosophers have drawn the RKR/WKR distinction in these areas and offer different interpretations of the idea of a general, uniform distinction. The major upshot is that there is at least one interesting way of substantiating a general RKR/WKR distinction with respect to a broad range of attitudes as well as actions. We argue that this has important implications for the proper scope of buck-passing accounts and the status of the wrong kind of reasons problem (§4). (shrink)

Ordinary normative discourse includes talk about the reasons for action we had in the past but only came to discover in hindsight. In some cases, we come to discover these reasons not because new information has come to light, but because our values have changed. Contemporary metaethical views, namely Street's Humean constructivism and Blackburn's and Gibbard's quasi-realism, have some difficulty accounting for these reasons and the claims we make about them. This difficulty hinges on the diachronic complexity of these reasons (...) and claims. It cannot be the case that these reasons were constructed by the perspective we had in the past before our values changed. If there were no extant reasons in the past, then it would seem that our claims about them in the present cannot be true. Quasi-realists can account for the way in which reason claims purport to be true by appealing to a deflationary sense of truth and so can remain agnostic on the actual existence of these reasons. Nevertheless, Street argues that t.. (shrink)

This essay seeks to introduce representative beliefs, attitudes, policies, and practices from the Confucian tradition concerning the ethical aspects of abortion and bring these into productive engagement with some of the best and most influential philosophical accounts of abortion available in contemporary Anglo-American philosophy. The essay begins with a discussion of the ethical dimensions of abortion and a critical review of two of the best and most influential contemporary Western accounts; it then moves on to describe and discuss an alternative (...) Confucian approach. The aims are to demonstrate the resources within the Confucian tradition for providing a distinctive philosophical account of abortion and to show that comparative work has the potential to augment, amend, and ultimately enrich our understanding of this morally challenging aspect of human life. (shrink)

Moral abolitionists recommend that we get rid of moral discourse and moral judgement. At first glance this seems repugnant, but abolitionists think that we have overestimated the practical value of our moral framework and that eliminating it would be in our interests. I argue that abolitionism has a surprising amount going for it. Traditionally, abolitionism has been treated as an option available to moral error theorists. Error theorists say that moral discourse and judgement are committed to the existence of moral (...) properties, and that no such properties exist. After error theory is established, abolitionism is one potential way to proceed. However, many error theorists suggest that we retain moral discourse as a sort of fiction. I evaluate some attractions of both fictionalism and abolitionism, arguing that abolitionism is a plausible position. No one doubts that error theorists can be abolitionists. However, what has gone largely undiscussed is that it is open to others to be abolitionists as well. I argue that moral realists of a metaphysically robust sort can and perhaps should be abolitionists. ‘Realist abolitionism’ makes for a surprisingly neat theoretical package, and I conclude that it represents an interesting new option in the theoretical landscape. (shrink)

Predicates of taste, such as ‘fun’ and ‘tasty’, have received considerable attention in recent debates between contextualists and relativists, with considerations involving disagreement playing a central role. Considerations involving disagreement have been taken to present a problem for contextualist treatments of predicates of taste. My goal is to argue that considerations involving disagreement do not undermine contextualism. To the extent that relativism was supposed to be motivated by contextualists being unable to deal with disagreement, this motivation is lacking. The argument (...) against contextualism rests on a too simple and narrow conception of disagreement that turns out to be problematic once we consider a wider range of cases. If we reject the assumptions about disagreement that the argument rests on, it no longer poses a threat to contextualism. (shrink)

Accounts of scientific explanation disagree about what’s required for a cause, law, or other fact to be a reason why an event occurs. In short, they disagree about the conditions for explanatory relevance. Nonetheless, most accounts presuppose that claims about explanatory relevance play a descriptive role in tracking reality. By rejecting the need for this descriptivist assumption, I develop an expressivist account of explanatory relevance and explanation: to judge that an answer is explanatory is to express an attitude ofbeing for (...) being satisfied by that answer. I show how expressivism vindicates ordinary scientific discourse about explanation, including claims about the objectivity and mind-independence of explanations. By avoiding commitment to ontic relevance relations, I rehabilitate an irrealist conception of explanation. (shrink)

This article argues that there can be epistemic dilemmas: situations in which one faces conflicting epistemic requirements with the result that whatever one does, one is doomed to do wrong from the epistemic point of view. Accepting this view, I argue, may enable us to solve several epistemological puzzles.

Many believe that the rational evaluation of actions depends on the rational evaluation of even basic desires. Hume, though, viewed desires as "original existences" which cannot be contrary to either truth or reason. Contemporary critics of Hume, including Norman, Brandt and Parfit, have sought a basis for the rational evaluation of desires that would deny some basic desires reason-giving force. I side with Hume against these modern critics. Hume's concept of rational evaluation is admittedly too narrow; even basic desires are, (...) despite their nonrepresentational nature, subject to rational evaluation. But this evaluation is not relevant to their tendency to generate reasons for action, and does not undermine the spirit of the Humean view of rational action. (shrink)

Health communication researchers and practitioners continue to debate about the types of influence that are appropriate in health promotion. A widely held assumption is that health campaigns and communicators should respect the autonomy of their audiences, and that the most appropriate way to do so is to persuade them by means of truthful substantive information. This approach to ethical persuasion, though, suffers from certain blind spots. To account for circumstances when respecting autonomy might take a back seat to other ethical (...) considerations, a comprehensive framework for the ethics of health communication needs to acknowledge types of communication that aim to do something other than provide substantive information (disclosive and directive communication), and subjective circumstances when people are not motivated to process information or make active choices (low processing motivation and decision aversion). (shrink)

Internalists about reasons generally insist that if a putative reason, R, is to count as a genuine normative reason for a particular agent to do something, then R must make a rational connection to some desire or interest of the agent in question. If internalism is true, but moral reasons purport to apply to agents independently of the particular desires, interests, and commitments they have, then we may be forced to conclude that moral reasons are incoherent. Richard Joyce (2001) develops (...) an argument along these lines. Against this view, I argue that we can make sense of moral reasons as reasons that apply to, and are capable of motivating, agents independently of their prior interests and desires. More specifically, I argue that moral agents, in virtue of their capacities for empathy and shared intentionality, are sensitive to reasons that do not directly link up with their pre-existing ends. In particular, they are sensitive to, and hence can be motivated by, reasons grounded in the desires, projects, commitments, concerns, and interests of others. Moral reasons are a subset of this class of reasons to which moral agents are sensitive. Thus, moral agents can be motivated by moral reasons, even where such reasons fail to link up to their own pre-existing ends. (shrink)

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, (...) is as follows. Idealizing subjectivism generates too many ideal selves to deliver determinate or commensurable options regarding what non-ideal deliberating agents ought to do. My solution: these idealized options should be assessed from the only perspective we can, in fact, occupy, namely, that of our non-ideal, actual selves. Deciding what to do therefore becomes, in part, an exercise in deciding who to be. But one might now worry this just moves the arbitrariness bump in the rug. Privileging the perspective of our actual self seems contrary to the rationale for idealizing in the first place. I consider two solutions to the problem, one democratic, the other modelled on trusteeship. In the end, I argue, our actual self has complete freedom to choose the ideal self it grants rational authority. In the final part of the paper, I present my positive proposal as a solution to the underdetermination problem confronting the idealizing subjectivist and then argue that, so understood, this account vindicates a tidied-up version of how some reflective people already do deliberate in their everyday lives. This, in turn, suggests that a decision-procedure closely connected to the account is both possible and attractive. (shrink)

I argue for three principle claims. First, philosophers who seek to integrate the semantic and the intentional into a naturalistic metaphysical worldview need to address a task that they have thus far largely failed even to notice: explaining into- level connections between the physical and the intentional in a naturalistically acceptable way. Second, there are serious reasons to think that this task cannot be carried out in a way that would vindicate realism about intentionality. Third, there is much to be (...) said for an irrealist, non-eliminativist, naturalistic approach to intentionality that I call "preservative irrealism". (shrink)

Most contemporary philosophers of mind claim to be in search of a 'naturalistic' theory. However, when we look more closely, we find that there are a number of different and even conflicting ideas of what would count as a 'naturalization' of the mind. This article attempts to show what various naturalistic philosophies of mind have in common, and also how they differ from one another. Additionally, it explores the differences between naturalistic philosophies of mind and naturalisms found in ethics, epistemology, (...) and philosophy of science. Section 1 introduces a distinction between two types of project that have been styled 'naturalistic', which I call philosophical naturalism and empirical naturalism . Sections 2 to 6 canvass different strands of philosophical naturalism concerning the mind, followed by a much briefer discussion of attempts to provide empirical naturalizations of the mind in Section 7 . Section 8 concludes the essay with a consideration of the relations between philosophical and empirical naturalism in philosophy of mind, arguing that at least some types of philosophical naturalism are incompatible with empirical naturalism. (shrink)

Many philosophers have argued that moral disagreement raises metaphysical and/or epistemological challenges for moral realism. In this paper, I consider whether widespread moral disagreement raises a different sort of challenge by threatening the semantic commitments of moral realism. In particular, I suggest that the character of many moral disagreements gives us reason to suspect that not all competent moral speakers pick out the same properties as one another when they use moral terms. If this is so, both sides of a (...) moral dispute may speak truly, and the standard realist diagnosis of such disputes—that at most one party can be correct—is mistaken. My argumentative strategy is to first isolate some features of linguistic exchanges that provide evidence of a lack of co-reference, and then argue that many moral disputes have these features. I conclude by suggesting that there are plausible accounts of moral disputes that do not require co-reference. (shrink)