This article argues, against contemporary experimentalist criticism, that conceptual analysis has epistemic value, with a structure that encourages the development of interesting hypotheses which are of the right form to be valuable in diverse areas of philosophy. The article shows, by analysis of the Gettier programme, that conceptual analysis shares the proofs and refutations form Lakatos identified in mathematics. Upon discovery of a counterexample, this structure aids the search for a replacement hypothesis. The search is guided by heuristics. The heuristics (...) of conceptual analysis are similar to those in other interesting areas of scholarship, and so hypotheses generated by it are of the right form to be applicable to diverse areas. The article shows that the explanationist criterion in epistemology was developed and applied in this way. The epistemic value of conceptual analysis is oblique because it contributes not towards the main purpose of conceptual analysis but towards the reliable development of epistemically valuable hypotheses in philosophy and scholarship. (shrink)

Many naturalistically-minded philosophers want to accomplish a naturalistic reduction of normative (e.g. moral and epistemic) claims. Mindful of avoiding the naturalistic fallacy, such philosophers claim that they are not reducing moral and epistemic concepts or definitions. Rather, they are only reducing the extension of these normative terms, while admitting that the concepts possess a normative content that cannot be naturalistically reduced. But these philosophers run into a serious problem. I will argue that normative claims possess two dimensions of normativity. I (...) will further argue that certain of the reductionist’s commitments require that these two dimensions of normativity be given a naturalistic reduction, while the other of the reductionist’s commitments make such a reduction impossible. Thus, the reductionist’s commitments both require and forbid a reductionist account of morality and epistemology. Thus, as we will see, reductionism is torn between two incompatible requirements, and must fail. (shrink)

The critical focus of this paper is on a claim made explicitly by Gilbert Harman and accepted implicitly by numerous others, the claim that naturalism supports concurrent defense of scientific objectivism and moral relativism. I challenge the assumptions of Harman's ‘argument from naturalism' used to support this combination of positions, utilizing. Hilary Putnam’s ‘companions in guilt’ argument in order to counter it. The paper concludes that while domain-specific anti-realism is often warranted, Harman’s own views about the objectivity of facts and (...) the subjectivity of values are better seen as stemming from scientistic ideals of knowledge than from dictates of naturalism. Scientists qua scientists make value judgments, and setting aside scientistic assumptions and unrealizable conceptions of scientific objectivity should lead us to more symmetrical metaphilosophical conception of epistemic and ethical normativity than that which underlies Harman's account. (shrink)

How can an agent's desire or will give him reasons for acting? Not long ago, this might have seemed a silly question, since it was widely believed that all reasons for acting are based in the agent's desires. The interesting question, it seemed, was not how what an agent wants could give him reasons, but how anything else could. In recent years, however, this earlier orthodoxy has increasingly appeared wrongheaded as a growing number of philosophers have come to stress the (...) action-guiding role of reasons in deliberation from the agent's point of view. What a deliberating agent has in view is rarely his own will or desires as such, even if taking something as a reason is intimately tied to desire. Someone who wants to escape a burning building does not evaluate her options by considering which is likeliest to realize what she wants or wills. She is focused, rather, on her desire's object: getting out alive. The fact that a successful route would realize something she wants is apt to strike her as beside the point or, at best, as a trivial bonus. (shrink)

There is a class of views about our moral relations with non-human animals that share the idea that animals do not matter directly for ethical purposes: whatever duties or obligations we have with respect to animals are indirect, connected somehow to other duties or obligations – to other human beings, for example – in which the well-being or interests of animals do not figure. Criticisms of indirect duty theories have often focused either upon denying the link that is supposed to (...) exist between how we treat animals and how or whether we discharge other obligations or upon denying that the indirect duty theorist has an adequate account of the animal-related duties we are confident that we have. I shall not pursue either of these options. Instead, I shall argue, first, that there is a tension within the indirect duty theorist’s view that makes it doubtful that anything will enable him to get what he wants from a theory, and second, that even if the necessary link between the way animals and humans are treated is assumed to be present, it will turn out that its best explanation will imply that there are direct duties to animals after all. (shrink)

Someone who knew everything about the world’s physical nature could, apparently, suffer from ignorance about various aspects of conscious experience. Someone who knew everything about the world’s physical and mental nature could, apparently, suffer from moral ignorance. Does it follow that there are ways the world is, over and above the way it is physically or psychophysically? This paper defends a negative answer, based on a distinction between knowing the fact that p and knowing that p. This distinction is made (...) intelligible by reference to criterial connections between the possession of moral or phenomenal knowledge, and the satisfaction of cognitively neutral conditions of desire and experiential history. The existence of such connections in the moral case makes for an efficient dissolution of the so-called moral problem. (shrink)

Consider the following facts about the average, philosophically untrained moral relativist: (1.1) The average moral relativist denies the existence of “absolute moral truths.” (1.2) The average moral relativist often expresses her commitment to moral relativism with slogans like ‘What’s true (or right) for you may not be what’s true (or right) for me’ or ‘What’s true (or right) for your culture may not be what’s true (or right) for my culture.’ (1.3) The average moral relativist endorses relativistic views of morality (...) without endorsing relativistic views about science or mathematics. (1.4) The average moral relativist takes moral relativism to be non-relatively true and does not think there is anything contradictory about doing so. (1.5) The average moral relativist adopts an egalitarian attitude toward a wide range of moral values, practices and beliefs, claiming they are all equally legitimate or correct. (1.6) The average moral relativist often admonishes others to be more tolerant of those who engage in alternative ethical practices and to refrain from making negative moral judgments about them. (1.7) The average moral relativist sometimes makes negative moral judgments about the behavior of others—e.g., by harshly judging moral absolutists to be intolerant—but is less inclined to do so when the relativist’s metaethical views are salient in a context of judgment. (1.8) The average moral relativist takes anthropological evidence concerning the worldwide diversity of ethical views and practices to support moral relativism. (shrink)

I argue that, given evidence of the factors that tend to distort our intuitions, ethical intuitionists should disown a wide range of common moral intuitions, and that they should typically give preference to abstract, formal intuitions over more substantive ethical intuitions. In place of the common sense morality with which intuitionism has traditionally allied, the suggested approach may lead to a highly revisionary normative ethics.

One of the central tasks of meta-ethical inquiry is to accommodate the common-sense assumptions deeply embedded in our moral discourse. A comparison of the potential of secular and theistic ethics shows that, in the end, theists have a greater facility in achieving this accommodation task; it is easier to appreciate the action-guiding authority and binding nature of morality in a theistic rather than in a secular context. Theistic ethics has a further advantage in being able to accommodate not only this (...) essential conceptual feature of morality, but also the existence of moral requirements and their source of normativity. (shrink)

What exactly is reasoning? Like many other philosophers, I shall endorse a broadly causal conception of reasoning. Reasoning is a causal process, in which one mental event (say, one’s accepting the conclusion of a certain argument) is caused by an antecedent mental event (say, one’s considering the premises of the argument). Just like causal accounts of action and causal accounts of perception, causal accounts of reasoning have to confront a version of what has come to be known as the problem (...) of deviant causal chains. In this paper, I shall propose an account of the nature of reasoning, incorporating a solution to the specific version of the deviant causal chains problem that arises for accounts of reasoning. One striking feature of my solution is that it requires that certain normative facts are causally efficacious. It might be thought that this feature will make my account incompatible with any plausibly naturalistic approach to understanding the mind. I shall argue that this is not so: my account of the nature of reasoning is quite compatible with plausible versions of naturalism. (shrink)

The essay has two purposes. One is to point out connections and parallels between, On one hand, The debates of metaphysical realists and anti-Realists, And on the other hand, The debates surrounding moral realism. The second is to provide the outlines of a case for a kind of position that would generally be classified as moral realism. One feature of this position is that it emerges as parallel to, And compatible with, A metaphysical position that would generally be classified as (...) anti-Realism. (shrink)

What is the point of developing an epistemology for a topic—for example, morality? When is it appropriate to develop the epistemology of a topic? For many topics—for example, the topic of socks—we see no need to develop a special epistemology. Under what conditions, then, does a topic deserve its own epistemology? I seek to answer these questions in this article. I provide a criterion for deciding when we are warranted in developing an epistemological theory for a topic. I briefly apply (...) this criterion to moral epistemology and argue that some approaches to moral epistemology should be abandoned. I also argue that we can develop an epistemology for a topic without committing ourselves to a specific substantive theory of justification, such as reliabilism or coherentism, if we work within a suitably neutral framework. (shrink)

My first paper on the Is/Ought issue. The young Arthur Prior endorsed the Autonomy of Ethics, in the form of Hume’s No-Ought-From-Is (NOFI) but the later Prior developed a seemingly devastating counter-argument. I defend Prior's earlier logical thesis (albeit in a modified form) against his later self. However it is important to distinguish between three versions of the Autonomy of Ethics: Ontological, Semantic and Ontological. Ontological Autonomy is the thesis that moral judgments, to be true, must answer to a realm (...) of sui generis non-natural PROPERTIES. Semantic autonomy insists on a realm of sui generis non-natural PREDICATES which do not mean the same as any natural counterparts. Logical Autonomy maintains that moral conclusions cannot be derived from non-moral premises.-moral premises with the aid of logic alone. Logical Autonomy does not entail Semantic Autonomy and Semantic Autonomy does not entail Ontological Autonomy. But, given some plausible assumptions Ontological Autonomy entails Semantic Autonomy and given the conservativeness of logic – the idea that in a valid argument you don’t get out what you haven’t put in – Semantic Autonomy entails Logical Autonomy. So if Logical Autonomy is false – as Prior appears to prove – then Semantic and Ontological Autonomy would appear to be false too! I develop a version of Logical Autonomy (or NOFI) and vindicate it against Prior’s counterexamples, which are also counterexamples to the conservativeness of logic as traditionally conceived. The key concept here is an idea derived in part from Quine - that of INFERENCE-RELATIVE VACUITY. I prove that you cannot derive conclusions in which the moral terms appear non-vacuously from premises from which they are absent. But this is because you cannot derive conclusions in which ANY (non-logical) terms appear non-vacuously from premises from which they are absent Thus NOFI or Logical Autonomy comes out as an instance of the conservativeness of logic. This means that the reverse entailment that I have suggested turns out to be a mistake. The falsehood of Logical Autonomy would not entail either the falsehood Semantic Autonomy or the falsehood of Ontological Autonomy, since Semantic Autonomy only entails Logical Autonomy with the aid of the conservativeness of logic of which Logical Autonomy is simply an instance. Thus NOFI or Logical Autonomy is vindicated, but it turns out to be a less world-shattering thesis than some have supposed. It provides no support for either non-cognitivism or non-naturalism. (shrink)

Discussion of moral explanation has reached an impasse, with proponents of contemporary ethical naturalism upholding the explanatory integrity of moral facts and properties, and opponents--including both antirealists and non-naturalistic realists--insisting that such robustly explanatory pretensions as moral theory has be explained away. I propose that the key to solving the problem lies in the question whether instances of moral properties are causally efficacious. It is argued that, given the truth of contemporary ethical naturalism, moral properties are causally efficacious if the (...) properties of the special sciences are. (shrink)

What contribution can the empirical sciences make to metaethics? This paper outlines an argument to a particular metaethical conclusion - that moral judgments are epistemically unjustified - that depends in large part on a posteriori premises.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the relationship between naturalism and morality and to assess their compatibility. Naturalism is defined as respect for science, for its methods and results. From this respect for science, one can infer two distinct philosophical naturalisms: the methodological and the metaphysical. The relationship between these forms of naturalism and morality depends on the correct conception of morality. This paper differentiates between objectively realistic conception and all other conceptions and argues that while other conceptions (...) can easily fit morality into a naturalistic worldview, objectively realistic conception faces theoretical challenges, including the challenge of explaining how moral facts and concepts play an explanatory role and the challenge of bridging the is/ought gap. The paper focuses on Railton's ethical naturalism as a prominent naturalistic theory of morality and evaluates its ability to overcome these challenges. The conclusion is that, so long as we consider a theory like Railton's, naturalism and realistically conceived morality are incompatible. (shrink)

Ethics is frequently concerned with how to resolve clashes between competing claims from claimants of different kinds. The idea of moral status is crucial to understanding how (1) competing claims...

It is highly consensual that we can perceive so-called low-level properties such as shape, color, motion, spatial location, and illumination through vision. But it’s more controversial whether the contents of visual perception can reach beyond the limits of weakness and involve high-level properties as well. By high-level property, it’s meant properties such as natural/artificial/functional kind, causality, dispositional properties, gender, roughness, aesthetic properties, bodily sensations, states of mind, agency features, action features, and moral properties. In this dissertation, setting Susanna Siegel's rich (...) content thesis as a framework and relying on her method of phenomenal contrast as a way of discovering the contents, I am intending to assess an account of perceiving moral properties. I will impose two objections against this model: The first one invokes the ignored role of imagination and recollection in the method and generally targets the method of contrast. The second one invokes the thesis of phenomenal holism and targets specifically the machinery of drawing contrast in the proposed moral pair. Finally, I’ll conclude that this account of moral perception, as well as other phenomenal-contrast-based accounts, is not tenable. -/- . (shrink)

Abstract“The wrongness of Albert's action causally explains why Jane judged that his action was wrong”. This type of causal moral explanation has been extensively discussed in the recent metaethical literature. This paper motivates the following claims about this type of moral explanation. First, a typical defence of this type of moral explanation suggested in the literature does not work because it predicts inaccurate modal information. Second, focusing on different aspects of the ways moral judgements are generated provides better chances for (...) the defender of this type of moral explanation. Third, the strategy mentioned in the previous point leads us to the following alternative evaluative explanation: The property of being a harmful action explains a recognisable pattern of moral judgements observed in the relevant empirical studies. One crucial implication the paper alludes to is a localist approach to the debates concerning moral realism: We should consider each moral property's ontological genuineness separately, referring to specific empirical findings that are particularly relevant to the target moral property in question. Such a localist approach can provide solid resources for realists to respond to various anti‐realist challenges, such as an influential evolutionary debunking argument. (shrink)

Moral perception is typically understood as moral properties perception, i.e., the perceptual registration of moral properties such as wrongness or dignity. In this article, I defend a view of moral perception as a process that involves imaginative apprehension of reality. It is meant as an adjustment to the dominant view of moral perception as moral properties perception and as an addition to existing Murdochian approaches to moral perception. The view I present here builds on Iris Murdoch’s moral psychology and holds (...) that moral perception is an imaginative exploration of the particularity of concrete objects of moral reality (e.g., persons, situations, and events), rather than a registration of moral properties. I argue that such imaginative apprehension includes direct and reflective uses of imagination and that this process grounds experiential moral knowledge that serves the ultimate role of moral perception: getting a better grip on concrete objects of moral reality. (shrink)

Moral realism faces a well known genealogical debunking challenge. I argue that the moral realist’s best response may involve abandoning metaphysical naturalism in favor of some form of axiarchism—the view, very roughly, that the natural world is “ordered to the good.” Axiarchism comes in both theistic and non-theistic forms, but all forms agree that the natural world exists and has certain basic features because it is good for it to exist and have those features. I argue that theistic and non-theistic (...) forms of axiarchism are better positioned than metaphysical naturalism to avoid two commitments that a moral realist should seek to avoid: that the correctness of our moral beliefs is a major coincidence, and that there is a complete explanation of our moral beliefs that does not mention any moral truths. (shrink)

The method of phenomenal contrast (in perception) invokes the phenomenal character of perceptual experience as a means to discover its contents. The method implicitly takes for granted that ‘what it is like’ to have a perceptual experience e is the same as ‘what it is like’ to imagine or recall it; accordingly, in its various proposed implementations, the method treats imaginations and/or recollections as interchangeable with real experiences. The method thus always contrasts a pair of experiences, at least one of (...) which is imagined or remembered rather than occurrent. Surveying all eighteen forms of implementing the method, I argue that in all of the proposed pairings, the substitution of imagination or recollection for perceptual experience in the method, is either inconceivable or impermissible. I identify four reasons why I think imagination cannot be substituted for real experience, and three reasons why recollection cannot be substituted for real experience. If my argument works, there is no form of implementing the method that is useful for discovering the contents of experience, and thus the method is not a well‐functioning tool to study the contents of perception. (shrink)

Gideon Rosen, Brian Leiter, and Catarina Dutilh Novaes raise deep questions about the arguments in Morality and Mathematics (M&M). Their objections bear on practical deliberation, the formulation of mathematical pluralism, the problem of universals, the argument from moral disagreement, moral ‘perception’, the contingency of our mathematical practices, and the purpose of proof. In this response, I address their objections, and the broader issues that they raise.

The motivating question of this paper is: ‘How are our beliefs in the theorems of mathematics justified?’ This is distinguished from the question ‘How are our mathematical beliefs reliably true?’ We examine an influential answer, outlined by Russell, championed by Gödel, and developed by those searching for new axioms to settle undecidables, that our mathematical beliefs are justified by ‘intuitions’, as our scientific beliefs are justified by observations. On this view, axioms are analogous to laws of nature. They are postulated (...) to best systematize the data to be explained. We argue that there is a decisive difference between the cases. There is agreement on the data to be systematized in the scientific case that has no analog in the mathematical one. There is virtual consensus over observations, but conspicuous dispute over intuitions. In this respect, mathematics more closely resembles stereotypical philosophy. We conclude by distinguishing two ideas that have long been associated -- realism (the idea that there is an independent reality) and objectivity (the idea that in a disagreement, only one of us can be right). We argue that, while realism is true of mathematics and philosophy, these domains fail to be objective. One upshot of the discussion is that even questions of fundamental physics may fail to be objective in roughly the sense that the question, ‘Is the Parallel Postulate is true?’, understood as one of pure mathematics, fails to be. Another is a kind of pragmatism. Factual questions in mathematics, modality, logic, and evaluative areas go proxy for non-factual practical ones. -/- . (shrink)

According to contentful moral perception (CMP), moral properties can be perceived in the same sense as tables, tigers, and tomatoes. Recently, Heather Logue (2012) has distinguished between two potential ways of perceiving a property. A Kantian Property (KP) in perception is one in which a perceiver’s access involves a detection of the property via a representational vehicle. A Berkeleyan Property (BP) in perception is one in which a perceiver’s access to the property involves that property as partly constitutive of the (...) experience itself. In this paper, I set aside generalized arguments in favor of one view or another, and instead ask whether proponents of CMP have reasons to understand moral perception as Kantian or Berkeleyan. I explore three possible explanatory differences—(a) explaining the intrinsic motivating force of moral perceptions, (b) providing a metasemantics for moral properties, and (c) providing an epistemology of the normative authority of moral properties. (shrink)

Students sometimes profess moral relativism or skepticism with retorts like ‘how can we know?’ or ‘it’s all relative!’ Here I defend a pedagogical method to defuse moral relativism and moral skepticism using phenomenal conservatism: if it seems to S that p, S has defeasible justification to believe that p; e.g., moral seemings, like perceptual ones, are defeasibly justified. The purpose of defusing moral skepticism and relativism is to prevent these metaethical views from acting as stumbling blocks to insightful ethical inquiry (...) in the classroom. This approach puts the burden of proof on the relativist or skeptic (to justify their view, contrary to appearances), and makes their views costlier: if we reject moral seemings as a kind, we must reject other less objectionable seemings too (e.g. intellectual seemings). Finally, this approach improves learning outcomes by ‘hooking onto’ student familiarity with seemings, e.g. seeing is (defeasibly justified) believing. (shrink)

In moral psychology, “psychological rationalism” is the view that moral judgments are caused by a process of reasoning. Jonathan Haidt argues against this view by showing that people succumb to “moral dumbfounding”—they cannot adequately provide reasoning for their moral judgment. I argue that this evidence undermines psychological rationalism only if the view is committed to two claims about reasoning: (a) reasoning must meet an adequacy condition, and (b) reasoning must be sufficiently conscious. I argue that plausible variants of psychological rationalism (...) are not committed to these requirements. Thus, the efficacy of the dumbfounding objection is more limited than it might initially seem. (shrink)

According to expressivists, normative language expresses desire‐like states of mind. According to noncognitivists, normative beliefs have a desire‐like functional role. What is the relation between these two doctrines? It is widely assumed that expressivism commits you to noncognitivism, and vice versa. This paper opposes that assumption. I advance a view that combines a noncognitivist psychology with a descriptivist semantics for normative language. While this might seem like an ungainly hybrid, I argue that it has important advantages over more familiar metaethical (...) positions. The noncognitivist aspect of the theory captures all of the explanatory benefits standardly associated with expressivism. At the same time, the descriptivist element allows us to avoid the semantic headaches for expressivism. (shrink)

In contemporary social ontology, normative attitudes are often regarded as the essential element to account for the existence of the social/normative realm. However, by emphasizing their foundational explanatory role, philosophers have been led to overlook or misrepresent some aspects of their structure. The first part of this paper attempts to offer a more proportioned analysis of the structure of normative attitudes; according to it, normative attitudes are essentially _sanctions_ that have a _projective_ or _generalizing_ aim, that is, sanctions that manage (...) to point beyond the acts they directly target. The second part of the paper engages in a polemic with two prominent authors in the social-ontology/normativity debate, Brandom and Searle, and shows that, by building their views on normative attitudes with the almost exclusive purpose of meeting foundational explanatory constraints, they fail to adequately conceptualize crucial aspects that make normative attitudes normative at all. (shrink)

Contemporary philosophers are attracted by the Indispensability Claim, according to which emotions are indispensable in acquiring knowledge of some important values. The truth of this claim is often thought to depend on that of Emotional Dogmatism, the view that emotions justify evaluative judgements because they (seem to) make us aware of the relevant values. The aim of this paper is to show that the Indispensability Claim does not stand or fall with Emotional Dogmatism and that there is actually an attractive (...) alternative way of developing it. We first argue that the Indispensability Claim requires a deflationary account of the cognitive bases of emotions, which we call the Simple View and defend against a variety of criticisms. Armed with the Simple View, we show that the Indispensability Claim is made true by three roles of the emotions: they help us access the relevant evidence, provide a needed hook-up between evidence and judgement, and contribute to evaluative understanding. (shrink)

One influential positive argument for moral realism is the Explanatory Indispensability Argument. A crucial premise of this argument is the explanatory relevance of moral properties. On this premise, moral properties, such as wrongness, rightness, courage, and cowardice, are explanatorily indispensable to some empirical phenomena. Although there has been a lively debate on this premise, one crucial challenge to this thesis, what I call the Scientific Standard Challenge, has not been properly discussed. After explaining this challenge and a related concern, I (...) argue that in response to this central challenge, the proponents of the argument should take what I call the localist turn to defend the explanatory indispensability of moral properties. The localist turn encourages the defenders of moral explanations to be more sensitive to the nature of each moral explanation. For instance, some moral explanations are explanations of social matters, so the standards they need to meet are provided by relevant branches of the social sciences. On the other hand, some other moral explanations are about our psychology, so the theoretical standards those explanations need to meet should come from psychology. I illustrate how this localist project can be conducted in the case of the moral explanation that appeals to injustice. I argue that the field of comparative politics provides the theoretical standards moral explanations of institutional change need to meet. I shall then illustrate how a sophisticated moral explanation can meet those theoretical standards and how this moral explanation can be strong evidence of injustice’s explanatory indispensability. (shrink)

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' (...) motivation for engaging in such a philosophical project should be taken seriously. The underlying concern is that the plausibility of a response‐dependent view makes people's strong commitment to irreducible normativity a puzzle that requires an explanation. I explain why people systematically fail to give up this commitment without claiming that they rationally cannot give it up, which means a non‐normative response‐dependent view is immune from such a challenge. (shrink)

I argue that our general disposition to make moral judgments and our core moral intuitions are likely the product of social selection—a kind of gene–culture coevolution driven by the enforcement of collectively agreed-upon rules. Social selection could potentially track mind-independent moral truth by a process that I term realist social selection: our ancestors could have acquired moral knowledge via reason and enforced rules based on that knowledge, thereby creating selection pressures that drove the evolution of our moral psychology. Given anthropological (...) evidence that early humans designed rules with the conscious aim of preserving individual autonomy and advancing their collective interests, the theory of realist social selection appears to be attractive for moral realists. The goal of evolutionary debunking arguments should be to show not that our moral beliefs are the product of natural selection, but that realist social selection did not occur. (shrink)

One of the most surprisingly prominent themes in Robert Brandom’s A Spirit of Trust is the role of genealogical explanations. Brandom sees genealogies or ‘debunking arguments’ as significant because of their ability to deprive our discursive acts of the normative status they require to be genuinely discursive or conceptual. His solution to the problem of genealogy is to offer rationalizing reconstructions of others’ discursive acts, which credit them with normative status. He calls this “forgiveness”. In this paper, I provide some (...) additional conceptual resources to explicate Brandom’s notions of genealogy and forgiveness. These resources allow me to discriminate between two alternate and seemingly incompatible ways of responding to genealogies. One way depends on rationalizing explanations that still attempt to attribute commitments to their subjects, the other avoids making such attributions in favor of explaining commitments only in terms of norms accepted by the rationalizer. I argue that Brandom’s work sometimes promotes the latter response to genealogy but that this tendency should be eliminated from the account. (shrink)

Matti Eklund’s fascinating and wide-ranging Choosing Normative Concepts is an excellent contribution to metaethical debates (and beyond).1 Eklund’s professed di.

Commentators regularly attribute to Frege realist, idealist, and quietist responses to metaphysical questions concerning the abstract objects he calls ‘thoughts’. But despite decades of effort, the evidence offered on behalf of these attributions remains unconvincing. I argue that Frege deliberately avoids commitment to any of these positions, as part of a metaphysical separatist policy motivated by the fact that logic is epistemologically autonomous from metaphysics. Frege’s views and arguments prove relevant to current attempts to argue for epistemological autonomy, particularly that (...) of ethics. (shrink)

My aim is to challenge recent attempts at reconciling moral realism and naturalism by pushing ethical naturalists into a dilemma. According to one horn of the dilemma, ethical naturalists must either build unique facts and properties about divergent social structures into their subvenient sets of natural facts and properties, and so jeopardize the objectivity of moral truths, or insist, in the face of all possible worlds in which people have different moral beliefs than ours, that they are all mistaken—this despite (...) the fact that the belief-forming mechanism responsible for their moral beliefs was never concerned with the truth of those beliefs in the first place. This will bring me to suggest that moral properties might only weakly supervene upon natural phenomena. But, according to the other horn of the dilemma, weak supervenience is a defeater for moral knowledge. (shrink)

A number of philosophers from Hobbes to Mill to Parfit have held some combination of the following views about the Golden Rule: (a) It is the cornerstone of morality across many if not all cultures. (b) It affirms the value of moral impartiality, and potentially the core idea of utilitarianism. (c) It is immune from evolutionary debunking, that is, there is no good naturalistic explanation for widespread acceptance of the Golden Rule, ergo the best explanation for its appearance in different (...) traditions is that people have perceived the same non-natural moral truth. De Lazari-Radek and Singer employ all three of these claims in an argument meant to vindicate Sidgwick's ‘principle of universal benevolence’. I argue that the Golden Rule is the cornerstone of morality only in Christianity, it does not advocate moral impartiality, and there is a naturalistic explanation for why versions of the Golden Rule appear in different traditions. (shrink)

David Enoch has argued that we can be justified in believing in irreducibly normative reasons on the grounds that such reasons are deliberatively indispensable. This deliberative indispensability argument has been attacked from a variety of angles and is generally held to be rather weak. In this paper, I argue that existing criticisms of the deliberative indispensability argument do not touch the core of Enoch's argument. Properly understood, the deliberative indispensability argument is much stronger than its critics allege. It deserves to (...) be taken seriously. (shrink)

Far from being unwelcome or impossible in a mathematical setting, indeterminacy in various forms can be seen as playing an important role in driving mathematical research forward by providing “sources of newness” in the sense of Hutter and Farías :434–449, 2017). I argue here that mathematical coincidences, phenomena recently under discussion in the philosophy of mathematics, are usefully seen as inducers of indeterminacy and as put to work in guiding mathematical research. I suggest that to call a pair of mathematical (...) facts a coincidence is roughly to suggest that the investigation of connections between these facts isn’t worthwhile. To say of this pair, “That’s no coincidence!” is to suggest just the opposite. I further argue that this perspective on mathematical coincidence, which pays special attention to what mathematical coincidences do, may provide us with a better view of what mathematical coincidences are than extant accounts. I close by reflecting on how understanding mathematical coincidences as generating indeterminacy accords with a conception of mathematical research as ultimately aiming to reduce indeterminacy and complexity to triviality as proposed in Rota Indiscrete thoughts, Birkhäuser, 1997). (shrink)

There is an ever-growing literature on what exactly the condition or criterion is that enables some (but not all) debunking arguments to undermine our beliefs. In this paper, I develop a novel schema for debunking argumentation, arguing that debunking arguments generally have a simple and valid form, but that whether or not they are sound depends on the particular aetiological explanation which the debunker provides in order to motivate acceptance of the individual premises. The schema has three unique features: (1) (...) it satisfies important desiderata for what any acceptable account of debunking would have to look like; (2) it is consistent with the inductively supported claim that there is no special debunking principle; and (3) it coheres with the plausible claim that what makes debunking arguments unique is that they rely on so-called genealogies for the justification of their premises. (shrink)

In his book On What Matters, Derek Parfit defends a version of moral non-naturalism, a view according to which there are objective normative truths, some of which are moral truths, and we have a reliable way of discovering them. These moral truths do not exist, however, as parts of the natural universe nor in Plato’s heaven. While explaining in what way these truths exist and how we discover them, Parfit makes analogies between morality on the one hand, and mathematics and (...) logic on the other. Moral truths “exist” in a way that numbers exist, and we discover these truths in a similar way as we discover truths about numbers. By the end of the second volume, Parfit also responds to a powerful objection against his view, an objection based on the phenomenon of moral disagreement. If people widely and deeply disagree about what is the moral truth, it is doubtful whether we have a reliable way of discovering it. In his reply, he claims that in ideal conditions for thinking about moral questions, we would all have sufficiently similar moral beliefs. However, we often find ourselves in less-than-ideal conditions due to various factors that distort our ability to agree. Therefore, differences in moral opinion can be expected. In this paper, I draw a connection between these parts of Parfit’s theory and comment on them. Firstly, I argue that Parfit’s analogy with mathematics and logic and his answer to the disagreement objection are in tension because there are important epistemic differences between morality and these fields. If one would try to account for the differences, one would have to sacrifice some measure of similarity between morality and them. Secondly, I comment on Parfit’s reply to the disagreement objection itself. I believe that, although his description of ideal conditions has some potential for reaching moral agreement, it may be difficult to tell if ideal conditions prevail. This obscurity spells further trouble for Parfit’s overall theory. (shrink)

Non-naturalism is the view that normative properties are response-independent, irreducible to natural properties, and causally inefficacious. An underexplored question for non-naturalism concerns the metasemantics of normative terms. Ideally, the non-naturalist could remain ecumenical, but it appears they cannot. Call this challenge the metasemantic challenge. This chapter suggests that non-naturalists endorse an epistemic account of reference determination of the sort recently defended by Imogen Dickie, with some modifications. An important implication of this account is that, if correct, a fully fleshed out (...) moral epistemology will simultaneously rebut metasemantic objections to non-naturalism. Thus, both the metasemantic and the more widely discussed epistemological challenges in effect amount to one. Before setting out the positive view, the chapter considers why all of the traditional metasemantic theories cause trouble for the non-naturalist. This includes discussions of teleosemantics, conceptual role semantics, as well as Schroeter and Schroeter’s “connectedness” model. (shrink)