The main guiding assumption of this paper is that there is need for a taxonomy of ethical sentences that does not overgenerate, yet can make useful contributions to debates about certain controversial sentences . After surveying the recent literature and concluding that no extant taxonomy that satisfies both of these conditions is available to us, I propose and explain a novel taxonomy which does satisfy them. I then defend my proposal from five potential objections.

Ever since its formulation by Hume, the idea of an inferential barrier between non-ethical (“is”) propositions and ethical (“ought”) propositions (also known as Hume’s is-ought thesis) has received much philosophical attention. Prior’s Paradox appears to demonstrate that the ban on “is”-“ought” inferences is violated in every possible instance, from which it follows that Hume’s is-ought thesis must be false. In this article, I will formulate a logically rigorous version of Hume’s is-ought thesis, introduce Prior-style counterexamples, and suggest how they might (...) demonstrate the falsity of Hume’s is-ought thesis, identify the substitution criterion, and develop at length the unrestricted and restricted versions of this criterion as it is applied by Pigden and Schurz. Thereafter, I will outline Schurz’s defence of the is-ought gap in accordance with his interpretation of the substitution criterion, before introducing a more sophisticated version of Prior-style objections, proposing a possible response from Pigden, identifying the costs of Pigden’s response and counter proposing a response on behalf of Schurz through an extension of his approach, and offering concluding remarks. (shrink)

Moral conclusions cannot validly be inferred from nonmoral premises – this principle, commonly called “Hume’s law,” presents a conundrum. On one hand, it seems obviously true, and its truth is often simply taken for granted. On the other hand, an ingenious argument by A. N. Prior seems to refute it. My aim here is a resolution. I shall argue, first, that Hume’s law is ambiguous, admitting both a strong and a weak interpretation; second, that the strong interpretation is false, as (...) shown by Prior’s argument; and, third, that the weak interpretation is true. (shrink)

Cet article a pour objectif de mettre en évidence l’unité qui sous-tend les travaux de Pierre-Yves Raccah relevant des champs divers tels que théorie de l’argumentation, éthique, épistémologies générale et morale, philosophie des sciences et sciences cognitives. Dans un premier temps, appuyé sur sa conception argumentative de la justification, je montrerai que son antifondationnalisme moral est une conséquence directe de la prise en compte de la reponsabilité en éthique et tout particulièrement de l’exigence relative à la méta-éthique : les êtres (...) humains sont totalement responsables de leurs positions morales aussi bien que des actions exécutées par rapport à ces positions morales. Dans un deuxième temps, mes interrogations seront portées à son anticonventionnalisme aussi bien qu’à ses considérations concernant les métapréférences, qui sont mis en œuvre pour pouvoir maintenir la responsabilité dans le domaine des prescriptions. Pour terminer, je mettrai en lumière que son épistémologie générale est fondée sur la thèse selon laquelle nous sommes moralement responsables des théories scientifiques aussi bien que des constats empiriques acceptés comme vrais, la responsabilité étant pertinente dans le domaine des descriptions fondées sur l’empirisme. (shrink)

Thought: A Journal of Philosophy, EarlyView.

The appealing principle that you can't get an ‘ought’ from an ‘is’, sometimes called Hume's Guillotine , faces a well-known challenge: it must give a clear account of the distinction between normative and descriptive sentences while dodging counter-examples. I argue in this paper that recent efforts to answer this challenge fail because the distinction between normative and descriptive sentences cannot be described well enough to be of any help. As a result, no version of the principle is both true and (...) adequate. Yet a different principle—that no normative terms are synonymous with any descriptive terms—can satisfy much of the motivation we had for defending Hume's Guillotine in the first place. I show briefly how this second principle can explain why is-ought arguments are invalid, block some attempted deductive justifications of beliefs with normative terms, and create an explanatory advantage for moral non-cognitivism. Just so, giving up Hume's Guillotine is the prudent thi.. (shrink)

According to a view I’ll call Epistemic Normativism, knowledge is normative in the same sense in which paradigmatically normative properties like justification are normative. This paper argues against EN in two stages and defends a positive non-normativist alternative. After clarifying the target in §1, I consider in §2 some arguments for EN from the premise that knowledge entails justification. I first raise some worries about inferring constitution from entailment. I then rehearse the reasons why some epistemologists reject the Entailment Thesis (...) and argue that a non-normativist picture provides the best explanation of all the intuitions surrounding this thesis, favorable and unfavorable. On this picture, human knowledge is a structured non-normative complex that has as one of its parts a justification-making property, analogous in role to good-making properties like pleasurableness. After giving three arguments against EN in §3 and answering an objection in §4, I turn in §5 to further develop the positive view sketched in §2. In §6, I take stock and conclude. (shrink)

This paper proves a precisification of Hume’s Law—the thesis that one cannot get an ought from an is—as an instance of a more general theorem which establishes several other philosophically interesting, though less controversial, barriers to logical consequence.

Are there good arguments from Is to Ought? Toomas Karmo has claimed that there are trivially valid arguments from Is to Ought, but no sound ones. I call into question some key elements of Karmo’s argument for the “logical autonomy of ethics”, and show that attempts to use it as part of an overall case for moral skepticism would be self-defeating.

Since the time of Hume, many philosophers have thought it impossible to deduce an ‘Ought’ from an ‘Is,’ or in general to deduce ‘ethical sentences’ from purely ‘factual sentences.’ This is the thesis of the logical autonomy of ethics. I consider a more recent argument by Toomas Karmo in support of the autonomism, but show its limitations in the context of justification skepticism about ethics.

We can infer moral conclusions from nonmoral evidence using a three-step procedure. First, we distinguish the processes generating belief so that their reliability in generating true belief is statistically predictable. Second, we assess the processes’ reliability, perhaps by observing how frequently they generate true nonmoral belief or logically inconsistent beliefs. Third, we adjust our credence in moral propositions in light of the truth ratios of the processes generating beliefs in them. This inferential route involves empirically discovering truths of the form (...) “Process P, which generates belief in moral proposition M, has truth ratio T", and using them to discover probabilities for moral propositions. The inferential route is noncircular, and progress along it is driven fundamentally by induction. (shrink)

In the current issue of this journal, Scott Hill critiques some of my work on the “is”-“ought” controversy, the Hume-inspired debate over whether an ethical conclusion can be soundly, or even validly, derived from only non-ethical premises. I’ve argued that it can be; Hill is unconvinced. I reply to Hill’s critique, focusing on four key questions to which he and I give different answers.

Hume seems to claim that there does not exist a valid argument that has all non-ethical sentences as premises and an ethical sentence as its conclusion. Starting with Prior, a number of counterexamples to this claim have been proposed. Unfortunately, all of these proposals are controversial. Even the most plausible have a premise that seems like it might be an ethical sentence or a conclusion that seems like it might be non-ethical. Since it is difficult to tell whether any of (...) these counterexamples are genuine, we need a taxonomy that sorts out ethical sentences from non-ethical ones. We need to know the difference between an ‘Is’ and an ‘Ought’. In the first part of the paper, I establish the need for a taxonomy. I consider some of the most influential ‘Is’–‘Ought’ derivations. These include proposals by Prior and Searle. I argue that each proposal has a premise whose status as ethical or non-ethical is difficult to determine. In the second part of the paper, I consider taxonomies proposed by Karmo and Maitzen. I argue against both taxonomies. I end with the claim that we need a taxonomy of ethical sentences and that none of the current proposals are adequate. (shrink)

Toomas Karmo claims that his taxonomy of ethical sentences has the result that there does not exist a sound argument with all non-ethical premises and an ethical conclusion. In a recent paper, Mark T. Nelson argues against this claim. Nelson presents a sound argument that he takes to be such that (i) Karmo’s taxonomy classifies that argument’s single premise as non-ethical and (ii) Karmo’s taxonomy classifies that argument’s conclusion as ethical. I attempt to show that Nelson is mistaken about (ii). (...) For any possible world at which the premise of Nelson’s argument is true, Karmo’s taxonomy classifies the conclusion of Nelson’s argument as non-ethical. (shrink)

The central question for this dissertation is, how do we do moral philosophy well from within a broadly naturalist framework? Its main goal is to lay the groundwork for a methodological approach to moral philosophy that integrates traditional, intuition-driven approaches to ethics with empirical approaches that employ empirical data from biology and cognitive science. Specifically, it explores what restrictions are placed on our moral theorizing by findings in evolutionary biology, psychology, neuroscience, and other fields, and how we can integrate this (...) data while still offering a fully normative account of ethics. To that end, the dissertation explores the methodological assumptions behind both traditional and more empirical or experimental approaches to ethics, to find where these assumptions cannot be properly supported and need to be re-examined. Chapter 1 explores the science-based objections that have been raised to traditional approaches, with a particular focus on questions concerning the reliability of moral intuitions. Chapter 2 examines three fundamental assumptions supporting the empirical approach to moral philosophy, and how those assumptions ultimately do not fit with how we ought to understand the project of ethics. In chapter 3, I discuss the fact/value distinction, and the restrictions that are placed on our moral theorizing by our commitment to this distinction. Chapter 4 offers a defense of ‘companions in guilt’ arguments, and uses these arguments to draw an analogy between moral philosophy and epistemology that will be used to help defend moral philosophy against empirical debunking arguments. Chapter 5 explores the ways in which epistemologists’ methods of incorporating empirical data into their research while maintaining the normativity of their accounts can be adapted to allow moral philosophers to do the same, and brings together the various methodological concerns addressed up to this point to lay out a methodological approach I call empirically-informed moral philosophy. (shrink)

This thesis examines the little-known phenomenological ethical theory of Max Scheler, discussed in his Formalism in Ethics and Non-Formal Ethics of Values and The Nature of Sympathy, also bringing in various other complementary philosophers. It argues that Scheler’s theory, when supplemented with complementary ideas, is superior to those offered by contemporary analytic intuitionism and other meta-ethical theories. It argues that a theory of pluralist emotive intuitionism provides a better description of both our experience of ethical value and the logical requirements (...) for the ethical knowledge presumed by that experience. This thesis places Scheler’s theory in the context of ethical intuitionism up until the present. It considers why intuitionism has been generally rejected, looking at outstanding philosophical questions facing ethical intuitionism and previous attempted answers, and discussing current theories of analytic ethical intuitionism and their flaws. It explains the significant elements of Scheler’s ethical theory and how it can be understood in its phenomenological context. To demonstrate how Scheler’s material intuitionism is better than current theories of rationalist intuitionism, and other meta-ethical alternatives, this thesis looks at two main groups of issues. Firstly, the epistemological issues raised by Scheler’s theory and how it offers a possible solution to the problem of ethical knowledge, along with a brief consideration of ontological issues. Secondly, normative issues raised by Scheler’s theory: major issues on normative judgement raised but not answered by Scheler’s theory and, following this, a chapter dedicated to Scheler’s theory of ‘persons’, particularly with reference to Emmanuel Levinas. It concludes that an adapted Scheleran theory of ethical intuitionism can be superior to contemporary theories. It explains how the fundamental features of ethical experience may be epistemologically and phenomenologically justified based on objective values. It provides better responses to standard problems raised against intuitionism while also providing a natural explanation for a wider range of moral phenomena than standard meta-ethical alternatives. This demonstrates its superior explanatory power and provides strong arguments for its value as an over-arching meta-ethical theory. (shrink)