One class of central debates between normative realists appears to concern whether we should be naturalists or reductionists about the normative. However, metaethical discussion of naturalism and reduction is often inconsistent, murky, or uninformative. This can make it hard to see why commitments relative to these metaphysical categories should matter to normative realists. This paper aims to clarify the nature of these categories, and their significance in debates between normative realists. I develop and defend what I call the joint-carving taxonomy, (...) which builds on David Lewis’ notion of elite properties. I argue that this taxonomy is clear and metaphysically interesting, and answers to distinctive taxonomic interests of normative realists. I also suggest that it has important implications for the project of adjudicating debates among normative realists. (shrink)

To enhance the plausibility of naturalistic moral realism, David Copp develops an argument from epistemic defeaters aiming to show that strongly a priori synthetic moral truths do not exist. In making a case for the non-naturalistic position, I locate Copp’s account within the wider literature on peer disagreement; I identify key points of divergence between Copp’s doctrine and conciliatorist doctrines; I introduce the notion of ‘minimal moral competence’; I contend that some plausible benchmarks for minimal moral competence are grounded in (...) substantive moral considerations; and I discuss two forms of spinelessness that Copp’s moral naturalism could result in. (shrink)

During the past few decades, Michael Moore has written incisively on an array of matters concerning the relationships between law and morality. While reflecting on those relationships, he has plumbed the nature of morality itself in impressive depth. Among the topics which he has addressed, the problem of torture has been prominent and controversial. It is a problem, moreover, that has led to some of his most searching enquiries into the character of moral obligations. In the present essay I take (...) issue not only with many of Moore's conclusions about torture, but also with some of his more far‐reaching claims about the domain of morality. (shrink)

Some philosophers think that normative properties are identical to descriptive properties. In this paper, I argue that this entails that it is possible to say which descriptive properties normative properties are identical to. I argue that Frank Jackson's argument to show that this is possible fails, and that the objections to this argument show that it is impossible to say which descriptive properties normative properties are identical to. I conclude that normative properties are not identical to descriptive properties. I then (...) show that if we combine this conclusion with the conclusion of a different argument that Jackson has given to show that there are no irreducibly normative properties, it follows that there are no normative properties at all. (shrink)

This paper is about the relationship between truthmaking—one of the pillars of contemporary metaphysics—and deflationism about truth—one of the main contenders in the debate about truth, and a key component of the broad anti-metaphysical philosophical approach known as pragmatism. Many philosophers have argued that deflationism and truthmaking are incompatible or in conflict in some interesting way. Some take this to count against deflationism, others to count against truthmaking. In this paper I argue that deflationism and truthmaking are compatible in most (...) of the ways in which they are commonly thought to be incompatible. Deflationism does not render truthmaking unintelligible, avoidable, unmotivated, or trivial. While deflationism is incompatible with certain ideas within mainstream truthmaking, I argue that these ideas result from merely optional assumptions and principles commonly accepted by mainstream truthmaker theorists. (shrink)

Suppose someone is brought up as an orthodox Jew, and so only eats kosher, is very conservative sexually, etc. Suppose they then find out that this Judaism stuff is just all a big mistake. If they then regret all the shrimp they could have eaten, all the sex!, this makes perfect sense. Not so, however, if someone finds out that moral realism is false, and they now regret all the fun they could have had hurting people’s feeling, etc. Even if (...) this does make sense, there’s a strong disanalogy between the moral and the religious case. This asymmetry, on a realist picture of morality, calls for explanation. This chapter tries to explain it. The discussion engages some topics familiar from objections to Robust realism—the why-be-moral challenge, the status of de-dicto moral motivation, and whether and why we should care about the moral properties, robustly realistically understood. (shrink)

If you put chimpanzees from different communities together you can expect mayhem - they are not keen on treating each other nicely. There is closely related species of apes, however, whose members have countless encounters with unrelated specimen on a daily basis and yet almost all get through the day in one piece - that species is us, homo sapiens. But what makes us get along, most of the time? Morality as such is, perhaps surprisingly, not a mainstream research topic (...) in social psychology. Most textbooks in the field do not even mention the term morality at all (and focus on 'prosociality' instead). This relative lack of 'coverage' might have to do with the difficulty of operationalising 'morality' in a fitting way (more on this below). However, morality certainly is a social phenomenon and therefore the collection of Fargas, Jussim, and Van Lange is certainly a step in the right direction; it offers an extensive overview of the field and is suggestive of the vast potential of studying morality through the lens of social psychology. (shrink)

Jonathan Dancy thinks that there are irreducibly normative properties. Frank Jackson has given a well-known argument against this view, and I have elsewhere defended this argument against many objections, including one made by Dancy. But Dancy remains unconvinced. In this chapter, I hope to convince him.

El presente trabajo trata de hacer una defensa de una particular versión de positivismo jurídico excluyente como teoría que mejor describe el derecho y sus referencias a la moral. Aunque se reivindica la tesis de las fuentes como la tesis iuspositivista por excelencia, el quid de la defensa se asienta sobre un análisis de los diferentes tipos y conceptos de moral que se consideran relevantes a la hora de la identificación del derecho. La posibilidad del error en el descubrimiento de (...) la moral objetiva deja campo abierto para entender que el derecho no puede quedar determinado por otra cosa que no sean hechos sociales. (shrink)

The philosophical path that I propose finds its origin in a properly metaethical questioning. It was first of all a question about the meaning of our moral statements by considering a defense of some kind of moral realism according to which our moral judgments would refer to a “moral reality” which would make it possible to determine their truth or their falsity. However, the realistic interpretation of moral judgments poses many difficulties from a psychological, an ontological and an epistemological point (...) of view. The central idea of this thesis was to explore these difficulties in order to consider the possibility of defending a form of moral realism. Nevertheless, this exploration – which constitutes the first part of this work – led me to a dead end in which all metaethical positions appeared to me as interesting as they were unsatisfactory. Faced with this situation, a new problem emerged to me as central: the disagreement between epistemic peers in philosophy. Since all metaethical positions are, even today, defended by experts in the field, it seemed to me essential to treat this difficulty with the intuition that a skeptical solution would be necessary. But this first turnaround was also unsatisfying, and rather than a skeptical conclusion it led me to shift my questioning to philosophy itself: what is philosophy? what can we expect from it? Perhaps my conception of philosophy – a search for truth based on argumentation – was at the origin of these successive dissatisfactions. I thus explore, in the last chapter, another way of approaching philosophy. Maybe it's not about looking for solutions to problems, like in science, maybe it’s about dealing with individual embarrassments which, at best, could just disappear. Thus “success” in philosophy would only be its abandonment – as an individual practice, and not as a discipline – through the disappearance of our philosophical embarrassments. In the end, I must admit that I do not have the means to defend such a conception of philosophy, but I can only note that all this work on moral realism, disagreement and philosophy was, for me, a way to make my philosophical embarrassment disappear. This is how, far from its starting point, the philosophical path that was mine ended. (shrink)

When it comes to the metaethical task of explaining and making sense of what it is that we are doing while doing ethics, the subject of moral objectivity occupies an important and special place within that task. Thus, it is often agreed that being able to explain and justify the objective features of common moral practice is one of if not the most important task for any metaethical theory to undertake. In this dissertation, I tackle the issue of ethical objectivity (...) on behalf of metaethical constructivism. To be more precise, my aim is to make plausible, strengthen, and defend the constructivist original contribution to contemporary metaethics by developing a novel constructivist account on the objectivity of ethics. While the account that I develop herein presents a novel and independent approach to the subject of moral objectivity on behalf of constructivism, it also places itself between the two other positions within the constructivist camp that openly strive to secure ethical objectivity – namely Kantianism on the one hand, and the more recently developed Humean objectivist view on the other. It is for the latter reason that I call my own view the hybrid view. (shrink)

Das Thema des Beitrages bildet der „neue“ Non-Naturalismus, welcher exemplarisch am metaethischen Ansatz von Derek Parfit untersucht wird. Parfits Ansatz zeichnet sich durch das Ziel aus, eine neue Theorienoption zu ermöglichen, die einerseits von der Existenz normativer Tatsachen ausgeht, ohne jedoch andererseits auf die ontologischen Verpflichtungen der klassischen Vertreter des Non-Naturalismus festgelegt zu sein. Hierfür wird der Begriff der „nicht-ontologischen Existenz“ eingeführt und von robusten ontologischen Existenzweisen unterschieden. In diesem Beitrag wird dafür argumentiert, dass Parfit bisher nur Explikationen dieses zentralen (...) Begriffs geliefert hat, die a.) uninformativ sind, b.) mit dem Ziel der Ausgangstheorie in Konkurrenz geraten oder c.) den eigenen Absatz bereits unter der Hand aufgeben. Darüber hinaus werden die dialektischen Möglichkeiten durchgespielt, die Parfit bleiben, um auf diese Diagnose zu reagieren. In der Konsequenz wird aber auch diesbezüglich aufgezeigt, dass mit Blick auf deren Erfolgsaussichten eine gewisse Skepsis angebracht ist. (shrink)