Furthermore, moral facts do seem to bear an intimate relationship to our moral attitudes and capacities. It is perhaps inconceivable that, at the end of moral deliberation and inquiry, fully rational human beings invested with our moral concepts could be radically incorrect in their moral beliefs. Moral properties seem to be essentially knowable. We hope that the fundamental truths of physics are epistemically available to us, but our conception of the physical world certainly does not guarantee it. However implausible, it (...) is certainly conceivable that the cognitive capacities that are our evolutionary inheritance, adapted for survival in the terrestrial niche in which our ancestors found themselves, are not well suited for doing cosmology. Is a similar pessimism about our ability to know the moral facts even coherent? I don’t think so. No matter how difficult it is to arrive at correct moral judgments, barring ignorance of any relevant non-moral empirical facts, the moral facts are by their very nature within our reach. And it is difficult to see how this could be so unless moral properties are in some way dependent on us. (shrink)

It is part of our notion of moral properties (certain forms of relativism to the contrary) that they are in some sense independent of our moral beliefs. A murderer cannot make his action moral simply by believing that it is so. Slavery was immoral even if a large number of people once believed that it was permissible, and it would remain so in the future even if every person came to believe that it was morally acceptable. But views that take (...) moral properties to be objective and thoroughly mind-independent constituents of reality face familiar metaphysical and epistemological obstacles. (shrink)

ABSTRACT: Neo-sentimentalism is the view that to judge that something has an evaluative property is to judge that some affective or emotional response is appropriate to it, but this view allows for radically different versions. My aim is to spell out what I take to be its most plausible version. Against its normative version, I argue that its descriptive version can best satisfy the normativity requirement that follows from Moore’s Open Question Argument while giving an answer to the Wrong Kind (...) of Reason Objection. Finally, I argue that the circularity that is involved is not vicious: understood epistemically, neo-sentimentalism remains instructive. View HTML Send article to KindleTo send this article to your Kindle, first ensure [email protected] is added to your Approved Personal Document E-mail List under your Personal Document Settings on the Manage Your Content and Devices page of your Amazon account. Then enter the ‘name’ part of your Kindle email address below. Find out more about sending to your Kindle. Find out more about sending to your Kindle. Note you can select to send to either the @free.kindle.com or @kindle.com variations. ‘@free.kindle.com’ emails are free but can only be sent to your device when it is connected to wi-fi. ‘@kindle.com’ emails can be delivered even when you are not connected to wi-fi, but note that service fees apply. Find out more about the Kindle Personal Document Service.Valeurs et émotions, les perspectives du néo-sentimentalismeVolume 51, Issue 1Christine Tappolet DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/S0012217312000212Your Kindle email address Please provide your Kindle [email protected]@kindle.com Available formats PDF Please select a format to send. By using this service, you agree that you will only keep articles for personal use, and will not openly distribute them via Dropbox, Google Drive or other file sharing services. Please confirm that you accept the terms of use. Cancel Send ×Send article to Dropbox To send this article to your Dropbox account, please select one or more formats and confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about sending content to Dropbox. Valeurs et émotions, les perspectives du néo-sentimentalismeVolume 51, Issue 1Christine Tappolet DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/S0012217312000212Available formats PDF Please select a format to send. By using this service, you agree that you will only keep articles for personal use, and will not openly distribute them via Dropbox, Google Drive or other file sharing services. Please confirm that you accept the terms of use. Cancel Send ×Send article to Google Drive To send this article to your Google Drive account, please select one or more formats and confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about sending content to Google Drive. Valeurs et émotions, les perspectives du néo-sentimentalismeVolume 51, Issue 1Christine Tappolet DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/S0012217312000212Available formats PDF Please select a format to send. By using this service, you agree that you will only keep articles for personal use, and will not openly distribute them via Dropbox, Google Drive or other file sharing services. Please confirm that you accept the terms of use. Cancel Send ×Export citation Request permission. (shrink)

Moral platonism, the claim that moral entities are both objective and prescriptive, is generally thought to be a dead end. In an attempt to defend a moderate form of moral platonism or more precisely platonism about values, I first argue that several of the many versions of this doctrine are not committed to ontological extravagances. I then discuss an important objection due to John McDowell and developed by Michael Smith, according to which moral platonism is incoherent. I argue that objectivism (...) is compatible with the claim that certain ways of being aware of values, namely those involving emotions, are motivating. (shrink)

This essay emerges from consideration of a question in the epistemology of ethics or morality. This is not the common claim-centered question as to how moral claims are confirmed and whether their mode of confirmation gives us grounds to be confident about the prospects for ethical discourse. Instead, I am concerned with the less frequently posed concept-centered question of where in human experience moral terms or concepts are grounded — that is, where in experience the moral becomes salient to us. (...) This question was central to moral epistemology in the form it took among thinkers such as Locke, Hume, and Kant, and it remains of the first importance today. (shrink)

The paper defends a neo-Lockean view of secondary qualities, in particular color, according to which the being of a given color amounts to having the disposition to produce in normal viewers under normal circumstances the response of seeing an objective manifest simple color. It also defends the view that the naïve color-concept, the simple color concept, so to speak, is a fully objective property. The defense of this view is carried against its nearest cousin , the view proposed and defended (...) by Philip Pettit and Frank Jackson, according to which the naive color concept is response dependent, whereas color itself is fully objective. It is argued that the neo-Lockean alternative better captures the phenomenology of color, and better predicts or accounts for the dramatic character of the historical scientific discoveries (of Newton and his followers). Against metaphysical response dependence, the paper proposes a brief positive argument from the unity of color properties, and a criticism of Jackson’s counter-argument against metaphysical response-dependence from the naïve intuitions about causal properties of color. (shrink)

Response-dependent accounts of value claim that to understand what we are saying about the objects of our value judgments, we must take into account the responses those objects provoke. Recent discussions of the proposal that value is response-dependent are obscured by dogmas about response-dependence, that (1) response-dependency must be known a priori, (2) must hold necessarily, and (3) the terms involved must designate rigidly. These “dogmas” stand in the way of formulating and assessing a clear conception of value as response-dependent. (...) I point out these dogmas and argue that there is no good reason for subscribing to them. (shrink)

I examine the basic logical character of ‘the last man example’, as well as the logical character of one of its more important variants. Although it has one striking antecedent in recent philosophy – of which more later – it’s fair to regard it as an example first presented to a contemporary audience by Richard Routley in his 1973 paper, ‘Is There a Need for a New, an Environmental, Ethic?’. I want to determine exactly how the example goes and what (...) it shows. I want to determine what it does not show. One reason for engaging in this exercise is the striking and engaging character of the last man example itself. Another is that a large number of environmental philosophers have since referred to the last man but have drawn different, sometimes contrary, lessons from it – though we won’t have time here to visit any but the earliest of these responses. It seems to me time to patiently revisit the example and time to attempt a conclusive understanding of its significance. A second, and broader, purpose I have is to describe the meta-ethical views it led Routley to adopt – or manufacture! – in an attempt to philosophically position his normative stance within a more fundamental, explanatory, framework. (shrink)

This paper explores a distinction between two types of response- dependence (RD) account (shallow vs. deep). This distinction is inherent in much of the existing literature, however it is neither widely nor well understood, and has never been drawn explicitly. The distinction is often taken to be a metaphysical, or ‘realism-relevant’ one—i.e. deep RD accounts entail qualified realism (or perhaps anti-realism), while shallow RD accounts are metaphysically neutral. I argue that the distinction is not reliably realism-relevant. I formulate a weaker (...) version of the distinction that may help prevent some common and understandable confusion about RD biconditionals and their relationship to realism. The weaker distinction rests on the different roles assigned to RD biconditionals by the two types of account. (shrink)

Abstract Thomas Kuhn is the most famous historian and philosopher of science of the last century. He is also among the most controversial. Since Kuhn's death, his corpus has been interpreted, systematized, and defended. Here I add to this endeavor in a novel way by arguing that Kuhn can be interpreted as a global response-dependence theorist. He can be understood as connecting all concepts and terms in an a priori manner to responses of suitably situated subjects to objects in the (...) world. Further, I claim, this interpretation is useful for three reasons. First, it allows us to systematize and defend Kuhn's views. We can therefore better appreciate him as a thinker in his own right. Second, it deepens our understanding of both the uniqueness of Kuhn's views and the continuity of those views with those of others. We can therefore better appreciate his place in history. And third, as I explain in the paper, my interpretation affords us the only example of an ethnocentric global response-dependence theory. We can therefore better appreciate the versatility of response-dependence itself. (shrink)

Alan Turing’s 1950 imitation game has been widely understood as a means for testing if an entity is intelligent. Following a series of papers by Diane Proudfoot, I offer a socio-technological interpretation of Turing’s paper and present an alternative way of understanding both the imitation game and Turing’s concept of intelligence. Turing, I claim, saw intelligence as a social concept, meaning that possession of intelligence is a property determined by society’s attitude toward the entity. He realized that as long as (...) human society held a prejudiced attitude toward machinery—seeing machines a priori as mindless objects—machines could not be said to be intelligent, by definition. He also realized, though, that if humans’ a priori, chauvinistic attitude toward machinery changed, the existence of intelligent machines would become logically possible. Turing thought that such a change would eventually occur: He believed that when scientists overcome the technological challenge of constructing sophisticated machines that could imitate human verbal behavior—i.e., do well in the imitation game—humans’ prejudiced attitude toward machinery will have altered in such a way that machines could be said to be intelligent. The imitation game, for Turing, was not an intelligence test, but a technological aspiration whose realization would likely involve a change in society’s attitude toward machines. (shrink)

According to Jackson, Pettit & Smith , “restricted particularism” is not affected by their supervenience-based consideration against particularism but, they claim, suffer from a different difficulty, roughly that it would violate the platitude about moral argument that, in debating controversial moral issues, a central role is played by various similarity claims. I present a defense of “restricted particularism” from this objection, which accommodates the platitudinous character of the claim that ordinary participants in conversations concerning the evaluative are committed to descriptive (...) similarities and differences being relevant in the way described by Jackson, Pettit and Smith, to moral similarities and differences. My defense exploits a presuppositional component congenial to response-dependent proposals such as Lewis’s. (shrink)

This paper is in five sections. In the first one, I summarize some views on truthmaking I will be presupposing, emphasizing however the various controversies on which I will remain neutral. In section two and three, I present the characterization of a response-dependent property. In section four, I present two ways in which a property can be response-dependent, in the characterized sense. In final section five, I present how these correspond to different versions of moderate relativism, namely indexical and nonindexical (...) contextualism. Thus the view presented here contrasts not only with pluralism about truth, but also with radical relativism about truth, as recently defended by John MacFarlane. (shrink)