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  1. Against the Fundamentality of GOOD.Nandi Theunissen - forthcoming - Journal of Philosophy.
    The argument that is in question in this article concerns the would-be dependence of one form of value on another. When something is intrinsically good for someone, which is to say, directly beneficial for them, it is so because it is good simpliciter. Proponents of the argument have so-called ‘perfectionist’ values chiefly in mind: worthwhile artworks, striking natural formations, intellectual and scientific achievements. They contend that the fact that engaging with perfectionist goods is non-instrumentally good for people depends on the (...)
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  • (1 other version)Reductive Evidentialism and the Normativity of Logic.Nader Shoaibi - 2022 - Canadian Journal of Philosophy 52 (8):843-852.
    Abstract‘Reductive Evidentialism’ seeks to explain away all ‘structural’ requirements of rationality—including norms of logical coherence—in terms of ‘substantive’ norms of rationality, i.e., responsiveness to evidence. While this view constitutes a novel take on the source of the normativity of logic, I argue that it faces serious difficulties. My argument, in a nutshell, is that on the assumption that individuals with the same evidence can have different rational responses (interpersonal permissivism), the view lacks the resources to maintain its central tenet that (...)
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  • Why Reasons Are Explanations.Stephen Finlay - 2024 - Philosophia 52 (4):1001-1014.
    In his book _Normative Reasons_ (Logins A in Normative reasons: between reasoning and explanation. Cambridge University Press, 2022), Artürs Logins accepts that a normative reason to do A is always an answer to a ‘Why A?’ question, but rejects the unifying explanationist theory which identifies reasons always as explanations. On his Erotetic Theory, ‘Why A?’ questions sometimes seek an explanation (in No-Challenge contexts) but sometimes seek rather an argument (in Challenge contexts). This article defends a unifying, end-relational explanationist theory by (...)
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  • Normativity, prudence and welfare.Michael Ridge - 2024 - Philosophical Studies 181 (5):1213-1235.
    Most discussions of discourse about welfare and discourse about prudence are a “package deal” when it comes to their normativity—either both or neither are normative. In this paper I argue against this conventional “package deal” assumption. I argue that discourse about welfare is not normative in one useful sense of that term, but that prudential discourse is normative. My argument draws in part on ideas from Derek Parfit’s account of personal identity. I then offer a novel positive account of the (...)
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  • Categorizing Art.Kiyohiro Sen - 2024 - Dissertation, University of Tokyo
    This dissertation examines the practice of categorizing works of art and its relationship to art criticism. How a work of art is categorized influences how it is appreciated and criticized. Being frightening is a merit for horror, but a demerit for lullabies. The brushstrokes in Monet's "Impression, Sunrise" (1874) look crude when seen as a Neoclassical painting, but graceful when seen as an Impressionist painting. Many of the judgments we make about artworks are category-dependent in this way, but previous research (...)
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  • Attitudes, objects, and norms: replies to Drucker, Schleifer McCormick, and Richard.David Hunter - 2024 - Inquiry: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Philosophy 67 (8):2495-2508.
    I am extremely grateful for the very thoughtful and stimulating comments by Daniel Drucker, Miriam Schleifer McCormick,1 and Mark Richard, and for the close attention they gave my book (Hunter 2022...
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  • Epistemic Value as Attributive Goodness?Michael Vollmer - forthcoming - Episteme:1-16.
    According to insulationism, a common take on epistemic value, being of epistemic value does not entail being of value simpliciter. In this paper, I explore one version of insulationism which has so far received little attention in the literature. On this view, epistemic value does not entail value simpliciter because it is a form of attributive goodness, that is, being good as a member of a particular kind. While having a significant advantage over some other formulations of insulationism, I argue (...)
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  • A Practice-based Account of The Truth Norm of Belief.Xintong Wei - 2024 - Episteme 21 (2):698-718.
    It is a platitude that belief is subject to a standard of correctness: a belief is correct if and only if it is true. But not all standards of correctness are authoritative or binding. Some standards of correctness may be arbitrary, unjustified or outrightly wrong. Given this, one challenge to proponents of the truth norm of belief, is to answer what Korsgaard (1996) calls ‘the normative question’. Is the truth norm of belief authoritative or binding regarding what one ought to (...)
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  • Précis of The Range of Reasons.Daniel Whiting - 2023 - Asian Journal of Philosophy 2 (2):1-7.
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  • Not a Good Fix: Constitutivism on Value Change and Disagreement.Michael Klenk & Ibo van de Poel - forthcoming - Erkenntnis:1-18.
    We examine whether Thomsonian constitutivism, a metaethical view that analyses value in terms of ‘goodness-fixing kinds,’ i.e. kinds that themselves set the standards for being a good instance of the respective kind, offers a satisfactory explanation of value change and disagreement. While value disagreement has long been considered an important explanandum, we introduce value change as a closely related but distinct phenomenon of metaethical interest. We argue that constitutivism fails to explain both phenomena because of its commitment to goodness-fixing kinds. (...)
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  • Function, Fitness, Flourishing.Paul Bloomfield - 2023 - In Paul Bloomfield & David Copp (eds.), Oxford Handbook of Moral Realism. New York, NY: Oxford University Press. pp. 264-292.
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  • Value Pluralism versus Value Monism.Christian Blum - 2023 - Acta Analytica 38 (4):627-652.
    Value pluralism is the metaphysical thesis that there is a plurality of values at the fundamental level of the evaluative domain. Value monism, on the other hand, is the claim that there is just one fundamental value. Pluralists, it is commonly argued, have an edge over monists when it comes to accounting for the conspicuous heterogeneity of the evaluative domain and the rationality of regretting well-justified decisions. Monists, in turn, seem to provide a far more plausible account of rational evaluative (...)
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  • The balance and weight of reasons.Nicholas Makins - 2023 - Theoria 89 (5):592-606.
    The aim of this paper is to provide a detailed characterisation of some ways in which our preferences reflect our reasons. I will argue that practical reasons can be characterised along two dimensions that influence our preferences: their balance and their weight. This is analogous to a similar characterisation of the way in which probabilities reflect the balance and weight of evidence in epistemology. In this paper, I will illustrate the distinction between the balance and weight of reasons, and show (...)
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  • The vices of naturalist neo‐Aristotelian virtue ethics.David Carr - 2023 - Philosophical Investigations 46 (4):414-429.
    While the modern revival of virtue ethics largely looks back to Aristotle, most, if not all, versions of this trend continue to be much indebted to and/or based upon specific mid‐twentieth‐century neo‐naturalist and descriptivist critiques of prevailing antinaturalist trends of that time: specifically, upon Anscombe's critique of the ethics of duty and utility and of the so‐called modern moral ought, and Geach's robust defence of the descriptive character of moral and other goodness. However, in the wake of further critical attention (...)
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  • (1 other version)Reductive Evidentialism and the Normativity of Logic.Nader Shoaibi - 2023 - Canadian Journal of Philosophy 1:1-10.
    Reductive Evidentialism seeks to explain away all structural requirements of rationality – including norms of logical coherence – in terms of substantive norms of rationality, i.e., responsiveness to evidence. While this view constitutes a novel take on the source of the normativity of logic, I argue that it faces serious difficulties. My argument, in a nutshell, is that, on the assumption that individuals with the same evidence can have different rational responses (interpersonal permissivism), the view lacks the resources to maintain (...)
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  • Review of Fitting Things Together: Coherence and the Demands of Structural Rationality[REVIEW]Benjamin Kiesewetter - forthcoming - Mind.
    This a review of Alex Worsnip's book 'Fitting Things Together: Coherence and the Demands of Structural Rationality'.
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  • The Weight of Reasons.Daniel Fogal & Olle Risberg - 2023 - Philosophical Studies 180 (9):2573-2596.
    This paper addresses the question of how the ‘weight’ or ‘strength’ of normative reasons is best understood. We argue that, given our preferred analysis of reasons as sources of normative support, this question has a straightforward answer: the weight of a normative reason is simply a matter of how much support it provides. We also critically discuss several competing views of reasons and their weight. These include views which take reasons to be normatively fundamental, views which analyze reasons as evidence (...)
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  • Ignorance and awareness.Paul Silva & Robert Weston Siscoe - 2024 - Noûs 58 (1):225-243.
    Knowledge implies the presence of a positive relation between a person and a fact. Factual ignorance, on the other hand, implies the absence of some positive relation between a person and a fact. The two most influential views of ignorance hold that what is lacking in cases of factual ignorance is knowledge or true belief, but these accounts fail to explain a number of basic facts about ignorance. In their place, we propose a novel and systematic defense of the view (...)
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  • Merely statistical evidence: when and why it justifies belief.Paul Silva - 2023 - Philosophical Studies 180 (9):2639-2664.
    It is one thing to hold that merely statistical evidence is _sometimes_ insufficient for rational belief, as in typical lottery and profiling cases. It is another thing to hold that merely statistical evidence is _always_ insufficient for rational belief. Indeed, there are cases where statistical evidence plainly does justify belief. This project develops a dispositional account of the normativity of statistical evidence, where the dispositions that ground justifying statistical evidence are connected to the goals (= proper function) of objects. There (...)
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  • Law and the Metaethics of Discord.Katja Vogt - 2022 - Ancient Philosophy Today 4 (Supplement):3-23.
    Plato’s Euthyphro, I argue, lays out a metaethics that responds to persistent and unresolved value disagreement. The dialogue’s analysis of disagreement leads to the distinction between three kinds of value, exemplified by the good, the god-loved, and the pious. With this proposal, I reject centuries of scholarship, which ascribe a realist metaethics to the Plato of the Euthyphro. But only the good and the just require a ‘realist’ analysis: we relate to them as features of the world to which we (...)
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  • Lacking, needing, and wanting.David Hunter - 2023 - Analytic Philosophy 64 (2):143-160.
    I offer a novel conception of the nature of wanting. According to it, wanting is lacking something one needs. Lacking is not a normative notion but needing is, and that is how goodness figures in to wanting. What a thing needs derives from what it is to be a good thing of its kind. In people, wanting is connected to both knowledge and the will. A person can know that she wants something and can act on that knowledge. When she (...)
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  • Against and for Ethical Naturalism Or: How Not To "Naturalize" Ethics.Berit Brogaard & Michael Slote - 2022 - American Philosophical Quarterly 59 (4):327-352.
    Moral realism and ethical naturalism are both highly attractive ethical positions but historically they have often been thought to be irreconcilable. Since the late 1980s defenders of Cornell Realism have argued that the two positions can consistently be combined. They make three constitutive claims: (i) Moral properties are natural kind properties that (ii) are identical to (or supervene) on descriptive functional properties, which (iii) causally regulate our use of moral terms. We offer new arguments against the feasibility of Cornell realism (...)
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  • (1 other version)Political normativity and the functional autonomy of politics.Carlo Burelli - 2022 - European Journal of Political Theory 21 (4):627-649.
    This article argues for a new interpretation of the realist claim that politics is autonomous from morality and involves specific political values. First, this article defends an original normative source: functional normativity. Second, it advocates a substantive functional standard: political institutions ought to be assessed by their capacity to select and implement collective decisions. Drawing from the ‘etiological account’ in philosophy of biology, I will argue that functions yield normative standards, which are independent from morality. For example, a ‘good heart’ (...)
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  • Imprecision in the Ethics of Rescue.Michael Rabenberg - 2023 - Analytic Philosophy 64 (3):277-317.
    Suppose you can save one group of people or a larger group of different people, but you cannot save both groups. Are you morally required, ceteris paribus, to save the larger group? Some say, “No.” Far more say, without qualification, “Yes.” But some say, “It depends on the sizes of the groups.” In this paper, I argue that an attractive moral principle that seems on its face to support the second answer in fact supports a version of the third. In (...)
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  • Epistemic reasons for action: a puzzle for pragmatists.Stephanie Leary - 2022 - Synthese 200 (3):1-22.
    Pluralist pragmatists claim that there are both practical and epistemic reasons for belief, but should they also claim that there are both kinds of reasons for action? I argue that the pluralist pragmatist faces a puzzle here. If she accepts that there are epistemic reasons for action, she must explain a striking asymmetry between action and belief: while epistemic reasons play a large role in determining which beliefs one all-things-considered ought to have, they don’t play much of a role in (...)
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  • Fittingness first?: Reasons to withhold belief.Wooram Lee - 2022 - Philosophical Studies 179 (12):3565-3581.
    Recent years have seen the rise of fittingness-first views, which take fittingness to be the most basic normative feature, in terms of which other normative features can be explained. This paper poses a serious difficulty for the fittingness-first approach by showing that existing fittingness-first accounts cannot plausibly accommodate an important class of reasons: reasons not to believe a proposition. There are two kinds of reasons not to believe a proposition: considerations that are counterevidence; and considerations that count against believing the (...)
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  • In Defense of Constitutivism About Epistemic Normativity.David Horst - 2022 - Pacific Philosophical Quarterly 103 (2):232-258.
    Epistemic constitutivism (EC) holds that the nature of believing is such that it gives rise to a standard of correctness and that other epistemic normative notions (e.g., reasons for belief) can be explained in terms of this standard. If defensible, this view promises an attractive and unifying account of epistemic normativity. However, EC faces a forceful objection: that constitutive standards of correctness are never enough for generating normative reasons. This paper aims to defend EC in the face of this objection. (...)
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  • (1 other version)Well‐being, part 1: The concept of well‐being.Eden Lin - 2022 - Philosophy Compass 17 (2):e12813.
    Philosophy Compass, Volume 17, Issue 2, February 2022.
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  • Collective Reasons and Agent-Relativity.Alexander Dietz - 2022 - Utilitas 34 (1):57-69.
    Could it be true that even though we as a group ought to do something, you as an individual ought not to do your part? And under what conditions, in particular, could this happen? In this article, I discuss how a certain kind of case, introduced by David Copp, illustrates the possibility that you ought not to do your part even when you would be playing a crucial causal role in the group action. This is because you may have special (...)
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  • There Are No Purely Aesthetic Obligations.John Dyck - 2021 - Pacific Philosophical Quarterly 102 (4):592-612.
    Do aesthetic reasons have normative authority over us? Could there be anything like an aesthetic ‘ought’ or an aesthetic obligation? I argue that there are no aesthetic obligations. We have reasons to act certain ways regarding various aesthetic objects – most notably, reasons to attend to and appreciate those objects. But, I argue, these reasons never amount to duties. This is because aesthetic reasons are merely evaluative, not deontic. They can only entice us or invite us – they can never (...)
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  • What the doctor should do: perspectivist duties for objectivists about ought.Davide Fassio - 2022 - Philosophical Studies 179 (5):1523-1544.
    Objectivism is the view that how an agent ought to act depends on all kinds of facts, regardless of the agent’s epistemic position with respect to them. One of the most important challenges to this view is constituted by certain cases involving specific conditions of uncertainty—so-called three-options cases. In these cases it seems overwhelmingly plausible that an agent ought to do what is recommendable given her limited perspective, even though the agent knows that this is not objectively the best course (...)
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  • Conceptions of Epistemic Value.Timothy Perrine - 2023 - Episteme 20 (2):213-231.
    This paper defends a conception of epistemic value that I call the “Simpliciter Conception.” On it, epistemic value is a kind of value simpliciter and being of epistemic value implies being of value simpliciter. I defend this conception by criticizing two others, what I call the Formal Conception and the Hybrid Conception. While those conceptions may be popular among epistemologists, I argue that they fail to explain why anyone should care that things are of epistemic value and naturally undercuts disputes (...)
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  • Practical conflicts as a problem for epistemic reductionism about practical reasons.Benjamin Kiesewetter & Jan Gertken - 2021 - Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 105 (3):677-686.
    According to epistemic reductionism about practical reasons, facts about practical reasons can be reduced to facts about evidence for ought-judgements. We argue that this view misconstrues practical conflicts. At least some conflicts between practical reasons put us in a position to know that an action ϕ is optional, i.e. that we neither ought to perform nor ought to refrain from performing the action. By understanding conflicts of practical reasons as conflicts of evidence about what one ought to do, epistemic reductionism (...)
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  • How Am I Supposed to Feel?Andrew T. Forcehimes - 2021 - Philosophia 50 (2):533-542.
    In this essay, I raise a puzzle concerning rational emotions. The puzzle arises from the fact that a handful of very plausible claims seem to commit us to the idea that whether a subject ought to have a certain emotion at a given time in part depends on the fittingness of the intensity of the feelings it involves, and the fittingness of these feelings in part depends on the intensity of the feelings the subject has at that time. Yet this (...)
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  • Explaining Normative Reasons.Daniel Fogal & Olle Risberg - 2023 - Noûs 57 (1):51-80.
    In this paper, we present and defend a natural yet novel analysis of normative reasons. According to what we call support-explanationism, for a fact to be a normative reason to φ is for it to explain why there's normative support for φ-ing. We critically consider the two main rival forms of explanationism—ought-explanationism, on which reasons explain facts about ought, and good-explanationism, on which reasons explain facts about goodness—as well as the popular Reasons-First view, which takes the notion of a normative (...)
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  • Are epistemic reasons normative?Benjamin Kiesewetter - 2021 - Noûs 56 (3):670-695.
    According to a widely held view, epistemic reasons are normative reasons for belief – much like prudential or moral reasons are normative reasons for action. In recent years, however, an increasing number of authors have questioned the assumption that epistemic reasons are normative. In this article, I discuss an important challenge for anti-normativism about epistemic reasons and present a number of arguments in support of normativism. The challenge for anti-normativism is to say what kind of reasons epistemic reasons are if (...)
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  • Deontic artifacts. Investigating the normativity of objects.Giuseppe Lorini, Stefano Moroni & Olimpia Giuliana Loddo - 2021 - Philosophical Explorations 24 (2):185-203.
    Since the middle of the last century, normative language has been much studied. In particular, the normative function performed by certain sentences and by certain speech acts has been investigated in depth. Still, the normative function performed by certain physical artifacts designed and built to regulate human behaviors has not yet been thoroughly investigated. We propose to call this specific type of artifacts with normative intent ‘deontic artifacts’. This article aims to investigate this normative phenomenon that is so widespread in (...)
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  • Reasons As Evidence Against Ought-Nots.Kok Yong Lee - 2020 - Philosophical Papers 49 (3):431-455.
    Reasons evidentialism is the view that normative reasons can be analyzed in terms of evidence about oughts (i.e., propositions concerning whether or not S ought to phi). In this paper, I defend a new reason-evidentialist account according to which normative reasons are evidence against propositions of the form S ought not to phi. The arguments for my view have two strands. First of all, I argue that my view can account for three difficulty cases, cases where (i) a fact is (...)
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  • Social wrongs.Arto Laitinen & Arvi Särkelä - 2023 - Critical Review of International Social and Political Philosophy 26 (7):1048-1072.
    In this paper we elucidate the notion of ‘social wrongs’. It differs from moral wrongness, and is broader than narrowly political wrongs. We distinguish conceptually monadic wrongness (1.1), dyadic wronging (1.2), and the idea of there being something ‘wrong with’ an entity (1.3). We argue that social and political wrongs share a feature with natural badness or wrongness (illnesses of organisms) as well as malfunctioning artifacts or dysfunctional organizations: they violate so called ought-to-be norms; they are not as they ought (...)
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  • On Goodness, by David Conan Wolfsdorf. [REVIEW]Mahrad Almotahari - 2022 - Mind 131 (521):326-337.
    On Goodness, by WolfsdorfDavid Conan. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2019. Pp. xxii + 314.
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  • Harm as Negative Prudential Value: A Non-Comparative Account of Harm.Tanya de Villiers-Botha - 2020 - SATS 21 (1):21-38.
    In recent attempts to define ‘harm’, the most promising approach has often been thought to be the counterfactual comparative account of harm. Nevertheless, this account faces serious difficulties. Moreover, it has been argued that ‘harm’ cannot be defined without reference to a substantive theory of well-being, which is itself a fraught issue. This has led to the call for the concept to simply be dropped from the moral lexicon altogether. I reject this call, arguing that the non-comparative approach to defining (...)
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  • Are all practical reasons based on value?Benjamin Kiesewetter - 2022 - Oxford Studies in Metaethics 17:27-53.
    According to an attractive and widely held view, all practical reasons are explained in terms of the (instrumental or final) value of the action supported by the reason. I argue that this theory is incompatible with plausible assumptions about the practical reasons that correspond to certain moral rights, including the right to a promised action and the right to an exclusive use of one’s property. The argument is an explanatory rather than extensional one: while the actions supported by the relevant (...)
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  • Veritism and the normativity of logic.Nader Shoaibi - 2020 - Ratio 34 (1):7-19.
    The idea that logic is in some sense normative for thought and reasoning is a familiar one. Some of the most prominent figures in the history of philosophy including Kant and Frege have been among its defenders. The most natural way of spelling out this idea is to formulate wide-scope deductive requirements on belief which rule out certain states as irrational. But what can account for the truth of such deductive requirements of rationality? By far, the most prominent responses draw (...)
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  • Rational monism and rational pluralism.Jack Spencer - 2020 - Philosophical Studies 178 (6):1769-1800.
    Consequentialists often assume rational monism: the thesis that options are always made rationally permissible by the maximization of the selfsame quantity. This essay argues that consequentialists should reject rational monism and instead accept rational pluralism: the thesis that, on different occasions, options are made rationally permissible by the maximization of different quantities. The essay then develops a systematic form of rational pluralism which, unlike its rivals, is capable of handling both the Newcomb problems that challenge evidential decision theory and the (...)
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  • Is reasoning responding to reasons?Franziska Poprawe - 2020 - Philosophical Explorations 23 (2):146-159.
    Volume 23, Issue 2, June 2020, Page 146-159.
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  • Omnivores and Synthesisers: Academic Philosophers as Interdisciplinary Specialists.Michael Klenk - 2020 - In Julia Hermann, Jeroen Hopster, Wouter Kalf & Michael Klenk (eds.), Philosophy in the Age of Science? Inquiries into Philosophical Progess, Method, and Societal Relevance. Fordham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield. pp. 173-194.
    I stipulate that an academic discipline is societally relevant insofar as it helps to resolve a society’s real problems. What makes such a view correct depends on meta-normative views. I show how one’s meta-normative view significantly determines the likelihood that disciplinary philosophy is of societal relevance. On normative non-naturalism, normative naturalism, and normative scepticism, the societal relevance of philosophy is in doubt. I then argue that philosophers should aim for two remedies. They should be what I call omnivores and 'synthesisers, (...)
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  • A “Good” Explanation of Five Puzzles about Reasons.Stephen Finlay - 2019 - Philosophical Perspectives 33 (1):62-104.
    This paper champions the view (REG) that the concept of a normative reason for an agent S to perform an action A is that of an explanation why it would be good (in some way, to some degree) for S to do A. REG has numerous virtues, but faces some significant challenges which prompt many philosophers to be skeptical that it can correctly account for all our reasons. I demonstrate how five different puzzles about normative reasons can be solved by (...)
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  • Knowledge of Objective 'Oughts': Monotonicity and the New Miners Puzzle.Daniel Muñoz & Jack Spencer - 2020 - Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 103 (1):77-91.
    In the classic Miners case, an agent subjectively ought to do what they know is objectively wrong. This case shows that the subjective and objective ‘oughts’ are somewhat independent. But there remains a powerful intuition that the guidance of objective ‘oughts’ is more authoritative—so long as we know what they tell us. We argue that this intuition must be given up in light of a monotonicity principle, which undercuts the rationale for saying that objective ‘oughts’ are an authoritative guide for (...)
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  • Socratic reductionism in ethics.Nicholas Smyth - 2020 - European Journal of Philosophy 28 (4):970-985.
    In this paper, I clarify and defend a provocative hypothesis offered by Bernard Williams, namely, that modern people are much more likely to speak in terms of master-concepts like “good” or “right,” and correspondingly less likely to think and speak in the pluralistic terms favored by certain Ancient societies. By conducting a close reading of the Platonic dialogues Charmides and Laches, I show that the figure of Socrates plays a key historical role in this conceptual shift. Once we understand that (...)
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  • Cut-off points for the rational believer.Lina Maria Lissia - 2022 - Synthese 200 (2):1-19.
    I show that the Lottery Paradox is just a version of the Sorites, and argue that this should modify our way of looking at the Paradox itself. In particular, I focus on what I call “the Cut-off Point Problem” and contend that this problem, well known by Sorites scholars, ought to play a key role in the debate on Kyburg’s puzzle. Very briefly, I show that, in the Lottery Paradox, the premises “ticket n°1 will lose”, “ticket n°2 will lose”… “ticket (...)
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