Many hope that our values, purged of messy human contingency, could aspire to correspond with mind-independent, rationally obligatory, and eternal ethical facts. But if the arguments of this thesis are on the right track, we should reject the search for non-natural and mind-independent moral truths.

Some theorists of normative explanation argue that we can make sense of debates between first-order moral theories such as consequentialism and its rivals only if we understand their explanations of why the right acts are right and the wrong acts are wrong as generative (e.g. grounding) explanations. Others argue that the standard form of normative explanation is, instead, some kind of unification. Neither sort of explanatory monism can account for all the explanations of particular moral facts that moral theorists seek (...) to state and defend. This paper argues that we can do better if we accept normative explanatory pluralism, the view that at least some particular explananda in normative inquiry have more than one type of correct complete explanation. Such pluralism is supported by what goes on in actual moral inquiry, parallels an independently plausible form of pluralism about scientific explanation, and can offer principled responses to central objections. (shrink)

This paper is a survey of the generalism-particularism debate in ethics. It's an updated version of "Moral Particularism", in Christian B. Miller (ed.), The Continuum Companion to Ethics (Continuum, 2011), pp. 247-260.

In this paper, I argue that a realist account of the modality of moral supervenience is superior to a non-cognitivist account. According to the recommended realist account, moral supervenience amounts to strong supervenience where the outer ‘necessary’ is conceptual and the inner metaphysical. It is argued that non-cognitivism faces a critical choice between weak and strong supervenience where both options are implausible on this view. However, non-cognitivism seems to have an important advantage: It can explain why the outer ‘necessary’ is (...) conceptual by reference to the function of moral language to influence behaviour. In the main part of the paper, I argue that realism is able to explain why ‘necessary’ in moral supervenience needs to be understood in the recommended manner by reference to the connection between moral properties and moral reasons. Moreover, I argue that the realist account has other attractive features. In contrast to non-cognitivism, it can unify the normative sphere by being generalizable to other normative notions. In addition, it can be part of an explanation of why moral language can have the function to influence behaviour. (shrink)

[This paper is available as open access from the publisher.] Normative theories aim to explain why things have the normative features they have. This paper argues that, contrary to some plausible existing views, one important kind of normative explanations which first-order normative theories aim to formulate and defend can fail to transmit downward along chains of metaphysical determination of normative facts by non-normative facts. Normative explanation is plausibly subject to a kind of a justification condition whose satisfaction may fail to (...) transmit along the relevant kind of metaphysical hierarchy. A broader aim of the paper is to contribute to systematic theorizing about normative explanation: whereas there has been a great deal of work on scientific explanation, there has been little by way of systematic exploration of what sort of explanations normative theories aim to formulate and defend. (shrink)

Moral theories often issue general principles that explain our moral judgments in terms of underlying moral considerations. But it is unclear whether the general principles have an explanatory role beyond the underlying moral considerations. In order to avoid the redundancy of their principles, two-level theories issue principles that appear to generalize beyond the considerations that ground them. In doing so, the principles appear to overgeneralize. The problem is conspicuous in the case of contractualism, which proposes that moral principles are grounded (...) in generic reasons that operate in only a subset of the cases covered by the relevant principle. Arguments that motivate the use of generic reasons on the basis of guidance, institutional necessity, or fairness are unsatisfactory. But the generality of moral principles can be justified in terms of the idea of a generic interest, which is an interest that all occupants of a standpoint have in virtue of what occupants of the standpoint as such typically take an interest in. The notion of a generic interest therefore acknowledges a distinction between having and taking an interest, and its use in moral theory is a way of giving expression to the significance of autonomy. This is reminiscent of the idea of a normative power; but the idea of a generic interest is less expensive and makes better sense of the way in which autonomy features in our moral lives. (shrink)

In this paper, I present the problem of scientific change as an explanatory problem, that is, as a philosophical problem concerning what logical forms of explanation we should employ in order to un...