7 found
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  1. Bullshit, Pseudoscience and Pseudophilosophy.Victor Moberger - 2020 - Theoria 86 (5):595-611.
    In this article I give a unified account of three phenomena: bullshit, pseudoscience and pseudophilosophy. My aims are partly conceptual, partly evaluative. Drawing on Harry Frankfurt's seminal analysis of bullshit, I give an account of the three phenomena and of how they are related, and I use this account to explain what is bad about all three. More specifically, I argue that what is defective about pseudoscience and pseudophilosophy is precisely that they are special cases of bullshit. Apart from raising (...)
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  2. Not Just Errors: A New Interpretation of Mackie’s Error Theory.Victor Moberger - 2017 - Journal for the History of Analytical Philosophy 5 (3).
    J. L. Mackie famously argued that a commitment to non-existent objective values permeates ordinary moral thought and discourse. According to a standard interpretation, Mackie construed this commitment as a universal and indeed essential feature of moral judgments. In this paper I argue that we should rather ascribe to Mackie a form of semantic pluralism, according to which not all moral judgments involve the commitment to objective values. This interpretation not only makes better sense of what Mackie actually says, but also (...)
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  3. Non-Naturalism and Reasons-Firstism: How to Solve the Discontinuity Problem by Reducing Two Queerness Worries to One.Victor Moberger - 2022 - The Journal of Ethics 26 (1):131-154.
    A core tenet of metanormative non-naturalism is that genuine or robust normativity—i.e., the kind of normativity that is characteristic of moral requirements, and perhaps also of prudential, epistemic and even aesthetic requirements—is metaphysically special in a way that rules out naturalist analyses or reductions; on the non-naturalist view, the normative is sui generis and metaphysically discontinuous with the natural. Non-naturalists agree, however, that the normative is modally as well as explanatorily dependent on the natural. These two commitments—discontinuity and dependence—at least (...)
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  4. The Mackiean Supervenience Challenge.Victor Moberger - 2019 - Ethical Theory and Moral Practice 22 (1):219-236.
    Non-naturalists about normativity hold that there are instantiable normative properties which are metaphysically discontinuous with natural properties. One of the central challenges to non-naturalism is how to reconcile this discontinuity with the supervenience of the normative on the natural. Drawing on J. L. Mackie’s seminal but highly compressed discussion in Ethics: Inventing Right and Wrong, this paper argues that the supervenience challenge as usually conceived is merely a symptom of a more fundamental challenge in the vicinity.
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  5.  55
    Impossible Ethics: Do Population Ethical Impossibility Results Support Moral Skepticism and/or Anti‐Realism?Victor Moberger - 2024 - Pacific Philosophical Quarterly 105 (3):370-391.
    In this paper, I discuss two different metaethical challenges based on population ethical impossibility results. According to the anti‐realist challenge, the results pose a serious threat to the existence of objective moral facts. According to the skeptical challenge, the results pose a serious threat to the reliability of our moral intuitions. My aim is to systematically explore and evaluate these challenges. In addition to clarifying the issues, I argue that population ethical impossibility results do not in fact support any anti‐realist (...)
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  6. Hume’s Dictum and Metaethics.Victor Moberger - 2020 - Philosophical Quarterly 70 (279):328-349.
    This paper explores the metaethical ramifications of a coarse-grained criterion of property identity, sometimes referred to as Hume's dictum. According to Hume's dictum, properties are identical if and only if they are necessarily co-extensive. Assuming the supervenience of the normative on the natural, this criterion threatens the non-naturalist view that there are instantiable normative properties which are distinct from natural properties. In response, non-naturalists typically point to various counterintuitive implications of Hume's dictum. The paper clarifies this strategy and defends it (...)
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  7. The limits of the just-too-different argument.Ragnar Francén & Victor Moberger - 2024 - Ratio 37 (1):64-75.
    According to moral non-naturalism, the kind of genuine or robust normativity that is characteristic of moral requirements cannot be accounted for within a wholly naturalistic worldview, but requires us to posit a domain of non-natural properties and facts. The main argument for this core non-naturalist claim appeals to what David Enoch calls the 'just-too-different intuition'. According to Enoch, robust normativity cannot be natural, since it is just too different from anything natural. Derek Parfit makes essentially the same claim under the (...)
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