Contemporary internalists typically idealize the conditions for motivation, claiming for example that motivation must be present in rational persons under certain conditions. Robert Johnson, in The Philosophical Quarterly, 49, convincingly argues that these versions of internalism overlook ways in which the conditions in the antecedent of the conditional expressing the analysis are incompatible with the claim under analysis. However, avoiding the fallacy decouples internalism from its use to explain and justify moral action. I use Johnson’s argument as the basis of (...) a new proposal for defining central internalist claims, modifying the conditions in which motivation must be manifest so that it is less idealized. We can specify conditions which are ideal enough to ensure motivation, but which are not so ideal as to be incompatible with the grounds of an agent’s reasons. (shrink)

Michael Smith's recent defence of the theory shows promise, in that it captures the most common reasons for accepting a Humean view. But, as I will argue, it falls short of vindicating the view. Smith's argument fails, because it ignores the role of rationality conditions on the ascription of motivating reason explanations. Because of these conditions, we must have a theory of rationality before we choose a theory of motivation. Thus, we cannot use Humean restrictions on motivation to argue for (...) a particular conception of rationality. I will not directly criticize using a Humean conception of rationality to defend a Humean theory of motivation. For my argument implies that such criticism must come more directly, as argument over the substantive content of rationality. (shrink)

Metaethics: A Contemporary Introduction provides a solid foundation in metaethics for advanced undergraduates by introducing a series of puzzles that most metaethical theories address. These puzzles involve moral disagreement, reference, moral epistemology, metaphysics, and moral psychology. From there, author Mark van Roojen discusses the many positions in metaethics that people will take in reaction to these puzzles. Van Roojen asks several essential questions of his readers, namely: What is metaethics? Why study it? How does one discuss metaethics, (...) given its inherently controversial nature? Each chapter closes with questions, both for reading comprehension and further discussion, and annotated suggestions for further reading. (shrink)

This book is a good idea, well-executed. The setup of the book mirrors one way of dividing up normative ethics. We divide theorists into Kantians, consequentialists and virtue theorists on the assumption that these are distinct and incompatible approaches to ethics. Each position is represented by one of the co-authors with Baron representing Kantians, Pettit consequentialists and Slote virtue theorists. What emerges is that each approach has virtues, but also that the division is neither neat nor exhaustive. As Pettit notes, (...) the issue that divides consequentialists from non-consequentialists is whether it is always right to promote agent-neutral value. While Kantians answer no where the consequentialists answer yes, a consequentialist can agree with Kantians about many other issues. And while Kantians are often portrayed as being exclusively interested in the rightness of actions, their actual emphasis on motivation and reasons for action make it difficult to distinguish their views from virtue theories that focus on the way an agent’s character and practical wisdom is reflected in her choices. The complexity of the positions defended by the authors highlight these difficulties for the standard division of the terrain. (shrink)

This is a review essay about Russ Shafer-Landau's Moral Realism. In Moral Realism, Russ Shafer-Landau divides cognitivist moral theories between realist and constructivist versions, where constructivists characterize morality as necessarily connected to the responses of agents under some conditions. This division is misleading; some constructivist or response-invoking characterizations of ethics are fully realist. We need not deny that reasons must be able to motivate rational agents in order to vindicate realism. Rationalists such as Shafer-Landau are committed to the truth of (...) response invoking necessary biconditionals connecting morality and reasons. Furthermore, reasons must be capable of governing the choices of rational agents. Thus moral judgements must be capable of motivating agents. (shrink)

Geach's problem, the problem of accounting for the fact that judgements expressed using moral terms function logically like other judgements, stands in the way of most noncognitive analyses of moral judgements. The non-cognitivist must offer a plausible interpretation of such terms when they appear in conditionals that also explains their logical interaction with straightforward moral assertions. Blackburn and Gibbard have offered a series of accounts each of which interprets such conditionals as expressing higher order commitments. Each then invokes norms for (...) the coherent acceptance of attitudes to explain why we hold certain combinations inconsistent. Against these accounts the paper presses two related objections: (1) The norms needed to do the explanatory work cannot be strong enough to do that work without also ruling clearly consistent attitudes inconsistent. And (2), the norms of rational attitude acceptance do not neatly track the distinction between consistent and inconsistent attitudes. (shrink)

Non-cognitivism is a variety of irrealism about ethics with a number of influential variants. Non-cognitivists agree with error theorists that there are no moral properties or moral facts. But rather than thinking that this makes moral statements false, noncognitivists claim that moral statements are not in the business of predicating properties or making statements which could be true or false in any substantial sense. Roughly put, noncognitivists think that moral statements have no truth conditions. Furthermore, according to non-cognitivists, when people (...) utter moral sentences they are not typically expressing states of mind which are beliefs or which are cognitive in the way that beliefs are. Rather they are expressing non-cognitive attitudes more similar to desires, approval or disapproval. Cognitivism is the denial of non-cognitivism. Thus it holds that moral statements do express beliefs and that they are apt for truth and falsity. But cognitivism need not be a species of realism since a cognitivist can be an error theorist and think all moral statements false. Still, moral realists are cognitivists insofar as they think moral statements are apt for truth and falsity and that many of them are in fact true. (shrink)

Over the last decade there have been various attempts to use empirical data about people’s dispositions to choose to undermine various moral positions by arguing that our judgements about what to do are unreliable. Usually they are directed at non-consequentialists by consequentialists, but they have also been directed at all moral theories by skeptics about morality. Walter Sinnott-Armstrong has been one of the leading proponents of such general skepticism. He has argued that empirical results particularly undermine intuitionist moral epistemology. This (...) paper is an attempt to look at what intuitionists should say in response. Consider the following argument : Regress (R1) If any person S is ever justified in believing a normative claim that p then S must be able to infer p from other beliefs of S. (shrink)

Tamara Horowitz criticizes the use of thought experiments by Warren Quinn and others to support a version of the Doctrine of Doing and Allowing. She argues that because a competing empirical explanatory hypothesis for our common agreement on the correct outcome in those thought experiments is true we should conclude that our intuitions concerning those examples do not provide support for the Doctrine of Doing and Allowing. Other authors have reached similar conclusions. I argue that the argument misconstrues the role (...) of higher order reflection on first order intuitive moral judgements in moral thinking. Appropriately appreciating that role will require us to reject Horowitz's claim that she has undermined arguments from Quinn's examples to the conclusion that there is a morally significance difference between doing and allowing. (shrink)

At the beginning of the twentieth century, G. E. Moore’s open question argument convinced many philosophers that moral statements were not equivalent to statements made using non- moral or descriptive terms. For any non- moral description of an object or object it seemed that competent speakers could without confusion doubt that the action or object was appropriately characterized using moral terms such as ‘good’ or ‘right’. The question of whether the action or object so described was good or right was (...) always open, even to competent speakers. In the absence of any systematic theory to explain the possibility of synthetic as opposed to analytic identities, many were convinced this demonstrated that moral properties could not be identified with any natural properties. Thus Moore and others concluded that moral properties such as goodness were irreducible sui generis properties, not identical to natural. (shrink)

Motivational internalism about moral judgments is the plausible view that accepting a moral judgment is necessarily connected to motivation motivation. However, it conflicts with the Humean theory that motives must be constituted by desires. Simple versions of internalism run into problems with people who do not desire to do what they believe right. This has long been urged by David Brink. Hence, many internalists have adopted more subtle defeasible views, on which only rational agents will have a desire to act. (...) I will argue that more complex versions run into problems with self-effacing values of the sort Parfit highlights in another context. Such values can only be attained indirectly. After proposing a general account of motivation suited to the internalist thesis, I argue that Anti-Humeanism is better suited to accommodating the internalist insight. (shrink)

Expressivist analyses of evaluative discourse characterize unembedded moral claims as functioning primarily to express noncognitive attitudes. The most thorny problem for this project has been explaining the logical relations between such evaluative judgements and other judgements expressed using evaluative terms in unasserted contexts, such as when moral judgements are embedded in conditionals. One strategy for solving the problem derives logical relations among moral judgements from relations of "consistency" and "inconsistency" which hold between the attitudes they express. This approach has been (...) accused of conflating inconsistency with mere pragmatic incoherence. In reaction such criticisms several recent theorists have attempted to use alternative resources. The most sophisticated noncognitivists have often propounded theories with secondary descriptive components in addition to their primary expressive meanings. Recent independent suggestions by Frank Jackson and Stephen Barker attempt to solve the embedding problem by utilizing such descriptive components of moral utterances. Unfortunately, this strategy fails to handle a certain sort of example using just the descriptive resources available to noncognitivists. For it must rule valid arguments invalid in virtue of equivocation in the secondary descriptive meanings. The present paper explains the problem and suggests a moral for expressivist theories. (shrink)

Jackson and Pettit propose a "functionalist" analysis of evaluative content in service of a naturalistic reduction of moral terms. Though a broadly functionalist account may be correct, it does not immediately lead to a naturalistic theory for two reasons. First, a naturalistic theory should make clear in what sense the properties in question are naturalistic. The paper raises some doubts that this can be done consistent with the functionalist reduction. Second, even if we can construct true Ramsey sentences containing only (...) naturalistic vocabulary and variables for moral terms, this will not ensure that the satisfiers for those variables are naturalistic. (shrink)

Some moral debunkers such as Sharon Street argue that evolutionary debunking arguments favor a response-dependent or subjectivist metaethics over more realist metaethical accounts. I argue that this thought conflates meta-semantics with semantics by running together mind-dependent content determination relations with mind-dependent content. Insofar as reference is broadly an epistemic relation, evolutionary debunking arguments would cause trouble for mind-independent theories of reference and content determination, since there would be no guarantee that reference would track epistemic access. But a firmly realist theory (...) of content is consistent with a mind-dependent theory of reference. I use David Hilbert's theory of color to illustrate. (shrink)

Robust moral rationalism has long been regarded as incompatible with the Humean Theory of Motivation which requires desires to ground motives. Recently this orthodoxy has been challenged on the ground that rationality itself might require certain desires. This strategy does not remove the tension between rationalism and the Humean Theory. If rationalism is correct, new normative beliefs should engender new motives - motives not grounded in a means-ends fashion in rationally required existing desires. Thus the motivational responses we should expect (...) would be ruled out by the Humean Theory, even when supplemented by rationally required desires. Anti-Humeans about rationality should not be Humeans about motivation. (shrink)

One popular criticism of affirmative action is that it discriminates against those who would otherwise have been offered jobs without it. This objection must rely on the non- consequentialist distinction between what we do and what we merely allow to claim that doing nothing merely allows people to be harmed by the discrimination of others, while preferential programs actively harm those left out. It fails since the present effects of past discrimination result from social arrangements which result from actions of (...) ours. We can be responsible for the effects of past discrimination, even without having discriminated, if we are responsible for that discrimination having those effects. (shrink)

Satisficing without thereby maximizing is rational provided that non-consequentialism is rational and provided that the preferred characterization of non-consequentialism is not one in which right action is justified in virtue of maximizing agent-relative value. Rather, the non-consequentialism which can serve to defend satisficing should be one in which the best characterization of certain reasons to act does not involve maximization of value of any sort, whether agent-relative or agent neutral. I argue there are reasons to prefer this sort of non-consequentialism (...) to theories which defend non-consequentialism by construing value as agent-relative. An upshot is that satisficing cannot be well-defended within an overall consequentialist framework. (shrink)

T. M. Scanlon suggests that the binding nature of promises itself plays a role in allowing a promisee rationally to expect follow through even while that binding nature itself depends on the promisee’s rational expectation of follow through. Kolodny and Wallace object that this makes the account viciously circular. The chapter defends Scanlon’s theory from this objection. It argues that the basic complaint is a form of wrong kinds of reason objection. The thought is that the promisee’s reason to expect (...) compliance are undermined if the promise is binding only when the promisee forms that very expectation. The chapter suggests that other uncontroversially rational processes of multi-person coordination involve beliefs with the very same feature. Focal point reasoning in the theory of games is one example. In coordination situations it can be rational to believe that another person will do something precisely because that person expects you to believe what one does about what they’ll do. An examination of the reasoning in such cases motivates a group reflection principle that vindicates the reasoning employed in Scanlon’s account. -/- . (shrink)

Cian Dorr has argued that non-cognitivists must think of reasoning from moral premises to empirical conclusions as akin to wishful thinking. Defenders of non-cognitivism have responded that an adequate solution to the Frege-Geach problem would explain relations of entailment and implication between moral and nonmoral claims and thereby also handle Dorr’s objection. This paper offers a new, more specific, interpretation of Dorr’s objection and one that makes it distinct from worries about Frege-Geach. The paper also explains why non-cognitivists might still (...) reasonably be optimistic that they can allay this version of the worry. Still, successfully undercutting the worry also undercuts one of the prime reasons offered on behalf of non-cognitivism—arguments based on the Humean Theory of Motivation purporting to show that moral judgments cannot be beliefs. (shrink)

This is a review essay discussing Mark Schroeder's book, Being For.

Rationalism offers an account of moral properties as a subset of the properties which serve to rationalize right actions, and these properties are fit to be the referents of our moral terms. That fitness can be exploited in constructing an externalist theory of reference determination for these terms. The resulting externalist theory draws support from standard responses to Moral Twin-Earth scenarios. The relevance of these responses to moral semantics has recently beenvigorously challenged by Dowell and by Schroeter and Schroeter. The (...) social character of meaning relations, which can explain the openness of questions about an analysis, may thereby also make Twin-Earth judgements beside the point. But the resources available to translators go beyond semantic competence and it is these resources that nonetheless make the Moral Twin-Earth responses relevant. (shrink)

This paper presents a non-consequentialist defense of Rawls’s general conception of justice requiring that primary social goods be distributed so that the least share is as great as possible. It suggests that a defense of this idea can be offered within a Rossian framework of prima facie duties. The prima facie duty not to harm constrains people from supporting social institutions which do not leave their fellows with goods and resources above a certain threshold. The paper argues that societies in (...) accord with the Rawlsian general conception come closest to meeting this requirement. This way of arguing for the conception enables the defenders of the theory to elude standard objections offered by utilitarians, libertarians, and even other egalitarians. (shrink)

Most contemporary moral philosophy is concerned with issues of rationality, universality, impartiality, and principle. By contrast Laurence Blum is concerned with the psychology of moral agency. The essays in this collection examine the moral import of emotion, motivation, judgment, perception, and group identifications, and explore how all these psychic capacities contribute to a morally good life. Blum takes up the challenge of Iris Murdoch to articulate a vision of moral excellence that provides a worthy aspiration for human beings. Drawing on (...) accounts of non-Jewish rescuers of Jews during the Holocaust Blum argues that impartial principle can mislead us about the variety of forms of moral excellence. (shrink)

Over the course of the twentieth century, the logical space available to metaethics has been rather thoroughly mapped out. We now have a pretty good idea of the inhabitable terrain, and each bit of that terrain appears to be occupied by able defenders. So it comes as a surprise when Mark Timmons stakes out previously undiscovered and unclaimed territory. He defends a view that he labels “ethical contextualism,” a position that is at once naturalistic, nonreductive, nonrelativist, irrealist, nondescriptivist, and (...) cognitivist. The list may seem incoherent so as to risk identifying contextualism with a form of error theory, but Timmons thinks this is an illusion resulting from a failure to realize that not all assertions need be descriptive. Some assertions are evaluative assertions distinct from descriptive assertions. As assertions, they express beliefs, but not representational beliefs. (shrink)

Over the course of the twentieth century, the logical space available to metaethics has been rather thoroughly mapped out. We now have a pretty good idea of the inhabitable terrain, and each bit of that terrain appears to be occupied by able defenders. So it comes as a surprise when Mark Timmons stakes out previously undiscovered and unclaimed territory. He defends a view that he labels “ethical contextualism,” a position that is at once naturalistic, nonreductive, nonrelativist, irrealist, nondescriptivist, and (...) cognitivist. The list may seem incoherent so as to risk identifying contextualism with a form of error theory, but Timmons thinks this is an illusion resulting from a failure to realize that not all assertions need be descriptive. Some assertions are evaluative assertions distinct from descriptive assertions. As assertions, they express beliefs, but not representational beliefs. (shrink)

In nearly forty years’ of work, Simon Blackburn has done more than anyone to expand our imaginations about the aspirations for broadly projectivist/expressivist theorizing in all areas of philosophy. I know that I am far from alone in that his work has often been a source of both inspiration and provocation for my own work. It might be tempting, in a volume of critical essays such as this, to pay tribute to Blackburn’s special talent for destructive polemic, by seeking to (...) take down that by which I’ve been most provoked over the years. But Blackburn’s biting wit has both more wit and more bite than I could hope to emulate. So instead I’ll try to emulate here what I’ve admired the most about Blackburn – the constructive vein of much of his work. (shrink)

There are two principles that lend Brouwer's mathematics the extra power beyond arithmetic. Both are presented in Brouwer's writings with little or no argument. One, the principle of bar induction, will not concern us here. The other, the continuity principle for numbers, occurs for the first time in print in [4]. It is formulated and immediately applied to show that the set of numerical choice sequences is not enumerable. In fact, the idea of the continuity property can be dated fairly (...) precisely, it is to be found in the margin of Brouwer's notes for his course on Pointset Theory of 1915/16. The course was repeated in 1916/17 and he must have inserted his first formulation of the continuity principle in the fall of 1916 as new material right at the beginning of the course.In modern language, the principle readswhere α and β range over choice sequences of natural numbers, m and x over natural numbers, and stands for ⟨α, α, …, α⟩, the initial segment of α of length m.An immediate consequence of WC-N is that all full functions are continuous, and, as a corollary, that the continuum is unsplittable [28]. Note that WC-N is incompatible with Church's thesis, [22], section 4.6.After Brouwer asserted WC-N, Troelstra was the first to ask in print for a conceptual motivation, but he remained an exception; most authors followed Brouwer by simply asserting it, cf. [18].Let us note first that in one particular case the principle is obvious indeed, namely in the case of the lawless sequences. The notion of lawless sequence surfaced fairly late in the history of intuitionism. Kreisel introduced it in [17] for metamathematical purposes. There is a letter from Brouwer to Heyting in which the phenomenon also occurs [7]. This is an important and interesting fact since it is the only time that Brouwer made use of a possibility expressly stipulated in, e.g., [5], see below. (shrink)

This paper explores the centrality of self-affirmation in Bernard Lonergan’s Insight and is specifically concerned with the role of bias in relation to self-appropriation and genuineness. I begin with an explication of the process of self-affirmation and the model of knowledge it involves. I then discuss the nature of bias and its relation to genuineness in Insight. My analysis concludes that bias is never “overcome,” in the sense of being eliminated. Thus, genuine self-appropriation is never complete. Rather, being true to (...) oneself is the struggle to recognize one’s biases while still affirming what is reasonable and choosing responsible action. I also conclude that total resistance to self-affirmation is a disingenuous refusal to engage one’s biases; it is an act of evasion, or a fear of genuineness and its accompanying responsibilities. I end by briefly addressing some of these tensions in relation to Catholicism, specifically raising questions concerning our thinking and acting from within a Catholic faith. (shrink)

In this paper, we argue that the characteristics of digital platforms challenge the fundamental assumptions of value sensitive design (VSD). Traditionally, VSD methods assume that we can identify relevant values during the design phase of new technologies. The underlying assumption is that there is onlyepistemic uncertaintyabout which values will be impacted by a technology. VSD methods suggest that one can predict which values will be affected by new technologies by increasing knowledge about how values are interpreted or understood in context. (...) In contrast, digital platforms exhibit a novel form of uncertainty, namely,ontological uncertainty: even with full information and overview, it cannot be foreseen what users or developers will do with digital platforms. Hence, predictions about which values are affected might not hold. In this paper, we suggest expanding VSD methods to account for value dynamism resulting from ontological uncertainty. Our expansions involve (1) extending VSD to the entire lifecycle of a platform, (2) broadening VSD through the addition of reflexivity, i.e. second-order learning about what values to aim at, and (3) adding specific tools of moral sandboxing and moral prototyping to enhance such reflexivity. While we illustrate our approach with a short case study about ride-sharing platforms such as Uber, our approach is relevant for other technologies exhibiting ontological uncertainty as well, such as machine learning, robotics and artificial intelligence. (shrink)