A slew of recent political theorists—many taking their cue from the political writings of Bernard Williams—have recently contended that political normativity is its own kind of normativity, distinct from moral normativity. In this article, we first attempt to clarify what this claim amounts to and then reconstruct and interrogate five major arguments for it. We contend that all these arguments are unconvincing and fail to establish a sense in which political normativity is genuinely separate from morality.

G. A. Cohen’s claim that fundamental principles are ‘fact-insensitive’ has not received an especially warm welcome from the philosophical community. While some philosophers have expressed doubts about the plausibility of his claim, others have complained that even if his thesis is true, it is also relatively insignificant. In my paper, I argue that the fact-insensitivity thesis, if true, provides considerable support for value pluralism, and is thus of interest for that reason. Though Cohen himself assumes a plurality of fundamental principles, (...) he never argues that the fact-insensitivity thesis supports this assumption. One of my paper’s aims, then, is to fill an argumentative gap in Cohen’s meta-ethical framework. (shrink)

David Estlund holds that ultimate normative principles are insensitive to bad facts. This is a deliberately twisted appropriation of Jerry Cohen’s famous dictum that ultimate normative principles are fact-insensitive. In this paper, I will show why Estlund’s twist misses the point of Cohen’s argument. The fact-insensitivity claim is not a requirement to eliminate all facts from our normative theories because facts necessarily make these theories concessive. Instead, it may help us to locate the true origin of these concessions. In normative (...) theorizing, we have not explained why a fact supports a principle if we fail to articulate the higher-order principle in light of which that fact is normatively significant. (shrink)