Call the ethos understanding rightness in terms of spiritual purity and piety, and wrongness in terms of corruption and sacrilege, the “fetish ethic.” Jonathan Haidt and his colleagues suggest that this ethos is particularly salient to political conservatives and non-liberal cultures around the globe. In this essay, I point to numerous examples of moral fetishism in mainstream academic ethics. Once we see how deeply “infected” our ethical reasoning is by fetishistic intuitions, we can respond by 1) repudiating the fetishistic impulse, (...) by 2) “sublimating” our fetishism into liberal rationales, or by 3) accepting the fetishism on its own terms. Of these options, I argue that sublimating our fetishism is not advisable, and that embracing our ethical fetishism isn’t as obviously misguided as some suggest. (shrink)

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 (...) and then show that there is a way to be a naturalistic realist that avoids internal inconsistency and uniquely provides for moral normativity. (shrink)

The prospects for moral realism and ethical naturalism have been important parts of recent debates within metaethics. As a first approximation, moral realism is the claim that there are facts or truths about moral matters that are objective in the sense that they obtain independently of the moral beliefs or attitudes of appraisers. Ethical naturalism is the claim that moral properties of people, actions, and institutions are natural, rather than occult or supernatural, features of the world. Though these metaethical debates (...) remain unsettled, several people, myself included, have tried to defend the plausibility of both moral realism and ethical naturalism. I, among others, have appealed to recent work in the philosophy of language—in particular, to so-called theories of “direct reference” —to defend ethical naturalism against a variety of semantic worries, including G. E. Moore's “open question argument.” In response to these arguments, critics have expressed doubts about the compatibility of moral realism and direct reference. In this essay, I explain these doubts, and then sketch the beginnings of an answer—but understanding both the doubts and my answer requires some intellectual background. (shrink)

Blackburn argues that moral supervenience in conjunction with the lack of entailments from naturalistic to moral judgments poses a challenge to moral realism. Klagge and McFetridge try to avert the challenge by appealing to synthetically necessary connections between natural and moral properties. Blackburn rejoins that, even if there are such connections, the challenge still remains. We remain agnostic on the question whether there are such connections, but argue against Blackburn that, if there are indeed such connections, then the challenge to (...) moral realism, properly phrased, does not hold up. (shrink)

I argue for the claim that there are instances of a priori justified belief – in particular, justified belief in moral principles – that are not analytic, i.e., that cannot be explained solely by the understanding we have of their propositions. §1–2 provides the background necessary for understanding this claim: in particular, it distinguishes between two ways a proposition can be analytic, Basis and Constitutive, and provides the general form of a moral principle. §§3–5 consider whether Hume's Law, properly interpreted, (...) can be established by Moore's Open Question Argument, and concludes that it cannot: while Moore's argument – appropriately modified – is effective against the idea that moral judgments are either reductively analyzable or Constitutive-analytic, a different argument is needed to show that they are not Basis-analytic. Such an argument is supplied in §6. §§7–8 conclude by considering how these considerations bear on recent discussions of “alternative normative concepts”, on the epistemology of intuitions, and on the differences between disagreement in moral domains and in other a priori domains such as logic and mathematics. (shrink)

I exploit parallel considerations in the philosophy of mind and metaethics to argue that the reasoning employed in an important argument for panpsychism overgeneralizes to support an analogous position in metaethics: panmoralism. Next, I raise a number of problems for panmoralism and thereby build a case for taking the metaethical parallel to be a reductio ad absurdum of the argument for panpsychism. Finally, I contrast panmoralism with a position recently defended by Einar Duenger Bohn and argue that the two suffer (...) from similar problems. I conclude by drawing some general lessons for panpsychism. (shrink)

Moral non-cognitivists hope to explain the nature of moral agreement and disagreement as agreement and disagreement in non-cognitive attitudes. In doing so, they take on the task of identifying the relevant attitudes, distinguishing the non-cognitive attitudes corresponding to judgements of moral wrongness, for example, from attitudes involved in aesthetic disapproval or the sports fan’s disapproval of her team’s performance. We begin this paper by showing that there is a simple recipe for generating apparent counterexamples to any informative specification of the (...) moral attitudes. This may appear to be a lethal objection to non-cognitivism, but a similar recipe challenges attempts by non-cognitivism’s competitors to specify the conditions underwriting the contrast between genuine and merely apparent moral disagreement. Because of its generality, this specification problem requires a systematic response, which, we argue, is most easily available for the non-cognitivist. Building on premisses congenial to the non-cognitivist tradition, we make the following claims: (1) In paradigmatic cases, wrongness-judgements constitute a certain complex but functionally unified state, and paradigmatic wrongness-judgements form a functional kind, preserved by homeostatic mechanisms. (2) Because of the practical function of such judgements, we should expect judges’ intuitive understanding of agreement and disagreement to be accommodating, treating states departing from the paradigm in various ways as wrongness-judgements. (3) This explains the intuitive judgements required by the counterexample-generating recipe, and more generally why various kinds of amoralists are seen as making genuine wrongness-judgements. (shrink)

Many philosophers think that moral objectivism is supported by stable features of moral discourse and thinking. When engaged in moral reasoning and discourse, people behave ‘as if’ objectivism were correct, and the seemingly most straightforward way of making sense of this is to assume that objectivism is correct; this is how we think that such behavior is explained in paradigmatically objectivist domains. By comparison, relativist, error-theoretic or non-cognitivist accounts of this behavior seem contrived and ad hoc. After explaining why this (...) argument should be taken seriously (recent arguments notwithstanding), I argue that it is nevertheless undermined by considerations of moral disagreement. Even if the metaphysical, epistemic and semantic commitments of objectivism provide little or no evidence against it, and even if the alternative explanations of ‘objectivist’ traits of moral discourse and thinking are speculative or contrived, objectivism is itself incapable of making straightforward sense of these traits. Deep and widespread moral disagreement or, rather, the mere appearance of such disagreement, strongly suggests that the explanations operative in paradigmatically objective discourse fail to carry over to the moral case. Since objectivism, no less than relativism, non-cognitivism and error-theories, needs non-trivial explanations of why we behave ‘as if’ objectivism were correct, such behavior does not presently provide reason to accept objectivism. (shrink)

In this paper, I will attempt to develop and defend a common form of intuitive resistance to the companions in guilt argument. I will argue that one can reasonably believe there are promising solutions to the access problem for mathematical realism that don’t translate to moral realism. In particular, I will suggest that the structuralist project of accounting for mathematical knowledge in terms of some form of logical knowledge offers significant hope of success while no analogous approach offers such hope (...) for moral realism. (shrink)

In this paper I will draw attention to an important route to external world skepticism, which I will call confidence skepticism. I will argue that we can defang confidence skepticism (though not a meeker ‘argument from might’ which has got some attention in the 20th century literature on external world skepticism) by adopting a partially psychologistic answer to the problem of priors. And I will argue that certain recent work in the epistemology of mathematics and logic provides independent support for (...) such psychologism. (shrink)

Reductionist forms of moral realism, such as naturalist realism, are often thought immune to epistemological objections that have been raised against nonnaturalist realism in the form of reliability worries or evolutionary debunking arguments. This article establishes that reductionist realist views can only explain the reliability of our moral beliefs at the cost of incurring repugnant first-order conclusions.

A posteriori Moral Naturalism posits a posteriorimoral/naturalistic identities. Versions of this view thatposit necessary identities purport to rely on theKripke/Putnam doctrine of scientific essentialism.Versions that posit only contingent identities requirethat moral terms are non-rigid designators. I argue thatmetaethics does not fall within the scope of scientificessentialism and that moral terms are not non-rigid designators.

This paper has two related goals. First, we develop an expressivist account of negation which, in the spirit of Alan Gibbard, treats disagreement as semantically primitive. Our second goal is to make progress toward a unified expressivist treatment of modality. Metaethical expressivists must be expressivists about deontic modal claims. But then metaethical expressivists must either extend their expressivism to include epistemic and alethic modals, or else accept a semantics for modal expressions that is radically disjunctive. We propose that expressivists look (...) to Amie Thomasson’s work for a general strategy for offering a unified expressivist account of modality. Modals in general, we propose, are devices for expressing metalinguistic commitments within the object language, with deontic, epistemic, and metaphysical modals all expressing different kinds of metalinguistic commitments. (shrink)

Allan Gibbard () argues that the term ‘meaning’ expresses a normative concept, primarily on the basis of arguments that parallel Moore's famous Open Question Argument. In this paper I argue that Gibbard's evidence for normativity rests on idiosyncrasies of the Open Question Argument, and that when we use related thought experiments designed to bring out unusual semantic intuitions associated with normative terms we fail to find such evidence. These thought experiments, moreover, strongly suggest there are basic requirements for a theory (...) of meaning incompatible with Gibbard's ultimate goal of providing an expressivist account of meaning-related concepts. I conclude by considering a possible way in which meaning could be normative, consistent with the intuitions about disagreement; but this form of normativism about meaning appears incompatible with Gibbard's expressivism. (shrink)

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.

This is a critical notice of José Zalabardo's recent book 'Pragmatist Semantics: A Use-Based Approach to Linguistic Representation' (2023). I raise problems about specific steps of Zalabardo’s arguments and I criticize important aspects of his positive account.

This chapter discusses vagueness in ethics.

Abstract We propose a metaethical view that combines the cognitivist idea that moral judgments are genuine beliefs and moral utterances express genuine assertions with the idea that such beliefs and utterances are nondescriptive in their overall content. This sort of view has not been recognized among the standard metaethical options because it is generally assumed that all genuine beliefs and assertions must have descriptive content. We challenge this assumption and thereby open up conceptual space for a new kind of metaethical (...) view. In developing our brand of nondescriptivist cognitivism we do the following: (1) articulate a conception of belief (and assertion) that does not require the overall declarative content of beliefs (and assertions) to be descriptive content; (2) make a case for the independent plausibility of this conception of belief and assertion; and (3) argue that our view, formulated in a way that draws upon the proposed conception of belief, has significant comparative advantages over descriptivist forms of cognitivism. (shrink)

Terence Horgan and Mark Timmons? Moral Twin Earth thought experiment shows that realist ethical naturalism entails a kind of conceptual relativism about moral predicates. This conceptual relativism implies, further, that Earthlings and Twin Earthlings do not express substantive disagreement with one another. Because this latter implication clashes with considered linguistic intuitions, Horgan and Timmons conclude that we should reject realist ethical naturalism. Against this, several critics recommend that realists ?bite the bullet? with respect to Moral Twin Earth: despite our intuitions, (...) we should accept that the speakers do not disagree. These critics argue that the intuitions elicited by the thought experiment are either the result of a failure on the part of readers to appreciate hidden details of the Moral Twin Earth case, or else they are mere artifacts of readers? epistemic limitations. In this paper, I show that the Moral Twin Earth argument prevails against this line of attack. (shrink)

Semantics is the investigation of meaning, and semantic theories, including semantic theories about moral language, come in two very different kinds. Descriptive semantic theories are theories about what words mean. So descriptive moral semantic theories are theories about what moral words mean: words like ‘good’, ‘better’, ‘right’, ‘must’, ‘ought’, ‘reason’, and ‘rational’. In contrast, foundational semantic theories are theories about why words mean what they do, or more specifically, about what makes it the case that words mean what they do. (...) So foundational moral semantic theories are theories about what makes it the case that moral words mean what they do: words like ‘good’, ‘better’, and so on. Since both kinds of theory are sometimes referred to as varieties of ‘moral semantics’, this article will cover both. Just as semantic theories themselves come in two kinds, descriptive semantics raises two very different kinds of issues. Some issues in descriptive semantics turn on the question of what kind of theory is required, in order to be able to account for the meanings of words – including of moral words, in particular. Such questions are questions about the nature of semantic theorizing. So, for example, according to truth-conditional theories, an adequate descriptive semantic theory needs to provide a recursive and compositional characterization of values for sentences which determine the truth conditions of each sentence. Whereas according to expressivist theories, an adequate descriptive semantic theory does not need to determine truth conditions at all, but does need to recursively and compositionally associate each sentence ‘P’ with a mental state – intuitively, with the state which constitutes what it is to think that P. Truth-conditional and expressivist theories involve very different conceptions of the nature of linguistic meaning, but their contrast is one of the most important issues in moral semantics, and they are not even the only live competitors. In contrast, other issues in descriptive semantics, rather than turning on what kind of theory is required, raise questions about specific properties of the meanings of particular words.. (shrink)

Imagine coming across an alternative community such that, while they have normative terms like 'ought' with the same action-guiding roles and relationships to each other, their normative terms come to pick out different properties. When we come across such a community, or even just imagine it, those of us who strive to be moral and rational want to ask something like the following: Further Question: Which set of concepts ought we use—theirs or ours? The problem, first raised by Eklund, is (...) that on almost any metasemantic theory, Further Question cannot be stated in a way that captures the spirit of what we want to ask. This is because any way of asking the question makes use of our own normative concepts, and thus their reference is already fixed on the properties that our current normative concepts refer to. Any purported solution to this problem must meet two conditions. First, it must capture the spirit of what Further Question is intuitively attempting to ask. Second, it must reframe the inquiry in a way that makes the answer neither trivial nor ineffable. In this paper, I propose a solution to this problem by appeal to edenic representation, inspired by, but not identical to, Chalmers’ notion of edenic content. The rough idea here is that representation is edenic to the extent that the representational vehicle mirrors, in quality and structure, the represented property. I argue that a reframing of Further Question in terms of edenic representation can capture the spirit of the question, without collapsing it into a question with a trivial or ineffable answer. Thus, the realist about normative properties can face the problem of the alternative normative community head on, without collapsing into incoherence or triviality. If correct, this solution is of further interest to any metanormative realist concerned with metasemantic questions, because it can tell us more about how the proper representation of the robustly normative would look. (shrink)

Recent work by Matthew Bedke and Max Hayward develops a new attack on metaethical non-naturalists: that they are committed to an immoral state of mind, because they must be willing to change their mind about the moral importance of certain actions given possible evidence about the layout of the non-natural realm. For example, they must be willing to decrease their credence that torturing babies is bad, if they ever get evidence that torturing babies is not in the extension of a (...) non-natural property. The present paper aims to both develop the strongest version of this argument and propose a response to it. The first section argues that the strongest version of this attack does not depend on whether accepting non-naturalism commits one to believing a certain kind of conditional proposition. Rather, it depends on whether accepting non-naturalism commits one to having a certain kind of conditional credences. Moreover, the moral criticism at hand does not hinge on the causal inertness of non-natural properties. And in so far as the argument does not depend on causal inertness, the people threatened by immorality are not just non-naturalists, but metaethicists in general (Sect. 2). This is because the worry hinges instead on particular relationships of epistemic dependence between our metaethical and some of our ethical views. But it is not clear that those relationships obtain; we could adopt metaethical methodologies that preclude morally problematic dependence of relevant first order views on evidence about our metaethical theories (Sect. 3). (shrink)

This paper argues against Boydian synthetic moral naturalism by way of a critical examination at metasemantic issues. I first show that the Boydian metasemantics delivers determinate but wrong reference, building on an analysis by Schroeter and Schroeter. I then propose a diagnosis which says that the problem occurs due to an overly simple way of understanding externalist metasemantics, and that a proper understanding requires us to pay heed to the higher-level constraints set by the speakers’ deferring pattern. That in turn (...) is restricted by what I call reference defeaters, which are essentially some central beliefs held by the speakers and are so called because they have the power to defeat reference of a term to certain things. Applying the notion to moral discourse, I argue that the entrenched is/ought distinction held by the ordinary speakers defeats the reference of the moral predicates to natural properties, that is, synthetic moral naturalism is not true. (shrink)

I defend the thesis that at least some moral properties can be part of the contents of experience. I argue for this claim using a _contrast argument_, a type of argument commonly found in the literature on the philosophy of perception. I first appeal to psychological research on what I call emotionally empathetic dysfunctional individuals to establish a phenomenal contrast between EEDI s and normal individuals in some moral situations. I then argue that the best explanation for this contrast, assuming (...) non-skeptical moral realism, is that _badness_ is represented in the normal individual’s experience but not in the EEDI ’s experience. I consider and reject four alternative explanations of the contrast. (shrink)

This paper offers a simple response to the Moral Twin Earth (MTE) objection to Naturalist Moral Realism (NMR). NMR typically relies on an externalist metasemantics such as a causal theory of reference. The MTE objection is that such a theory predicts that terms like ‘good’ and ‘right’ have a different reference in certain twin communities where it’s intuitively clear that the twins are talking about the same thing when using ‘good’. I argue that Boyd’s causal regulation theory, the original target (...) of the MTE objection, was never vulnerable to this objection. The theory contains an epistemic constraint on reference which implies that either the property that causally regulates uses of ‘good’ isn’t different for the twin communities or, in scenarios where the reference is different, the communities diverge in ways where it’s not intuitively clear that ‘good’ has the same reference for them. (shrink)

In order to rebut G. E. Moore’s open question argument, ethical naturalists adopt a theory of direct reference for our moral terms. T. Horgan and M. Timmons have argued that this theory cannot be applied to moral terms, on the ground that it clashes with competent speakers’ linguistic intuitions. While Putnam’s Twin Earth thought experiment shows that our linguistic intuitions confirm the theory of direct reference, as applied to ‘water’, Horgan and Timmons devise a parallel thought experiment about moral terms, (...) in order to show that this theory runs against our linguistic intuitions about such terms. My claim is that the Horgan–Timmons argument does not work. I concede that their thought experiment is a good way to test the applicability of the theory of direct reference to moral terms, and argue that the upshot of their experiment is not what they claim it is: our linguistic intuitions about Moral Twin Earth are parallel to, not different from, our intuitions about Twin Earth. (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)

Metaethical realists disagree about the nature of normative properties. Naturalists think that they are ordinary natural properties: causally efficacious, a posteriori knowable, and usable in the best explanations of natural and social sciences. Non-naturalist realists, in contrast, argue that they are sui generis: causally inert, a priori knowable and not a part of the subject matter of sciences. It has been assumed so far that naturalists can explain causally how the normative predicates manage to refer to normative properties, whereas non-naturalists (...) are unable to provide equally satisfactory metasemantic explanations. This article first describes how the previous non-naturalist accounts of reference fail to tell us how the normative predicates could have come to refer to the non-natural properties rather than to the natural ones. I will then use the so-called qua-problem to show how the causal theories of reference of naturalists also fail to fix the reference of normative predicates to unique natural properties. Finally, I will suggest that, just as naturalists need to rely on the non-causal mechanism of reference magnetism to solve the previous problem, non-naturalists, too, can rely on the very same idea to respond to the pressing metasemantic challenges that they face concerning reference. (shrink)

This chapter offers an introduction to naturalist views in contemporary metaethics. Such views attempt to find a place for normative properties (such as goodness and rightness) in the concrete physical world as it is understood by both science and common sense. The chapter begins by introducing simple naturalist conceptual analyses of normative terms. It then explains how these analyses were rejected in the beginning of the 20th Century due to G.E. Moore’s influential Open Question Argument. After this, the chapter considers (...) what good general reasons there are for defending naturalism in metaethics. The bulk of the chapter will then survey new semantic and metaphysical forms of naturalism which in different ways attempt to address Moore’s objection to naturalism. These more recent versions of naturalism—using new resources from philosophy of language, philosophy of mind, metaphysics, philosophy of science and epistemology—attempt to explain why the Open Question Argument fails. (shrink)

Judgment internalism about evaluative judgments is the view that there is a necessary internal connection between evaluative judgments and motivation understood as desires. The debate about judgment internalism has reached a standoff some time ago. In this paper, I outline a new argument for judgment internalism. This argument does not rely on intuitions about cases, but rather it has the form of an inference to the best explanation. I argue that the best philosophical explanations of how we know what we (...) desire require that judgment internalism is true, which gives us a good reason to believe that judgment internalism is true. (shrink)

Quasi‐realists are expressivists who say much of what realists say. To avoid making their view indistinguishable from realism, however, they usually stop short of saying everything realists say. Many realists therefore think that something important is missing from quasi‐realism. I argue that quasi‐realists can undermine this thought by defending a version of quasi‐realism that I call super‐quasi‐realism. This version seems indistinguishable from realism, but I argue that this is a mistaken impression that arises because we cannot believe super‐quasi‐realism.

Some philosophers think that normative properties are identical to descriptive properties. In this paper, I argue that this entails that it is possible to say which descriptive properties normative properties are identical to. I argue that Frank Jackson's argument to show that this is possible fails, and that the objections to this argument show that it is impossible to say which descriptive properties normative properties are identical to. I conclude that normative properties are not identical to descriptive properties. I then (...) show that if we combine this conclusion with the conclusion of a different argument that Jackson has given to show that there are no irreducibly normative properties, it follows that there are no normative properties at all. (shrink)

Contemporary realist theories of value claim to be compatible with natural science. In this paper, I call this claim into question by arguing that Darwinian considerations pose a dilemma for these theories. The main thrust of my argument is this. Evolutionary forces have played a tremendous role in shaping the content of human evaluative attitudes. The challenge for realist theories of value is to explain the relation between these evolutionary influences on our evaluative attitudes, on the one hand, and the (...) independent evaluative truths that realism posits, on the other. Realism, I argue, can give no satisfactory account of this relation. On the one hand, the realist may claim that there is no relation between evolutionary influences on our evaluative attitudes and independent evaluative truths. But this claim leads to the implausible skeptical result that most of our evaluative judgements are off track due to the distorting pressure of Darwinian forces. The realist’s other option is to claim that there is a relation between evolutionary influences and independent evaluative truths, namely that natural selection favored ancestors who were able to grasp those truths. But this account, I argue, is unacceptable on scientific grounds. Either way, then, realist theories of value prove unable to accommodate the fact that Darwinian forces have deeply influenced the content of human values. After responding to three objections, the third of which leads me to argue against a realist understanding of the disvalue of pain, I conclude by sketching how antirealism is able to sidestep the dilemma I have presented. Antirealist theories of value are able to offer an alternative account of the relation between evolutionary forces and evaluative facts —
an account that allows us to reconcile our understanding of evaluative truth with our understanding of the many non-rational causes that have played a role in shaping our evaluative judgements. (shrink)

This article is concerned with Mark Timmons and Terence Horgan's influential twin - earth argument against the semantic views of that school of thought in metaethics that has come to be known as “Cornell realism”. The semantic views of Cornell realism have been developed in greatest detail by Richard Boyd, and it is Boyd's view that is targeted by Timmons and Horgan. In the first part of the article, the twin - earth argument is introduced and two versions of it (...) are disentangled. Thereafter, a defensive strategy is developed against the most powerful version of the argument. The conclusion of the article is that Timmons and Horgan's argument does not succeed in showing that the semantic views associated with Cornell realism are false. (shrink)

Ethical reductionism is the best version of naturalistic moral realism. Reductionists regard moral properties as identical to properties appearing in successful scientific theories. Nonreductionists, including many of the Cornell Realists, argue that moral properties instead supervene on scientific properties without identity. I respond to two arguments for nonreductionism. First, nonreductionists argue that the multiple realizability of moral properties defeats reductionism. Multiple realizability can be addressed in ethics by identifying moral properties uniquely or disjunctively with properties of the special sciences. Second, (...) nonreductionists argue that irreducible moral properties explain empirical phenomena, just as irreducible special-science properties do. But since irreducible moral properties don't successfully explain additional regularities, they run the risk of being pseudoscientific properties. Reductionism has all the benefits of nonreductionism, while also being more secure against anti-realist objections because of its ontological simplicity. (shrink)

Shamik Dasgupta has argued that realists about natural properties (and laws, grounding, etc.) cannot account for their epistemic value. For "properties are cheap": in addition to natural properties and any value the realist might attach to them, there are also "shmatural" properties (standing to natural properties like charge and mass as Goodman's grue and bleen stand to green and blue) and a corresponding "shmvalue" of theorizing in terms of them. Dasgupta's challenge is one of objectivity: the existence of the "shmamiked" (...) network of concepts threatens the objectivity of facts stated using the unshmamiked network. But the challenge can be repelled given a proper understanding of objectivity itself. (shrink)

Most error theorists want to accept hypothetical reasons but not moral reasons. They do so by arguing that there is no queerness in hypothetical reasons. They can be reduced to purely descriptive claims, about either standards or ordinary standard-independent facts: when I say “I have a reason to take this flight, ” all I say is that “according to certain standards of reasoning, I have a reason to take this flight” or that “I have a desire such that taking this (...) flight is the only way of doing so.” Error theorists who want to accept hypothetical reasons but not moral reasons think that one of these approaches works for hypothetical reasons but neither work for moral reasons. I shall argue that whatever arguments are given for rejecting these approaches in the case of moral reasons are also arguments for rejecting them in the case of hypothetical reasons. (shrink)

_ Source: _Page Count 22 In _Unbelievable Errors_, Bart Streumer offers resourceful arguments against each of non-reductive realism, reductive realism, and non-cognitivism, in order to motivate his version of the normative error theory, according to which normative predicates ascribe properties that do not exist. In this contribution, I argue that none of the steps of this master argument succeed, and that Streumer’s arguments leave puzzles about what it means to ascribe a property at all.

The purpose of this paper is to conceptualize and explore what I shall call the Common Subject Problem for ethics. The problem is that there seems to be no good answer to what property everyone who makes moral claims could be talking and thinking about. The Common Subject Problem is not a new problem; on the contrary, I will argue that it is one of the central animating concerns in the history of both metaethics and normative theory. But despite its (...) importance, the Common Subject Problem is essentially invisible on many contemporary ways of carving up the problems of metaethics and normative ethical theory.My aim, therefore, is to make progress – in part by naming the problem, but also by beginning to sketch out the contours of what gives the problem its force, by distinguishing between different paths of response to the problem and assessing some of their chief merits, and finally, by distinguishing the Common Subject Problem from another problem with which it has come to be conflated. This nearby problem is the Moral Twin Earth Problem. Whereas the Common Subject Problem is a problem about what property ‘wrong’ could refer to, the Moral Twin Earth Problem is a problem about how ‘wrong’ could refer to it.The upshot of the paper, therefore, is to rescue one of the historically significant problems in normative ethics and metaethics – a problem that is essentially about normative semantics – from the illusion that has persisted over the last twenty years that it is really, somehow, a problem about metasemantics. Once we have reclaimed this problem, we can see that it could still be a problem even if there are no distinctively metasemantic problems in metaethics at all, that it is a problem faced by a wider variety of views, and that the space of possible solutions is much wider and more interesting for normative theory, moral psychology, and moral epistemology. (shrink)

In this paper, I argue that an adequate meta-semantic framework capable of accommodating the range of projects currently identified as projects in conceptual engineering must be sensitive to the fact that concepts (and hence projects relating to them) fall into distinct kinds. Concepts can vary, I will argue, with respect to their direction of determination, their modal range, and their temporal range. Acknowledging such variations yields a preliminary taxonomy of concepts and generates a meta-semantic framework that allows us both to (...) accommodate the full range of cases and to identify a proper subset of concepts for special ameliorative consideration. Ignoring such variations, in contrast, leads to a restricted meta-semantic framework that accommodates only a subset of the particular projects while generating implausible accounts of others. (shrink)