Many philosophers think that normative judgements do not aim to represent the world. In this paper, I argue that this view is incompatible with the thought that when two people make conflicting normative judgements, at most one of these judgements is correct. I argue that this shows that normative judgements do aim to represent the world.

What does it take to count as competent with the meaning of a thin evaluative predicate like 'is the right thing to do'? According to minimalists like Allan Gibbard and Ralph Wedgwood, competent speakers must simply use the predicate to express their own motivational states. According to analytic descriptivists like Frank Jackson, Philip Pettit and Christopher Peacocke, competent speakers must grasp a particular criterion for identifying the property picked out by the term. Both approaches face serious difficulties. We suggest that (...) these difficulties derive from a shared background assumption that competence conditions must be explained in terms of a determinate conceptual role. We propose a new way of characterizing competence with evaluative terms: what's required for competence is participation in a shared epistemic practice with a term. Our approach, we argue, better explains the nature of evaluative inquiry and the extent of disagreement about evaluative questions. (shrink)

Recently, theorists have pointed to the role of improvisation in practical reasoning and in gaining new moral knowledge. Laura and François Schroeter have gone even further by suggesting an account of competence with evaluative terms based on holistic improvisation. I argue, however, that they fail in their task. Through a challenge of their key claim against Allan Gibbard’s alternative account, I demonstrate that Schroeter and Schroeter provide only partial constraints on competence, and thus that their account lacks the content to (...) provide an alternative to substantive accounts in metaethics such as minimalism and neo-descriptivism. (shrink)

If there is pragmatic encroachment in epistemology, whether a person knows that p can vary with normative facts about her actions—including facts that do not bear on the truth or likelihood of p. This paper raises an underappreciated question for defenders of pragmatic encroachment: which of the many norms on action are distinctively connected to knowledge? To the extent that contemporary defenders of pragmatic encroachment address this question, they do so by citing norms of ‘practical rationality.’ I show that this (...) approach can only be made to work on the assumption that all immorality involves some form of incoherence. I then suggest a pluralist strategy for pragmatic encroachers who seek to answer my question without making this heavyweight metaethical assumption: they should agree that multiple distinct norms on action play a difference-making role in epistemology. I close the paper by sketching three ways in which pragmatic encroachers might pursue this strategy. (shrink)

I show that an overlooked feature of our moral life—moral status—provides a route to vindicating naturalist moral realism in much the same way that the Humean theory of motivation and judgment internalism are used to undermine it. Moral status presents two explanatory burdens for metaethical views. First, a given view must provide an ecumenical explanation of moral status, which does not depend on the truth of its metaethical claims (say, that there are mind-independent facts about moral status). Second, its explanation (...) must be consistent with persistent normative ethical disagreement about what constitutes moral status. I conclude that naturalist moral realism succeeds, while quasi-realism fails because it cannot meet the latter requirement. This argument has three results: we have a new route for metaethical vindication more generally and for naturalist moral realism in particular; quasi-realism's plausibility is undermined by an inability to explain disagreement, but not for the familiar reasons. (shrink)