The Problem of Other Attitudes

American Philosophical Quarterly 54 (2):141-152 (2017)
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Abstract

Non-cognitivists are known to face a problem in extending their account of straightforward predicative moral judgments to logically complex moral judgments. This paper presents a related problem concerning how non-cognitivists might extend their accounts of moral judgments to other kinds of moral attitudes, such as moral hopes and moral intuitions. Non-cognitivists must solve three separate challenges: they must explain the natures of these other attitudes, they must explain why they count as moral attitudes, and they must explain why the moral attitudes are systematically correlated with ordinary propositional attitudes. After presenting the problem, this paper examines several contemporary theories with some initial promise for solving it, and argues that they are insufficient.

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Derek Shiller
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Citations of this work

Moral Cognitivism vs. Non-Cognitivism.Mark van Roojen - 2013 - Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy 2013 (1):1-88.
A solution to the many attitudes problem.Bob Beddor - 2020 - Philosophical Studies 177 (9):2789-2813.
Deflating the Many Attitudes Problem.Derek Baker - 2021 - Philosophical Quarterly 72 (1):1-18.
The unity of moral attitudes: recipe semantics and credal exaptation.Derek Shiller - 2018 - Canadian Journal of Philosophy 48 (3-4):425-446.

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References found in this work

Wise choices, apt feelings: a theory of normative judgment.Allan Gibbard - 1990 - Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press.
Language, truth and logic.Alfred Jules Ayer - 1936 - London,: V. Gollancz.
Thinking how to live.Allan Gibbard - 2003 - Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press.
Being for: evaluating the semantic program of expressivism.Mark Andrew Schroeder - 2008 - New York: Oxford University Press. Edited by Mark Schroeder.

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