36 research outputs found
The Metaphysics of Moral Explanations
Itâs commonly held that particular moral facts are explained by ânaturalâ or âdescriptiveâ facts, though thereâs disagreement over how such explanations work. We defend the view that general moral principles also play a role in explaining particular moral facts. More specifically, we argue that this view best makes sense of some intuitive data points, including the supervenience of the moral upon the natural. We consider two alternative accounts of the nature and structure of moral principlesââthe nomic viewâ and âmoral platonismââbefore considering in what sense such principles obtain of necessity
MetaâSkepticism
The epistemological debate about radical skepticism has focused on whether our beliefs in apparently obvious claims, such as the claim that we have hands, amount to knowledge. Arguably, however, our concept of knowledge is only one of many knowledge-like concepts that there are. If this is correct, it follows that even if our beliefs satisfy our concept of knowledge, there are many other relevantly similar concepts that they fail to satisfy. And this might give us pause. After all, we might wonder: What is so great about the concept of knowledge that we happen to have? Might it be more important, epistemically speaking, to investigate whether our beliefs satisfy some other relevantly similar concept instead? And how should questions such as these even be understood? This paper discusses the epistemological significance of these issues. In particular, a novel skeptical stance called âmeta-skepticismâ is introduced, which is a kind of skepticism about the idea that some knowledge-like concepts are epistemically more important than others. It suggested that it is unclear whether this form of skepticism can be avoided
Ethics and the Question of What to Do
Several recent debates in ethics and metaethics highlight what has been called the âcentral deliberative question.â For instance, in cases involving normative uncertainty, it is natural to ask questions like âI donât know what I ought to doâ*now* what ought I to do?â But it is not clear how this question should be understood, since what I ought to do is precisely what I do not know. Similar things can be said about questions raised by normative conflicts, so-called âalternative normative concepts,â and other similar problems. This paper defends a form of non-cognitivism about these questions that is combined with cognitivism about normative questions proper. A central claim is that we should distinguish the question of what we ought to do from the question of what *to* do, and that this distinction in turn has important consequences for our understanding of normative guidance, decision-making and deliberation. Two challenges to the non- cognitivist view defended are met, and its relationship to realism and âquasi-realismâ about normativity is considered
A Simple Analysis of Harm
In this paper, we present and defend an analysis of harm that we call the Negative Influence on Well-Being Account (NIWA). We argue that NIWA has a number of significant advantages compared to its two main rivals, the Counterfactual Comparative Account (CCA) and the Causal Account (CA), and that it also helps explain why those views go wrong. In addition, we defend NIWA against a class of likely objections, and consider its implications for several questions about harm and its role in normative theorizing
Explaining Normative Reasons
In this paper, we present and defend a natural yet novel analysis of normative reasons. According to what we call support-explanationism, for a fact to be a normative reason to Ï is for it to explain why thereâs normative support for Ï-ing. We critically consider the two main rival forms of explanationismâought-explanationism, on which reasons explain facts about ought, and good-explanationism, on which reasons explain facts about goodnessâas well as the popular Reasons-First view, which takes the notion of a normative reason to be normatively fundamental. Support-explanationism, we argue, enjoys many of the virtues of these views while avoiding their drawbacks. We conclude by exploring several further important implications: among other things, we argue that the influential metaphor of âweighingâ reasons is inapt, and propose a better one; that, contrary to what Berker (2019) suggests, thereâs no reason for non-naturalists about normativity to accept the Reasons-First view; and that, contrary to what Wodak (2020b) suggests, explanationist views can successfully accommodate what he calls âredundant reasonsâ
Benefits Are Better than Harms: A Reply to Feit
We have argued that the counterfactual comparative account of harm and benefit (CCA) violates the plausible adequacy condition that an act that would harm an agent cannot leave her much better off than an alternative act that would benefit her. In a recent paper in this journal, however, Neil Feit objects that our argument presupposes questionable counterfactual backtracking. He also argues that CCA proponents can justifiably reject the condition by invoking so-called plural harm and benefit. In this reply, we argue that Feitâs lines of criticism are both unsuccessful