Brogaard's non-indexical version of moral contextualism has two related problems. It is unable to account for the function of truth-governed assertoric moral discourse, since it leaves two (semantically clearheaded) disputants without any incentive to resolve seemingly contradictory moral claims. The moral contextualist could explain why people do feel such an incentive by ascribing false beliefs about the semantic workings of their own language. But, secondly, this leaves Brogaard's moral contextualism looking weaker than a Mackie-style invariantist error theory about morals. The (...) latter is equally non-objectivist, but less revisionist, since it takes the semantics of moral discourse at face value, and can also explain all of Brogaard's other linguistic evidence. (shrink)

We defend a contextualist account of deontic judgments as relativized both to (i) information and to (ii) standards or ends, against recent objections that turn on practices of moral disagreement. Kolodny & MacFarlane argue that information-relative contextualism cannot accommodate the connection between deliberation and advice; we suggest in response that they misidentify the basic concerns of deliberating agents. For pragmatic reasons, semantic assessments of normative claims sometimes are evaluations of propositions other than those asserted. Weatherson, Schroeder and others have raised (...) parallel objections to standard-relative contextualism; we argue for a parallel solution. (shrink)

One of the most interesting recent developments in philosophy is epistemic contextualism, i.e., the thesis that the truth value of knowledge attributions varies with the context of the attributor. Despite the great attention given to epistemic contextualism, very little work has been done so far on the question of whether analogous arguments can be made in the case of moral notions like, for instance, responsibility, rightness, and demandingness. Moral contextualism is the thesis, broadly speaking, that the truth values of attributions (...) of responsibility, rightness, demandingess, etc., vary with the context of the attributor (in a way similar to the case mentioned above) or with the context of the subject. The basic idea motivating this conference is that moral contextualism is indeed a very attractive and strong position which deserves much more attention and discussion than has so far been given to it. The philosophical debate on moral contextualism has already begun; there is important work being done by Berit Brogaard, John Greco, John Hawthorne, Walter Sinnott-Armstrong, Alan Thomas, Mark Timmons, Peter Unger, and Ralph Wedgwood. By bringing many of these outstanding specialists of international reputation together, this conference will further progress this topic by intensifying and widening the debate. As far as we know, this will be the first major international conference dedicated exclusively to moral contextualism. There are various connections with other topics in moral philosophy which have recently been the focus of attention: moral particularism, the nature of virtues and character, the concept of demandingness, just to name a few. Finally, this conference will also contribute to a more intensive exchange between theoretical and practical philosophy. (shrink)

Theoretical reasoning aims to expand our knowledge of how the world is. Practical reasoning aims to expand our knowledge of how to behave in the world as we know it to be. Although this distinction between theoretical and practical reasoning is notoriously central to normative ethical theorizing, its significance has, I think, been underappreciated and misconstrued in the metaethical debate about realism. I suspect that this is the result of two aspects of that debate: (a) the realism debate has been (...) pursued (mostly) by investigating the appropriate semantic account of ethical statements, (b) all of the prominent semantic accounts on offer, both realist and irrealist, take representation rather than inference as their master concept, which leaves the distinction between ways of reasoning as explanatorily posterior to the distinction between representational and nonrepresentational items. Aspect (a) is not obviously beyond reproach—perhaps the reality of moral properties should be investigated by strictly metaphysical rather than semantic methods. However, for the purposes of this paper, I shall not reproach the methodological mindset that semanticizes the realism debate in metaethics. This is because it is by working within this mindset that I think we have best hope of correcting the mistake I see embodied in aspect (b) and gaining a fuller appreciation of the significance of the distinction between theoretical and practical reasoning to the realism debate. Thus, my overarching aim in this paper is to begin to explore what happens to that debate when we take inference rather than representation as our master concept in philosophical semantics. More specifically, I want to consider the fortunes of the most prominent form of irrealism—expressivism—and urge that a new form of this position, which takes the distinction between theoretical and practical reasoning (rather than the distinction between representational and nonrepresentational mental states) as basic, has the resources to address one of the main objections threatening contemporary versions of the view. (shrink)

The central argument in the Euthyphro is the one Socrates advances against the definition of piety as "what all the gods love." The argument turns on establishing that a loved thing (philoumenon) is 1) a loved thing because it is loved (phileitai), not 2) loved because it is a loved thing. I suggest that this claim can be understood and found acceptable if we take "because" to be used equivocally in it. Despite the equivocation, Socrates' argument is valid, showing that (...) Euthyphro cannot offer this definition consistently with his view that the gods have as a reason for loving pious things that they are pious things. (shrink)

‘Ought’ is a very important and common word that everybody seems to know how to use perfectly well. But it has proven stubbornly resistant to definition and seems to have indefinitely many different senses. This emerges in a particularly clear and acute way from a puzzle that continues to vex philosophers, the Detaching problem. I first explore this problem, and how extant attempts to solve it either fail or have to indulge rampant proliferation of senses of ‘ought.’ I then propose (...) a unifying semantic analysis of ‘ought,’ explaining how it can accommodate the many different uses to which ‘ought’ is put, including not only the diverse normative ‘oughts,’ but also the nonnormative ‘ought.’ The central idea is that the nonnormative ‘ought’ is basic, and can be analyzed in terms of comparative probability. I analyze normative ‘oughts’ as teleological applications of the comparative probabilistic ‘ought’, and apply the analysis to the Detaching problem, showing how it offers a straightforward unifying solution. (shrink)

A reductive analysis of a concept decomposes it into more basic constituent parts. Metaethicists today are in almost unanimous agreement that normative language and concepts cannot be reductively analyzed into entirely nonnormative language and concepts; basic normative concepts are widely thought to be primitive or elemental in our thought, and therefore to admit of no further (reductive) explanation. G. E. Moore inferred from the unanalyzability of normative concepts the metaphysical doctrine that basic normative properties and relations are irreducible to complexes (...) of entirely nonnormative properties and relations; they are metaphysical primitives or elements that cannot be further explained. On this nonreductive view, now dominant again,1 normativity enters our world, experience, and thought only by virtue of some elemental essence that cannot be dissected or explained in nonnormative terms. Contemporary reductionists resist this metaphysical claim, but are generally willing to concede the conceptual claim.2 There is widespread consensus, therefore, that normative concepts are autonomous from nonnormative concepts. Reductive analysis of normative concepts is seen as the metaethical equivalent to alchemy, an attempt to create a precious element through the combination of base materials—except that analysis works in the reverse direction, perversely trying to reduce something precious to something base. (shrink)

This paper advances a reductive semantics for ‘ought’ and a naturalistic theory of normativity. It gives a unified analysis of predictive, instrumental, and categorical uses of ‘ought’: the predictive ‘ought’ is basic, and is interpreted in terms of probability. Instrumental ‘oughts’ are analyzed as predictive ‘oughts’ occurring under an ‘in order that’ modifer (the end-relational theory). The theory is then extended to categorical uses of ‘ought’: it is argued that they are special rhetorical uses of the instrumental ‘ought’. Plausible conversational (...) principles explain how this end-relational ‘ought’ can perform the expressive functions of the moral ‘ought’. The notion of an ‘ought-simpliciter’ is also discussed. (shrink)

Terry Horgan and Mark Timmons have recently presented a series of papers in which they argue against what has come to be called the ‘new wave’ moral realism and moral semantics of David Brink, Richard Boyd, Peter Railton, and a number of other philosophers. The central idea behind Horgan and Timmons’s criticism of these ‘new wave’ theories has been extended by Sean Holland to include the sort of realism that drops out of response-dependent accounts that make use of an analogy (...) between moral properties and secondary qualities. This paper argues that Holland’s extension depends crucially on the fact that his target is a direct response-dependent account of moral value. His argument does not work against such accounts of more basic normative notions such as ‘harm’ or ‘benefit’. And these more basic notions may then serve as the basic normative building blocks for an indirectly response-dependent moral theory. (shrink)

We consider a paradox involving indicative conditionals (“ifs”) and deontic modals (“oughts”). After considering and rejecting several standard options for..

This is an early draft of a joint critical notice I am writing of Jonathan Dancy’s Ethics Without Principles and Sean McKeever and Michael Ridge’s Principled Ethics, for Noûs.

When Sara ought to smile, there is something that Sara ought to do – to smile. That is, smiling is something that Sara ought to do. Similarly, if Lori is left of the lamp, then there is something Lori is left of – the lamp. That is, the lamp is something Lori is left of. Just as ‘left of’ expresses a relation between Lori and the lamp, it is natural to think that ‘ought to’ expresses a relation between Sara and (...) smiling: the ought to relation. This relation, it is natural to think, relates agents to actions. Just as actions are the kind of thing that can be right or wrong, so also it is actions that are the kind of thing we can stand to in the ought to relation. (shrink)

This paper is a survey of recent ‘hybrid’ approaches to metaethics, according to which moral sentences, in some sense or other, express both beliefs and desires. I try to show what kinds of theoretical issues come up at the different choice points we encounter in developing such a view, to raise some problems and explain where they come from, and to begin to get a sense for what the payoff of such views can be, and what they will need to (...) do in order to earn that payoff. (shrink)

In the 1960s, Peter Geach and John Searle independently posed an important objection to the wide class of 'noncognitivist' metaethical views that had at that time been dominant and widely defended for a quarter of a century. The problems raised by that objection have come to be known in the literature as the Frege-Geach Problem, because of Geach's attribution of the objection to Frege's distinction between content and assertoric force, and the problem has since occupied a great deal of the (...) attention both of defenders of broadly noncognitivist views, and of their critics. In this article I explain Geach and Searle's historical objections, and put the subsequent discussion into dialectical context, paying some attention to the developments along the way and how they have enhanced our overall understanding of the problem. The article covers a lot of territory, so we will only be able to see the highlights, along the way. For further reading, see the Works Cited. (shrink)

Expressivism - the sophisticated contemporary incarnation of the noncognitivist research program of Ayer, Stevenson, and Hare - is no longer the province of metaethicists alone. Its comprehensive view about the nature of both normative language and normative thought has also recently been applied to many topics elsewhere in philosophy - including logic, probability, mental and linguistic content, knowledge, epistemic modals, belief, the a priori, and even quantifiers. Yet the semantic commitments of expressivism are still poorly understood and have not been (...) very far developed. As argued within, expressivists have not yet even managed to solve the "negation problem" - to explain why atomic normative sentences are inconsistent with their negations. As a result, it is far from clear that expressivism even could be true, let alone whether it is. Being For seeks to evaluate the semantic commitments of expressivism, by showing how an expressivist semantics would work, what it can do, and what kind of assumptions would be required, in order for it to do it. Building on a highly general understanding of the basic ideas of expressivism, it argues that expressivists can solve the negation problem - but only in one kind of way. It shows how this insight paves the way for an explanatorily powerful, constructive expressivist semantics, which solves many of what have been taken to be the deepest problems for expressivism. But it also argues that no account with these advantages can be generalized to deal with constructions like tense, modals, or binary quantifiers. Expressivism, the book argues, is coherent and interesting, but false. (shrink)

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)

This paper is a critique of Ralph Wedgwood's recent attempt to use the framework of conceptual role semantics in metaethics. Wedgwood's central idea is that the action-guiding role of moral terms suffices to determine genuine properties as their semantic values. We argue that Wedgwood cannot get so much for so little. We explore two interpretations of Wedgwood's account of what it takes to be competent with a thin moral term. On the first interpretation, the account does not warrant the assignment (...) of a normative property as the semantic value of the target expression. On the second interpretation, the account presupposes that the subject has a prior understanding of normative notions. (shrink)

This a response to Michael Smith's argument that, if non-cognitivism is true, there can't be anything like normative uncertainty, so non-cognitivism is false. I argue that all plausible non-cognitivisms can withstand Smith's challenge. That's because all plausible non-cognitivisms can support an expressivist meta-semantics capable surmounting the Frege-Geach Problem and related problems about probabilistic inference, and the features that enable them to do that also enable them to surmount Smith's problem.

NOTE: New version uploaded March 8.

A difficulty is exposed in Allan Gibbard's solution to the embedding/Frege-Geach problem, namely that the difference between refusing to accept a normative judgement and accepting its negation is ignored. This is shown to undermine the whole solution.

Expressivists, such as Blackburn, analyse sentences such as 'S thinks that it ought to be the case that p' as S hoorays that p'. A problem is that the former sentence can be negated in three different ways, but the latter in only two. The distinction between refusing to accept a moral judgement and accepting its negation therefore cannot be accounted for. This is shown to undermine Blackburn's solution to the Frege-Geach problem.

So-called "thick" moral concepts are distinctive in that they somehow "hold together" evaluation and description. But how? This paper argues against the standard view that the evaluative contents of thick concepts belong to their semantically expressed meaning or sense. It cannot explain linguistic data concerning how thick concepts behave in a distinctive type of disagreements and denials which arise when one speaker regards another's thick concept as "objectionable" in a certain sense. The paper also briefly considers contextualist, presuppositional, and implicature (...) accounts of the evaluative contents of thick concepts, but finds none clearly superior to the others. (shrink)

In this paper, I apply the "conceptual role semantics" approach that I have proposed elsewhere (according to which the meaning of normative terms is given by their role in practical reasoning or deliberation) to the meaning of the term 'ought'. I argue that this approach can do three things: It can give an adequate explanation of the special connection that normative judgments have to practical reasoning and motivation for action. It can give an adequate account of why the central principles (...) of deontic logic are correct. It can give an explanation of the precise ways in which the term 'ought' is systematically context-sensitive, so that the term expresses different (but systematically related) concepts in different contexts. (shrink)

This paper outlines a new approach to the task of giving an account of the meaning of moral statements: a sort of "conceptual role semantics", according to which the meaning of moral terms is given by their role in practical reasoning. This role is sufficient both to distinguish the meaning of any moral term from that of other terms, and to determine the property or relation (if any) that the term stands for. The paper ends by suggesting reasons for regarding (...) this "conceptual role semantics" approach as preferable to noncognitivism, the causal theory of reference, and noncircular conceptual analysis. (shrink)