Footing the Cost (Of Normative Subjectivism)* Forthcoming in New Methods in Ethics, eds. Jussi Suikkanen and Antti Kauppinen Jack Woods April 9, 2018 1. Introduction According to some, there's rarely sufficient moral reason to interfere with reasonable adults' decisions about what to do. According to others, there's often sufficient moral reason to do so since our choices impact on the welfare of others. And, of course, many of us vacillate between these viewpoints over the course of our lives. Many philosophers believe at least one of these viewpoints must be wrong-and wrong no matter who holds it and where it's assessed from. Moreover, many philosophers seem to think that believing that both could1 be right- believing that some form of normative subjectivism is true-would undermine the point of normative judgment entirely. Philippa Foot reports the phenomenon thus: [subjectivism] may, as I said, appear dangerous and subversive of morality. We are apt to panic at the thought that we ourselves, or other people, might stop caring about the things we do care about, and we feel that the categorical imperative gives us some control over the situation. (Foot 1972) *Thanks to Derek Baker, Catharine Diehl, Jessica Isserow, Alex King, Barry Maguire, Erum Naqvi, Ville Paukkonen, Karl Schafer, Lucas Thorpe, Teemu Toppinen, Pekka Väyrynen, Ken Westphal, and audiences at Boğaziçi University and the University of Helsinki for useful comments. Thanks to Philippa Foot for providing inspiration. 1Could how? Stay tuned. 1 and anyone who's taken a serious crack at developing subjectivism knows the reaction all too well. The worry Foot is discussing isn't that subjectivism is false. Rather, it's that subjectivism (or believing in it) might be actively harmful to the role that normative judgment plays in structuring our lives, evaluating others, planning our future, and the like. I'll explore here a precisified version of this sometimes inchoate worry-that somehow the truth or acceptance of subjectivism about normativity undermines the functional role of normative judgment. If it doesn't, as I'll claim, the intuitive worry so many lay at subjectivism's doorstep is significantly diminished, if not entirely extinguished. I claim that neither the truth of, nor belief in, subjectivism has deleterious impact on the use or functional role of normative judgments. There's no need to panic; at worst, the majority of the population simply believe falsely. I start by describing reasonable, yet unabashedly subjectivist positions (§2) and distinguishing two senses of normative universality (in §3). Evaluative normative universality holds that normative reasons are invariant under change in context, when assessed from our actual normative standpoint. Ontic normative universality holds that normative reasons are invariant under change in context when assessed by the norms grounded in those very contexts. I then argue that, for many aspects of the functional role of normativity, the putative costs of normative contingency are typically due to failures or perceived failures of evaluative normative universality. Yet subjectivism need not-in fact, for some subjects and some contexts, can not-deny evaluative normative universality. Subjectivist views are ontically contingent by definition, so I need to show the costs of accepting ontic normative contingency aren't onerous. I address four ways in which ontic contigency might interfere with the functional role of normative judgment. In (§4-5), I argue that the ontic contingency of our reasons doesn't undermine their normative significance for us or for evaluating others. In (§6), I show that we can make sense of why we engage in normative communication- at least in many cases-given ontic contingency. (§7) explains how normatively evaluating hypothetical situations makes sense even given subjectivism. Finally, (§8) addresses whether certain intuitively false counternormative conditionals come out true on subjectivist views. Admittedly, there are still features of subjectivism conflicting with intuitions about 2 normativity. But the arguments and constructions of §4-8 alleviate the symptoms even if they don't cure the "disease". Much of the necessary palliative work I'll engage in is inspired by an insight of Foot (1972): our normative outlooks are robust in the sense that it would take a quite radical departure from ordinary humanity for our normative outlook to significantly change. Moreover, even if this isn't actually true, we believe it, and this belief stabilizes our normative practice. I won't argue for the sociological claim directly, but there are good reasons to believe it: just look around and talk to folks for a while. Given this, much apparent divergence in normative outlook is derivative in the sense that some locally contingent non-normative fact explains the normative divergence. A complementary point which plays a co-inspirational role comes from Barry Stroud's (1965) discussion of Wittgenstein's Wood Sellers-strange people who measure amounts of wood by the area instead of volume. Stroud argues that the typical way to conceptualize Wittgenstein's example involves importing, illicitly, many of our own norms about how to measure. But evaluating such a case under this presumption does not show that their practices are irrational-it just shows that the irrationality of measuring wood that way while maintaining the remainder of our measuring norms.2 We need to remember that when we consider bizarre scenarios that we typically take our world with us. So it's not obvious that our initial reactions to such cases are probative; no one yet has fleshed out a counternormative case to the point where we could take it seriously as a challenge to serious subjectivist views. Whether it's even possible to conceptualize obeying such bizarre conventions from the inside, so to speak, is extremely fraught. This point is somewhat known, but too infrequently recognized, as the endless discussion of Parfit's notion of future tuesday indifference, frequent opposition to the rationality of Gibbard's totally coherent Caligula, etc. shows. Recognition of this fact diminishes the probative weight of putative counterexamples to normative subjectivism. As I'll argue below, this point is dramatized by the fact that we're quick to conflate evaluative universality with ontic universality when theorizing, which is extremely problematic when evaluating subjectivist views. Foot and Stroud's points, in tandem, do yeoman work in showing that subjectivist views are far more capable of capturing 2This also echoes a useful discussion of similar issues by Sharon Street (Street 2009, lessons 4-5, 10-11) that we can't make changes in normative outlook without it spreading throughout the rest of our normative standpoint. 3 the functional role and point of normative discourse than is typically thought. My aim is to put together a number of existing points about subjectivism and functional role which, collectively, undermine the widespread sense that our normative judgments must be universal.3 I agree that if we lacked evaluative normative universality, then that would be a serious problem. But it's entirely unclear what the costs of ontic normative contingency are. This fact strengthens existing cases for subjectivist views-given, for example, by Foot (1972), Harman (1975), Dreier (1990), Sobel (2009), Velleman (2013), Finlay (2014), etc.-by showing that costs of the view are relatively minor. There's no need to panic, even if subjectivism is true, even if we believe it. 2. Normative Subjectivism Subjectivist views, as I understand them, are characterized by an explanatory biconditional like: We have to reason to φ if and only if (and because) A where A is some condition or state of affairs that is essentially dependent on contingent features of us, our community, our conventions, etc. Note that this biconditional is universally quantified and the 'because' here is meant as full, not partial, non-causal explanation. This is important since most normative views accept that some particular instances of this biconditional when the 'because' is treated as partial. Reasonable subjectivist views also allow: It's correct in some sense to say, of a, that they have reason to φ if and only if and (because) A where again A is a condition or state of affairs that is essentially dependent on contingent features of me or my moral community. This means that it's possible- though not required-that I, a member of one moral community, can correctly say of you, a member of another moral community, that you have reason to φ even if you can't say this of yourself.4 I can correctly condemn the moral practices of another community even if their practice is not correctly condemnable from within. 3Many techniques I use below are known in at least philosophical folklore; nevertheless, putting them together constitutes a novel treatment of this problem. 4For example, Lenman (1999) points out "However, [response-dependency] is consistent with my insistence that torturing human babies for fun is wrong applying not just to the actual world but to any world for it may be part of the substantive content of my moral judgement that this wrongness is not conditional on my responses." 4 Not all subjectivist views accept this, but ones which don't have trouble satisfying any type of universality. Note that this doesn't entail that our grounds for asserting that someone has a reason to φ are A (though it doesn't rule it out either). Rather, it only claims that the correctness of our assertion is explained by A, even if our grounds for asserting it aren't A. Compare a positivistic picture of the law where the explanation of why a particular fact is legal is grounded out in the decisions of the salient law-makers and our recognition of these law-makers as law makers. This story about legal validity doesn't demand, and in fact shouldn't demand, that when we assert that something is legal, we take the grounds of the actual explanation as our justification for our assertion. That's an additional controversial commitment. Subjectivist views come in many varieties: non-quasi-realist expressivism, Foot's (1972) instrumentalism, Street's (2010, 2012) Humean Constructivism, etc. To focus in, we'll take the following account of reasons as our working example-note that it's intended just as a working example-of a paradigmatically subjectivist view: conventionalism: Someone has reason to φ in a situation γ just in case and because them φ-ing in γ is entailed by a system of conventional norms which governs their potential action. This isn't a claim about the lexical meaning of reasons claims, but one about what it is for there to be a normative reason for me to do something. Given conventionalism, suitable shifts in the norms we accept will generate a shift in the normative facts. However, even given conventionalism, we needn't endorse claims like "If our norms permitted dog kicking, kicking dogs would be okay" (see §8). Rather, qua normative theorist, I endorse the metanormative claim that, if conventionalism were correct, then if we were to have accepted norms permitting kicking dogs, we would have had (from the view of that context) reason to kick dogs. This metanormative claim is crucially different from a similar sounding normative claim made from within our perspective. I put to the side here those, like Blackburn (1998) and Dworkin (1996), who suggest that we cannot make sense of the metanormative claim. Even if they're right about the particular metaethical views they favor, which I strongly doubt, we can make the necessary distinction for conventionalism. 5 I won't chisel down the right-hand side of conventionalism. We should add hedges to avoid worries having to do with false information, rash approvals, and the like, but presumably such chiseling can be done.5 I talk in terms of reasons, not obligations, but the arguments work equally either way. I use reasons talk since it's increasingly pervasive and we can plausibly recapture obligation-talk in terms of having most reason. Anyway, though the contours of any actual subjectivist view will be tremendously complicated, this does not affect the general structural points I want to make. For similar reasons, I'll put aside complicated relationships between moral normativity- morally loaded claims forming the majority of my working examples-when taken as a standard and our "thin" reasons to engage in moral behavior. For the sort of structural points I want to make here, this doesn't matter much and my claims generalize across normative standards and down to "thinner" normative notions. If anything, working with morality stacks the deck against me since it's exactly in the case of morality that our fears about deviant normative standards are greatest. For those wanting a plausible picture of how to merge two types of subjectivism to accommodate this distinction, I offer my (2016, forthcoming, manuscript) as examples. Of course, to fully develop conventionalism as more than an example, I'd need to give an account of what it is for a conventional system of norms to be in force for a particular agent (see Woods (forthcoming)), but I won't do so here. If a picture is needed, it's close enough to think in terms of Hart (1961)'s picture of the law. I'll presume that conventional facts tell us both what reasons we have and what their strength is. This is a substantial assumption, but, again, it will do for here. The points made are general enough to hold regardless of one's normative topography. Finally, I have no truck here with metanormative subjectivism-where what it is for there to be a reason at all, moral or otherwise, shifts from context to context. That view dances far too close to literal incoherence, as Plato pointed out long ago. We turn now to distinguishing two senses in which we might think reasons are universal. 5I'll likewise not address the distinction between objective and subjective-in the sense of information-dependent-reasons below. A full account should, but I have no room for epicycles. 6 3. Two Notions of Normative Universalism To elucidate these, note that we may view normative reasons as holding for each other when evaluated at our own perspective. When you suggest you can ignore starving people, I draw on my belief that we shouldn't harm innocents to persuade you to help out. If you reject this reason, as it's no part of your (recognized) normative perspective, I still have no reason to revise my opinion that you're doing something you've significant reason not to. After all, I have strong evidence your normative beliefs are mistaken: mine. Call this the evaluative sense of normative universality: that you (or anyone, but stick with 'you' for now) have reason to do something is evaluatively normatively universal when it holds, no matter what the non-normative facts may be, when when evaluated from our normative perspective. For example, consider a normative perspective which only cares about utility maximization. For it, "we have reason to do the thing which is utility maximizing" is evaluatively normatively universal: no matter what conventions govern a context we evaluate, what matters is whether the actions performed there are utility maximizing. If their normative viewpoint tells them to do something which doesn't maximize utility, they're simply wrong (by our lights.) Second, we may view normative reason claims as holding for each other even when evaluated even within each others perspectives. That is, we may hold that there's reason for you to do such and so when evaluated from my context α, from your context β, or even from any arbitrary context γ. Call this the ontic sense of normative universality: that we have reason to do something is ontically normatively necessary when it holds no matter what the non-normative facts may be when evaluated at any normative perspective.6 To make this distinction slightly more precise, I'll introduce some machinery from Einheuser (2006).7 Let a context be a pair 〈c, n〉 of a circumstance c–here a set of non-normative descriptive facts-and a system of norms n–here a set of conventions for what we have reason to do. A circumstance is a suitably large fragment 6This way of distinguishing two notions of reasons is similar to the two-dimensional interpretation of expressivism in (Peacocke 2003). (Schafer 2014a) develops a slightly more general view, perspectivalism, using the notion of assessor relativism. 7The development here is a bit more technical than the rest of the paper: the reader can skip it and work with the intuitive glosses if they're allergic to symbols. 7 of a possible world-large enough to support a group of agents with particular behavior indicating acceptance or rejection of a system of norms, systematic approval and disapproval of various actions, etc.8 A context gives rise to a reason for an agent a to φ in a situation γ when the system of norms n, applied to the non-normative descriptive facts c, says that a has reason to φ in γ. We'll can write this 〈c, n〉 |= R(a, φ, γ).9 We say that the system of norms n is grounded by a circumstance c when n is the system of pure reason facts (those which aren't dependent on particular nonnormative facts about our perspective) given by a circumstance c. What it is for a circumstance to give rise to a system of pure reason facts will depend on the correct view of metanormativity. Quite generally, we'll write nc to indicate the system of norms grounded by c. This way of proceeding explicates conventionalism, but it doesn't presuppose it. If conventionalism is right, then it's the behaviors and dispositions to accept various norms as holding (or deferral to a group of people for decide which norms hold, as in Hart (1961)) that does the relevant work here. Then, the actual circumstance c@ grounds a system of norms n which says-when applied to the non-normative facts captured by c@, that we have decisive reasons not to kick dogs since the conventional practices we accept rule out kicking dogs. More generally, given conventionalism, our pure reasons will depend on our circumstances. If, alternatively, a non-subjectivist view is right, then there will be one set of pure reasons which will be grounded by any circumstance in some way. So our Einheuserian machinery makes room for, but doesn't presuppose, subjectivism. We can vary our actual circumstance c@ and our actual norms nc@ in two ways, thus obtaining two notions of universality. What I've called evaluative universality can be defined easily enough for simple reasons claims: 〈c, n〉 |= eR(a, γ, φ) if and only if ∀c′[a, γ ∈ c′ ⇒ 〈c′, n〉 |= R(a, γ, φ)] That is, a reasons claim R(a, γ, φ) is evaluatively universal at a context 〈c, n〉 just in case that a has reason to φ in situation γ-R(a, γ, φ)-holds at all contexts 8We use fragments of possible worlds to allow that different communities in the same world may have different normative behaviors. If this annoys, make the simplifying assumption that there is only one set of behaviors at any context and let a circumstance be a possible world. 9We will often simplify by assuming that a is part of c and that we don't have to deal with reasons arising for agents in context where they don't exist. 8 〈c′, n〉 which differ from 〈c, n〉 only in circumstance (i.e. non-normative facts) (and where a and γ still exist).10 That is, when evaluating by the conventional norms n, no matter what circumstance we look at, a has reason to φ in γ. Extending our definition in the obvious way, we get 〈c, n〉 |= eφ if and only if ∀c′〈c′, n〉 |= φ for more complicated reasons claims with embedded occurrences of R. We can then find non-trivial evaluatively universal claims easily enough.11 Consider "no one ever has a reason to be cruel merely for fun". Evaluated by a stringent version of our own moral outlook, this seems true no matter what the underlying non-normative facts are. Note that there is no entailment from subjectivism of the types described above to cases of evaluative contingency. Our norms may not express the idea that others have reason to do what their conventions suggest, we may disapprove of others following their conventions, etc.12 Defining ontic normative universality is also straightforward: 〈c, n〉 |= oφ if and only if ∀c′ 〈c′, nc′〉 |= φ That is, φ is ontically necessary at a context 〈c, n〉 just in case that it holds in any context consisting of a circumstance c′ and the norms grounded by c′. Presuming conventionalism is true, if φ holds at the point of view of any context when the salient norms are those arising from the circumstance of that context. conventionalism entails the existence of ontic contingency so long as different circumstances embody different systems of norms-as must be allowed to be the case on any plausible conventionalist view. Again, remember that the only plausibly universal reasons claims, in either sense, are pure reasons claims. Otherwise our reasons are typically held hostage to non-normative facts embodied in the circumstances of evaluation. 10I'll take the restriction that a and γ exists at c′ as understood henceforth. 11There are complexities here that we are ignoring; e.g. without restrictions on the range of φ, our definition marks various metaphysically necessary non-normative claims as evaluatively universal. See Woods and Maguire (2018) for related discussion. 12In some cases, there'll be derivative reasons to do something that derives from an explicit reference to the local conventions-when in Rome and all that. But subjectivism need not be committed to such norms. 9 We can expand on our Einheuserian terminology to define two related senses of reasons. Let us say that a, in their context ca, has an ontic reason to φ in γ just in case 〈ca, nca〉 |= R(a, γ, φ). And, fixing a set of norms n, we will say that a has an evaluative reason to φ in γ just in case 〈ca, n〉 |= R(a, d, φ). In plainer language, a has an ontic reason to φ in γ just in case the norms governing their context give a reason to φ. And a has an evaluative reason, according to n, to φ in γ just in case n (applied to ca) says a has reason to φ in γ. It's now easy to see that a's reason to φ in c is ontically universal just in case a has an ontic reason to φ in γ in any context where a and γ exist and a's reason to φ is evaluatively universal just in case n yields a reason for a to φ in γ given any context c′. Having clarified the distinction between two types of normative universality and the two related sense of reasons, showing them obviously coherent, we turn to our central question about normative universality. 4. Normative Universality As mentioned above, some claim that treating normative facts as arbitrary or contingent, would disrupt their role. Here's two sources, one old and one new: if one does not wish to deprive the concept of morality of all truth and all relation to any possible object whatsoever, then one cannot dispute that its law is so extended in significance as to be valid not merely for human beings but for all reasonable beings whatsoever, and not merely under accidental conditions and with exceptions but with absolute necessity. . . (Kant 2002, 24) . . . if normative reasons were indeed relative, then mere reflection on that fact would suffice to undermine their normative significance. (Smith 1994, 172) There are two immediate responses to this. First, one borrowed: Kant seems to be articulating a brute intuition about the ontic universality of normativity: it's categorical and binding on all rational individuals-at least normativity concerning morality. But this brute intuition is hard to defend. As Foot (1972) showed, the categorical form of (moral) normative judgments is insufficient to validate Kant's intuition. Obviously contingent etiquette facts likewise have categorical form; it's 10 not "respect your elders if you don't want to be rude", but "respect your elders!"13 But what then justifies the claim that normative judgments are ontically universal? Now, one blue: difference in conventional morality is simply a fact of life and one non-theory driven ordinary moralizers have learned to live with. Diversity in prudential opinion is likewise fairly common; risk aversion comes in different levels, as do views about what a good life consists in and how to best care for ourselves. Even diversity in epistemic norms is rife and sometimes intuitive (just think of faultless disagreement). Reflecting on this fact doesn't undermine the normative significance of our views of risk, morality, and epistemology for us; far from it. The seemingly undeniable tendency to treat our aesthetic judgments as sourced in our own standpoints doesn't undermine our application of these standards to ourselves. If we understand Kant and Smith as saying that accepting relativism undermines taking all normativity seriously, their claim is implausible. When we take a standard seriously, it plays a role for us in regulating our behavior, contingent or no.14 Maybe the claim is that it would be better if we believed our normative reasons to be non-relative. But this is not at all obvious. Often the fact that my reasons would change if I acted thusly seems intuitively explanatory of why I shouldn't act thusly; this not only is consistent with subjectivism, but seems to nearly presuppose it. A better thought is that normative facts hold not only ourselves, but others, regardless of whether they share our normative beliefs or not. Further, the thought continues, this is part and parcel of why we engage in normative theorizing to begin with. Perhaps we should understand Kant and Smith as claiming that the functional role of normative theorizing requires that we be able to criticize and correct the actions of others. Lenman, discussing Smith, glosses what this might mean: 13Miss Manners, views this as implying that etiquette facts are moral facts (Martin and Stent 1990). This, though, conflicts with the strong intuition that etiquette facts have only local force, though it's fair to say that many etiquette facts make overlap, in their content, with moral facts- don't offend! And many moral facts have as part of their content respect, which in turn implies we ought to pay attention to etiquette. But the claim that all etiquette facts are moral is too much to bear. 14We can treat taking a formal standard seriously, roughly, in terms of us taking being out of step with it as non-instrumentally undesirable. See Woods (2016, forthcoming) for details and complications. 11 If we came to see our moral commitments in this way we'd rightly panic because we'd no longer be able to take seriously the idea of disapproving of someone for failing to share them. (Lenman 1999, 166) That a central part of the functional role of normative judgment includes disagreement and evaluation of others seems true.15 It'd be difficult to come to grips with a notion of normativity that didn't allow us to bring our normative beliefs to bear on each other in attempting to guide not only our own actions, but also the actions of others. We should be careful here though. Some normative standards clearly don't work this way. My judgment that it's rude to expose my feet gives me no reason to keep my shoes on in a Turkish household; their sense of it being rude to object in class gives them no reason to behave deferentially in my classroom. Quite the contrary. Different standards of etiquette apply in each case and we are well aware that our behavior should change accordingly, at least when we think carefully about it. That this isn't the case with morality may be due to differences in the functional role of our normative and our etiquette judgments. So perhaps this is the essence of Kant and Smith's point: we view normative reasons as holding for others as well as ourselves; our evidence for this is our willingness to bring such considerations to bear in our discussions with one another about how we ought to act; and the explanation of this may, perhaps, be found in the functional role of normative theorizing. Other potential aspects of the functional role of normative theorizing includes evaluation of the reasons of others, contentful disagreement about what to do, planing for what to do in hypothetical situations, and evaluation of the reasons we'd have there. Reasonable subjectivist views should capture these aspects of normative judgement's functional role. As I'll show in the remainder of this essay, capturing these aspects does not require the ontic universality of normativity-something far weaker will suffice. We will now turn to the first aspect-evaluating the reasons of others. 15I won't address the full literature on disagreement in ethics and aesthetics. Since disagreement is just one of several properties I think the subjectivists can accommodate with evaluative reasons, I just sketch one way disagreement is possible. See Finlay (2014) and Ridge (2014, chapter 6) for further accounts of disagreement for subjectivist and expressivist views which could be adapted to my purpose here. 12 5. Subjectivism and Criticizing Others Consider again aesthetic judgment. It's commonly (and correctly) believed that tastes are relatively subjective. I am no fan of chocolate; it's bearable, but generally unremarkable. This is strange to most people. Assessed from their gustatory standpoint, I have reasons to eat more chocolate. "Assessed from their gustatory standpoint" here means evaluating what gustatory reasons I have according to their tastes. The evaluative reasons I have, from their standpoint, will differ from the evaluative reasons I have according to my own gustatory standpoint. Plausibly, I've evaluative reason to eat chocolate according to the average individual, but no ontic reason at all. Consider likewise folks driving on the wrong side of the road. This is a joke- kind of. The funny thing is that we really do feel like other folk drive on the wrong side of the road, even though we know quite well that it's entirely arbitrary which side of the road a community drives on. The intuitive force of the approval of right-driving over left-driving remains, even when we know quite well that the choice of side is arbitrary. Of course, this is quite irrational in a sense. We all know full well that tastes differ between individuals and that my tastes give you no reason to eat what I would eat were I to be in your shoes, but with my tongue.16 In other cases where we have explicitly subjective reactions, recognition of this fact undermines claims to correctness and incorrectness. . . . once we bring other perceptual systems into view, the provided they are equally discriminatory, we lose any very robust attachment to the idea that ours is right and theirs is wrong. ... People who taste phenolthiourea the other way are not wrong, just different. But there is no reason to suppose that this ambivalence extends similarly to the case of value. (Blackburn 2006) But I submit that many of us feel a drive to criticize others aesthetic sensibility even though we know full well that tastes are subjective-or, anyways, so my 16Alex King suggests (personal communication) that I'm staking a lot on the subjective nature of culinary norms and that perhaps the general aesthetic case, including more objective aspects of the aesthetics of food, is different. The issue is difficult, but I only really need the gustatory case for my point that we can use what seem obviously subjective normative standards to fill the functional role that we need for putatively non-subjective ones like morality. Thanks also to her for more general discussion on the paper. 13 experiences being a chocolate deviant suggest. Our actual gustatory standpoints seem to include the idea that we are in a position to recommend someone eat against what we know their tastes to be, to criticize their tastes for being bizarre, and so on. And, in a sense, this is quite rational as tastes are plastic and, from your point of view, chocolate really is delicious. Continued experience with a particular thing, be it chocolate or wine, tends to breed some taste for it, which from your perspective is a valuable thing. Moreover, general convergence in our tastes is useful and desirable-when deciding where to go for dinner. And we might want ourselves, if we were to find ourselves in a position like mine, to go through the pain of developing an affection for chocolate, at least as we now view that tragic possibility. The same explanation cannot be given for ontic aesthetic reasons. It's irrational tout court, not merely irrational in a sense, to think that we all have gustatory reasons to eat chocolate when assessed from within our own gustatory perspective. Some of us-ahem-do not. There is no gustatory reason for me to pursue the modification of my desires that continued exposure to chocolate might provide. Assessing my gustatory reasons from within my gustatory standpoint, my only reason to develop a taste for chocolate is the prudential reason of not standing out. Yet this type of aesthetic irrationality is a pervasive feature of ordinary aesthetic discourse; someone who differs significantly enough from you aesthetically is often thought to simply be mistaken about their own tastes, as if such a thing were generally possible. But this is projection of some kind of mistaken universality on a bit of our experience we know, on reflection, to be non-universal. Thus the explanation of why we might hold onto ontic aesthetic universality doesn't justify holding on to it, unlike the case of evaluative aesthetic universality where aesthetic norms evaluating others tastes negatively are coherent and socially useful. As with aesthetic reasons, so with normative reasons. We can make sense of evaluative normative reasons and thereby evaluative normative universality. And the reasons given above for evaluating the aesthetic reactions of others are even more compelling in the normative case. If we are often willing to claim aesthetic reasons hold for someone even when they clearly aren't reachable from within their aesthetic standpoint, even given that we know in our hearts how subjective tastes are, it seems very plausible that we are willing to claim normative reasons hold for someone else when they aren't clearly reachable from within their normative standpoint. Our normative standpoint need accept no restriction on our evaluation 14 of other's actions, even when they clearly don't share our norms. Applying our normative notions to your actions yields a definite and sensible verdict-even if it's not obviously a verdict you should share.17 It's here that we find the truth in Smith's idea that viewing our own perspectives as arbitrary would undermine them. If we viewed our reasons as holding evaluatively only for us or those with nigh-identical norms, then we'd be hard pressed to make sense of the role of normative reasons in evaluating others; a role which is clearly part of our actual normative practice. Luckily, since exertion of social pressure by means of explicit normative pronouncement is reasonably effective as a tool of social coordination, even of those with divergent norms, there's good reason to evaluate others.18 I've argued that we can reasonably evaluate others actions by means of our own norms even when we know that our norms differ by analogizing it with a clearly subjective set of evaluative judgments: aesthetic judgments. But there remains the question of how to understand our frequent engagement in explicit argument with others about normative matters and our attempts to convince them to modify their normative standpoints. Evaluation is one thing; reasonable hashing out of normative difference another. If someone's normative or aesthetic standpoint is significantly different from ours, this practice might seem pointless. De gustibus non est disputandum, after all. Yet, we dispute about taste all the time.19 So we have to explain why would we do such a thing if our normative standpoints aren't ontically universal. We turn to this now. 6. How Subjectivists Should Disagree In order to address this question, it's useful to set aside a class of cases were normative disagreement doesn't make sense. If someone has a coherent and deep commitment to a normative standpoint radically different from ours, then dispute can be pointless. Of course, as mentioned above, this does not mean that we can't 17Consider the similar discussion of defined notions of evaluation in (Schafer 2014a). 18(Manne 2014) also suggests similar justification for persisting in offering reasons to others even if our offerings won't have uptake for them. 19I've always preferred the punny rendition of the phrase in English anyways. There's no accounting for taste is a nice way to express that one searches in vain for why someone likes lettuce. 15 evaluate their actions according to our own normative standpoints and that, in an important sense, it's totally reasonable to do so. But actually locking horns with them about their perverted norms doesn't really make sense. This echoes Ayer's (1946) neglected discussion of moral argumentation. He analyzes moral argumentation as proposing various "deeper" commitments until our interlocutor latches onto one of them. Punching him is okay?; Well, do you think hurting is fine?; Oh, do you think causing pain unnecessarily is fine? and so on. Ayer suggests that if this procedure does not work, we tend to abandon the argument. Similarly, if we can see in advance it won't work, then it seems unreasonable to start arguing with them at all. Ayer neglects the role of argument in irrational change of belief-we can bring people to agreement by applying argumentative peer pressure. Sometimes this is even reasonable.20 But, when someone has suitably robust views and a suitably argumentative nature, it may be pointless to disagree: Suppose...I am trying to convince a man who is nasty to his wife to treat her more nicely, or with more consideration. In this endeavor, I repeatedly press my concerns on him, and in a variety of ways. Finally, he says to me-borrowing Williams' wording here-"I don't care. Don't you understand? I really do not care." That is, he doesn't care directly about treating his wife more nicely. Nor does he care about any of the goods which would be promoted or instantiated by so doing.... Here's the intuition I have, and want to invite you to share, now: when we learn that this man cannot be motivated to lift his game merely by continuing to carry on with the conversation, something has now changed in the normative and dialogical space between us. (Manne 2014) Manne's point is that when there's really no common ground for rational conversation, the only reason remaining to argue is browbeating one's interlocutor into moral compliance.21 Our normative standpoints differ to simply too large a degree. 20See also Street (2009) and Sobel (2014) for this point. 21Manne is concerned with cases where motivational internalism fails, but the point generalizes. 16 Thankfully, such cases are relatively rare; we can put them aside. In better cases when our interlocutor is reasonable-to borrow Manne's expression, when they are open to 'rational' discussion-then we presume overlap in our beliefs about what considerations normatively matter. It's plausible that such overlap is required to make sense of rational discussion at all. Carballo and Santorio (2016), for example, argue that for rational communication about normative matters to have a point, both participants must take as part of the presupposed common ground that: • there are norms-either derivative or fundamental-that are not ruled out in advance of each other • the participants ought to come to some convergence.22 These conditions are generalizations of the typical Stalnakarian account of communication, so we needn't even invoke anything special in understanding normative communication. We can thus understand communication about normative matters in terms of coming to agree on a norms or attitudes we can share and usefully apply in planning our actions and evaluating the world around us. If this is right-and I suspect it is-then we should assume that our typical interlocutors share some part of our normative standpoint.23 Restricting our norms to the overlapping sections of our normative standpoints, there is a reason for someone to do something by my lights (there's ontic reason to do something) if and only if there is a reason for them to do it by yours. By arguing about normative matters with the aim to coordinate, we are sometimes putting forth factual claims about what reasons exist in the shared background and sometimes proposing to extend this shared background by adding norms to the common ground and making the appropriate modifications to one's overall normative standpoint. Since the shared background will typically be a mere fragment of our overall normative standpoint, which may or may not be complete, 22They go on to argue that both participants should agree that there is a unique convergence point, but this is overly strong for subjectivist views. If this were true, however, it would just make my point all the stronger. 23Finlay (2009 §7.1) argues compellingly that participants to such conversations often do presuppose overlap in normative outlook (in his terms, shared ends). This strengthens the point that normative argumentation does and should proceed in a sensible way even if subjectivism is true. He goes on to suggest-as I did above-that even when such presuppositions are false, they're useful to maintain. 17 accepting the proposal of our interlocutor will often involve retracting or modifying some fragment of our normative standpoint. Here are two examples. Suppose neither you nor I take a stand on whether third-trimester abortions are permissible, but we agree (a) about many of the nonnormative details, (b) that pain and suffering is bad, we've reasons to avoid taking life, etc, and (c) that we've reason to make our view more coherent and natural when possible. You propose that we've reasons to avoid third-trimester abortions on grounds that fetuses are well-developed by that point and the likelihood of suffering is non-negligible. I accept this claim, add it into the common ground, and thereby expand the overlap of our normative standpoints. Now, suppose that the case is as above, but I think we've reasons to avoid thirdtrimester abortions and you disagree. I propose as before, suggesting that if you accept b, you should-on abductive grounds-accept that we've reasons to avoid third-trimester abortions. You come to accept that we have reasons to avoid thirdtrimester abortions, retracting your earlier view. This suffices for the point I want to make. If communication about normative matters looks like this, then we do not need ontic or even evaluative universality to make sense of normative communication. All we need is presupposition of overlap in our normative standpoints. Presuppositions may be false; there may be less overlap in our normative standpoints than we hope. But the more atypical the case, the more pointless it will seem to engage in rational discussion instead of engaging in browbeating, the exertion of social and peer pressure, and the like. Harkening back to the opening remarks from Foot, Street, and Stroud, those who share none of our normative standpoint seem inhuman and alien, unlike our typical conversational partners. Since all we needs in the presumption of overlap (on both parts), and follows from viewing our conversational partners as relatively like us, there's good reason to think that normative communication, even for subjectivists, is obviously possible and plausibly pervasive. We turn now to addressing a related aspect of the functional role of normative judgment: hypothetical planning. 7. Subjectivism and Hypothetical Planning We often consider hypothetical and counterfactual situations to plan-to test and hone in our actual reasons (Gibbard 1990). We might want ontic universality here since we want our garnered knowledge to bear on analogous circumstances we 18 might actually face. We want both that the reasons on which we'd then act would be genuine reasons for action as well as our testing of general reasons would be guaranteed by ontic universality. As Schafer (2014) notes, we use this kind of reasoning all the time: Nothing is more natural or more common than for us to consider someone's situation and to form some hypothetical plan for action for the situation in question. For example, suppose I... find myself wondering what I "would have done" had I been in Napoleon's shoes. When I ask myself this question, I am not asking myself a descriptive question concerning what someone with my psychology would have done in that situation. Rather, I am asking myself what to do in such a situation. In other words, I am forming a hypothetical plan for action...(Schafer 2014b) But there is a worry here: why bother forming a plan for what I would do in Napoleon's shoes as I'll never be there, and I'll never share his norms?24 Even less the norms of Caligula or Elizabeth Báthory. What role do these bizarre hypothetical plans play in my actual plans for situations I'll encounter? Perhaps our pure reasons should be treated as ontically universal if this kind of hypothetical planning need inform our actual decisions; but since many of the problematic situations seem to do no such thing, it's hard to see why we should require ontic universality. Of course, it can be reasonable to evaluate Napoleon's situation by our norms. To be sure, it would make more sense for a general to engage in an evaluative judgment about what Napoleon should do than it would for most of us, but the point is the same. It's reasonable to evaluate what we-people with our normative sensibilities-would do in similar situations. This doesn't give us much reason to think that ontic evaluation of Napoleon's situation is anything more than a curiosity. What would the fact that Caligula has ontic reason to plan a massacre tell us about what we'd have reason to do in a similar situation? The regulative role of considering ontic reasons in bizarre abstract hypothetical 24See also Finlay (2014 §8.6) on weird consequences of Gibbard's account of hypothetical planning. 19 situations is thus much less important that it initially seemed.25 Moreover, it's doubtful that the anti-subjectivist intuitions about such situations usually bandied about are clearly probative. Imagining the full normative outlook of Parfit's Future Tuesday Indifferent, for example, (someone who only prospectively cares only about non-Tuesday pain) seems nigh impossible, so our intuitions aren't clearly probative-plausibly we're importing our norms illicitly in claiming they have reason to avoid pain on future Tuesdays. Obviously such a situation is then irrational, but it's irrational since there's internal conflict between the norms and desires we're illicitly importing and those part of the stipulated example. This point should remind us again of Wittgenstein's Woodsellers and how difficult is to understand their way of counting, especially when we've only considered how they measure wood. The point is not that we cannot make out how they measure wood; it's understanding how it integrates into an overall system of measuring and the role of counting in various aspects of our lives. Measuring wood by area is tantamount to throwing out everything we know about measuring. It's entirely alien to us. As with wood, so with reasons. Why, then, is it so natural and easy for us to pass seemingly ontic judgment in such counteractual cases? Presumably, it's because our judgments about what we ought to do in Caligula's shoes are informed by the gross majority of our normative sensibilities and we assume that Caligula, different as he is, nevertheless shares many of our norms. Again, it's very plausible that there is broad and pervasive overlap between any conceivable normative outlook. Maybe it seems okay to cross against the light and shoplift from large chain stores to me and not to you, but random stabbings are out. And asking ourselves the question of what we'd do in Caligula's shoes plausibly presupposes this fact. Something like this underlies Foot's famous observation: But it's interesting that the people of Leningrad were not similarly struck by the thought that only the contingent fact that other citizens shared their loyalty and devotion to the city stood between them 25This is true for morality and normativity generally, but not clearly true for other "when in Rome" systems of norms like those of fashion, aesthetics, and etiquette. There it seems much more important to consider what our reasons would be in that context instead of what we think, from outside, the reasons they have are. Still, and crucially, we don't need ontic universality for this. Thanks to Catharine Diehl for discussion. 20 and the Germans during the terrible years of the siege. Perhaps we should be less troubled than we are by fear of defection from the moral cause. . . They were not struck by this exactly because it would be relatively inhuman to have no loyalty and devotion to one's city, family, and friends; it seems literally inconceivable that this could be a pervasive feature of our fellows. We accept that not everyone shares such our sensibilities, but looking through the eyes of those who do not seems rather difficult. Again, where even to start? We might thus mistake Caligula's evaluative reasons (roughly corresponding to what we would do in similar circumstances) for ontic reasons. Given the presupposition that we enjoy broad overlap in sensibility and normative outlook, the questions come to largely the same.26 So it's no surprise that we'd mistake the evaluative reasons Caligula has to avoid massacre-planning for ontic reasons. There's thus not much cause for worry that subjectivism delivers the wrong verdict on these situations; such intuitions are plausibly based on illicit readings of the cases. If something more precise is desired here, we could put the upshot this way. We need only Human universality (writing c ∼h d for d a context similar to ours in the conventions, psychologies, and behaviors of the agents within): 〈c, n〉 |= hR(a, γ, φ) if and only if ∀c′[a, γ ∈ c′ ∧ c′ ∼h c⇒ 〈c′, nc′〉 |= R(a, γ, φ)] for normative judgments to play the role in organizing our actual behavior that Gibbard and Schafer suggest. And no reasonable subjectivist position needs to force us to believe normativity is not humanly universal. Intuitions to the contrary can be explained away by a combination of Foot's observation about humanity and Stroud's observation about the method of underexplicated cases. We now turn discussing one last aspect of normative judgment, one which generalizes Smith and Kant's point from above and continues the point that our intuitions about counter-normative contexts aren't probative. 8. Counternormative Counterfactuals The following counternormative conditional seems false: 26Note that this means that evaluative reasons are enough even for non-subjectivist accounts of hypothetical planning, so we haven't lost anything here by our subjectivism. 21 If local moral conventions demanded random cruelty, I would have strong reason to be cruel We seem not to have strong reasons for being randomly cruel, whether or not our local conventions endorse it.27 But, since we have distinguished two senses of universality, we should also distinguish two senses of these conditionals.28 We can distinguish the evaluative normative counterfactual conditional: 〈c, n〉 |= φe ψ iff in the closest circumstance c′ in which 〈c′, n〉 |= φ, 〈c′, n〉 |= ψ from the ontic normative counterfactual conditional 〈c, n〉 |= φo ψ iff in the closest circumstance c′ in which 〈c′, nc′〉 |= φ, 〈c′, n〉 |= ψ So long as we do not have as a part of our normative standpoint that the conventions of people matter for whether they have reasons for what they do-and most subjectivist views endorse no such thing-then the closest contexts in which people approve of random cruelty is one where random cruelty is wrong. So the evaluative counternormative is false. Is this enough to downplay the intuition that such conditionals are intuitively false? It ought to be. It's entirely unclear why we'd think that the ontic counternormative is obviously false. But I fear that this will be insufficient to convince most people, so let me offer another consideration. Many of ontic counternormatives are also false even given subjectivism. Consider the closest possible world in which kicking dogs is endorsed by our normative standpoint, but where we don't have massively false beliefs about animals.29 What would such a world be like? Our disapproval of kicking dogs is grounded in our empathy towards animals, the intimate role dogs play in our lives, that kicking them causes pain, etc. This sits badly with approval of kicking dogs. So the nearest world in which kicking dogs 27Modulo lightweight reasons that arise from distinct contexts, like promising to be cruel. I am committed elsewhere to the view that such reasons exist, but are nearly always outweighed. See Woods (2016, forthcoming). 28I work with a Lewis-style "variably-strict" analysis of counterfactuals here for simplicity (Lewis 1973). My point can be generalized across a range of analyses of counterfactuals. 29In general, we need to be careful here about instrumental norms and information. For example, if our anti-dog-kicking norm is grounded in more basic norm of avoiding causing pain to feeling creatures, then false beliefs about dogs being feeling creatures will explain why we endorse dog-kicking. Still, we would have ontic reason to avoid kicking dogs since they, in fact, are feeling creatures. 22 is smiled upon is one falsifying one of these facts. Perhaps dogs there enjoy being kicked. In that context, it's not clear that kicking dogs is bad.30 Suppose, now, that we do not feel any empathy towards animals. We have two types of cases. First, we might leave the rest of our psychology alone. But given the resulting massive incoherence in our psychologies, such a world will be very different from ours. Given this, the above point about dog-kicking applies; since such a world is so far away, it's not relevant for evaluation of the above counternormative.31 Not having reason to be randomly cruel, after all, is more or less a normative fixed point for us (Cuneo and Shafer-Landau 2014).32 Suppose instead that we make the requisite changes in the rest of our psychology. Then, as in the last section, I submit that our intuitive judgments about ontic reasons aren't probative. Imagine what it would be like to have a psychology approving of something like serious random cruelty without assuming some massively mistaken set of beliefs about the world. I'm guessing that you can't; I definitely cannot. This, I believe, underlies why it's so difficult to even portray a seriously deranged character (say, in a show like Dexter); the tendency to "humanize" them is nearly immediate. So there are three interlocking responses to intuitive "false" judgments about counternormative conditionals. First, we might be mistaking our evaluative reaction for an ontic one. Evaluatively, our reaction is totally apt. Second, we might be mistaking ontic reaction for one case for an ontic reaction to a different case- the case of a group differing from us in this particular, but agreeing on nearly every other part of our normative standpoint. But such cases are too remote to play a role in the truth or falsity of the counternormative. Finally, we might be treating our reaction to the case just described as our reaction to the case of someone with a coherent, but inhuman, psychology. But such intuitions aren't probative, as I've argued above. So counternormatives pose no real problem. The relevant evaluative counternormatives are typically false, and, for ontic counternormatives, once we've disentan30For more discussion of counterconventional conditionals, see Einheuser (2006). 31Of course, you can freeze this condition into the prejacent of the counternormative, but evaluating such complex prejacent-ed conditionals is extremely fraught. 32As Shafer-Landau and Cuneo (2014: 407-408) remark, denying such a thing tends to provoke bewilderment. 23 gled what they really are, we can see that our intuitive reactions aren't probative. Given this, we cannot assume that they're false without begging questions against the subjectivist. 9. Conclusion I have distinguished and defined two separate notions of normative universality- ontic and evaluative universality-and argued that even though subjectivism denies ontic universality, this does not undermine normative judgment playing its usual functional role. Evaluative universality suffices to make sense of evaluating the reasons of others, significant overlap in our reasons suffices to make sense of normative disagreement and evaluating hypothetical cases, and the resulting types of counterfactuals are unproblematic-the relevant evaluative counternormative counterfactuals are false, as should be expected, ontic counternormative counterfactuals are either false, unworrisome, or our intuitions about them are not probative. At this point, it might be worried that there are real life cases of repulsive moral behavior. True. And charity demands that we should try as hard as possible to see the culprits as not making moral errors, but factual ones. When we cannot find such errors, we should look for swamping beliefs-such as religious, cultural, or capitalist convictions that cut against human empathy-or mistakes of reason arising from mistaken application of beliefs to norms.33 And when both of these fail, only then should we look to see what sort of affective or moral difference would explain why we and they have such differing normative outlooks. If this procedure is reasonable, as I hope and pray it is, then plausibly we generally presuppose that others are relatively like us. When we cannot so explain grotesque behavior, it seems to me that we are in a position to these folks as we are to people who approve of random cruelty on alternating Wednesdays. It's very difficult to understand how someone could willingly throw adulterers off of high towers without presuming that they believe something that's simply false. This normative outlook is not just different from ours; it's more or less incomprehensible. Or, anyways, so I find it. And, judging by how often people react to immoral behavior with expressions like "I simply don't 33See Sobel (2014) for useful discussion of the role of mistaken beliefs in explicating seeming immoral and amoral behaviors. 24 understand how you could think that", I and my fellow subjectivists are not alone in this. Even when we can make sense of evaluating the reasons of someone from a differing perspective, it by no means follows that we should take such evaluations seriously or afford them the role that our assessments of reasons typically plays in attributions of punitive actions like blame and criticism. That's a non-obvious normative claim. Likewise, it's not obvious that we should revise our tendencies to accept norms demanding evaluative normative universality, just as it's not obvious that we should revise our tendencies to accept norms demanding evaluative aesthetic universality. These tendencies play a useful prudential role in facilitating coordination, one which would be hampered by being overly tolerant of the viewpoints of others. On balance, the assumption that normative facts are ontically universal is on shaky footing. If there's an argument here, it won't come from subjectivism interfering with the functional role of normative judgment. Without begging questions against a subjectivist point of view, it's unlikely to come from anywhere. This is not to say that there aren't other reasons to reject subjectivism. But the putative ontic universality of normative facts is not one of them. This fact seems to me to significantly strengthen the already quite considerable case in favor of subjectivist views of normativity. References Ayer, A. J. 1946. Language, Truth and Logic. Victor Gollancz Publishers. Blackburn, S. 1998. Ruling Passions. Oxford University Press. Blackburn, S. 2006. Must We Weep for Sentimentalism? in Contemporary Debates in Moral Theory ed. J. Dreier: 144–159. Wiley Publishers. Carballo, A. P. and P. Santorio. 2016. Communication for Expressivists. Ethics 126(3): 607–635. Cuneo, T. and R. Shafer-Landau. 2014. The Moral Fixed Points: New Directions for Moral Nonnaturalism. Philosophical Studies 171(3): 399–443. Dreier, J. 1990. Internalism and Speaker Relativism. Ethics 101(1): 6–26. Dworkin, R. 1996. Objectivity and Truth: You'd better believe it. Philosophy & Public Affairs 25(2): 87–139. 25 Einheuser, I. 2006. Counterconventional Conditionals. Philosophical Studies 127(3): 459–482. Finlay, S. 2014. Confusion of Tongues: A Theory of Normative Language. Oxford University Press. Foot, P. 1972. Morality as a System of Hypothetical Imperatives. The Philosophical Review 81(3): 305–316. Harman, G. 1975. Moral Relativism Defended. The Philosophical Review 84(1): 3–22. Hart, H.L.A. 1961. The Concept of Law. Claredon Press. Kant, I. 2002. Groundwork for the Metaphysics of Morals. Yale University Press. Lenman, J. 1999. Michael Smith and the Daleks: Reason, Morality, and Contingency. Utilitas 11(2): 164–177. Lewis, D. 1973. Counterfactuals. Blackwell Press. Manne, K. 2014. Internalism about Reasons: Sad but True? Philosophical Studies 167(1): 89–117. Martin, J. and G. S. Stent. 1990. I think; therefore I thank: A philosophy of etiquette. The American Scholar 59(2): 237–254. Peacocke, C. 2003. The Realm of Reason. Oxford University Press. Ridge, M. 2014. Impassioned Belief. Oxford University Press. Schafer, K. 2014a. Constructivism and Three Forms of PerspectiveDependence in Metaethics. Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 89(1): 68–101. Schafer, K. 2014b. Doxastic Planning and Epistemic Internalism. Synthese 191(12): 2571–2591. Smith, M. 1994. The Moral Problem. Blackwell Press. Smith, M. 1999. The Non-arbitrariness of Reasons: Reply to Lenman. Utilitas 11(02): 178–193. Sobel, D. 2009. Subjectivism and Idealization. Ethics 119(2): 336–352. Sobel, D. forthcoming. Subjectivism and Reasons to be Moral. in From Valuing to Value: 16-42. Oxford University Press. 26 Street, S. 2009. In Defense of Future Tuesday Indifference: Ideally Coherent Eccentrics and the Contingency of What Matters. Philosophical Issues 19(1): 273–298. Street, S. 2010. What is Constructivism in Ethics and Metaethics? Philosophy Compass 5(5): 363–384. Street, S. 2012. Coming to terms with contingency: Humean constructivism about practical reason. in Constructivism in Practical Philosophy, eds. J. Lenman, James, and Y. Shemmer: 40–59. Oxford University Press. Stroud, B. 1965. Wittgenstein and Logical Necessity Philosophical Review 74:(3): 504–518. Woods, J. 2016. The Normative Force of Promising. Oxford Studies in Normative Ethics (6): 77–101. Woods, J. and Maguire, B. 2017. Model Theory, Hume's Dictum, and the Priority of Ethical Theory. Ergo 4:(14): 419–440. Woods, J. forthcoming. The Authority of Formality. Oxford Studies in Metaethics (13). Velleman, J. D. 2013. Foundations for Moral Relativism. Open Book Publishers.