This book examines some of the deepest questions in philosophy: What is involved in judging a belief, action, or feeling to be rational?

An original and elegant work of metaethics, this book brings a new clarity and rigor to the discussion of these tangled issues, and will significantly alter the ...

Choices can be wise or foolish, and feelings can be apt or off the mark. So we judge, and it would be good to know what content these normative judgements carry. Gibbard offers an answer, and elaborates it. His theory explores what is at issue in narrowly moral questions, and in questions of rational thought and conduct in general.

The concepts of meaning and mental content resist naturalistic analysis. This is because they are normative: they depend on ideas of how things ought to be. Allan Gibbard offers an expressivist explanation of these 'oughts': he borrows devices from metaethics to illuminate deep problems at the heart of the philosophy of language and thought.

Philosophers have long suspected that thought and discourse about what we ought to do differ in some fundamental way from statements about what is. But the difference has proved elusive, in part because the two kinds of statement look alike. Focusing on judgments that express decisions--judgments about what is to be done, all things considered--Allan Gibbard offers a compelling argument for reconsidering, and reconfiguring, the distinctions between normative and descriptive discourse--between questions of "ought" and "is." Gibbard considers (...) how our actions, and our realities, emerge from the thousands of questions and decisions we form for ourselves. The result is a book that investigates the very nature of the questions we ask ourselves when we ask how we should live, and that clarifies the concept of "ought" by understanding the patterns of normative concepts involved in beliefs and decisions. An original and elegant work of metaethics, this book brings a new clarity and rigor to the discussion of these tangled issues, and will significantly alter the long-standing debate over "objectivity" and "factuality" in ethics. Table of Contents: I. Preliminaries 1. Introduction: A Possibility Proof 2. Intuitionism as Template: Emending Moore II. The Thing to Do 3. Planning and Ruling Out: The "Frege-Geach" Problem 4. Judgment, Disagreement, Negation 5. Supervenience and Constitution 6. Character and Import III. Normative Concepts 7. Ordinary Oughts: Meaning and Motivation 8. Normative Kinds: Patterns of Engagement 9. What to Say about the Thing to Do: The Expressivistic Turn and What it Gains Us IV. Knowing What to Do 10. Explaining with Plans 11. Knowing What to Do 12. Ideal Response Concepts 13. Deep Vindication and Practical Confidence 14. Impasse and Dissent References Index This is a remarkable book. It takes up a central and much-discussed problem - the difference between normative thought and "descriptive" thought. It develops a compelling response to that problem with ramifications for much else in philosophy. But perhaps most importantly, it brings new clarity and rigor to the discussion of these tangled issues. It will take some time to come to terms with the details of Gibbard's discussion. It is absolutely clear, however, that the book will reconfigure the debate over objectivity and "factuality" in ethics. --Gideon Rosen, Professor of Philosophy, Princeton University Gibbard,/author> writes elegantly, and the theory he develops is innovative, philosophically sophisticated, and challenging. Gibbard defends his theory vigorously and with admirable intellectual honesty. --David Copp, Professor of Philosophy, Bowling Green State University. (shrink)

Identities formed with proper names may be contingent. this claim is made first through an example. the paper then develops a theory of the semantics of concrete things, with contingent identity as a consequence. this general theory lets concrete things be made up canonically from fundamental physical entities. it includes theories of proper names, variables, cross-world identity with respect to a sortal, and modal and dispositional properties. the theory, it is argued, is coherent and superior to its rivals, in that (...) it stems naturally from a systematic picture of the physical world. (shrink)

The concepts of meaning and mental content resist naturalistic analysis. This is because they are normative: they depend on ideas of how things ought to be.

In these three Tanner lectures, distinguished ethical theorist Allan Gibbard explores the nature of normative thought and the bases of ethics. In the first lecture he explores the role of intuitions in moral thinking and offers a way of thinking about the intuitive method of moral inquiry that both places this activity within the natural world and makes sense of it as an indispensable part of our lives as planners. In the second and third lectures he takes up (...) the kind of substantive ethical inquiry he has described in the first lecture, asking how we might live together on terms that none of us could reasonably reject. Since working at cross purposes loses fruits that might stem from cooperation, he argues, any consistent ethos that meets this test would be, in a crucial way, utilitarian. It would reconcile our individual aims to establish, in Kant's phrase, a "kingdom of ends." The volume also contains an introduction by Barry Stroud, the volume editor, critiques by Michael Bratman (Stanford University), John Broome (Oxford University), and F. M. Kamm (Harvard University), and Gibbard's responses. (shrink)

Arrow’s impossibility result stems chiefly from a combination of two requirements: independence and fixity. Independence says that the social choice is independent of individual preferences involving unavailable alternatives. Fixity says that the social choice is fixed by a social preference relation that is independent of what is available. Arrow found that requiring, further, that this relation be transitive yields impossibility. Here it is shown that allowing intransitive social indifference still permits only a vastly unsatisfactory system, a liberum veto oligarchy. Arrow’s (...) argument for independence, though, undermines any rationale for fixity. (shrink)

What are ethical judgments about? And what is their relation to practice? How can ethical judgment aspire to objectivity? The past two decades have witnessed a resurgence of interest in metaethics, placing questions such as these about the nature and status of ethical judgment at the very center of contemporary moral philosophy. Moral Discourse and Practice: Some Philosophical Approaches is a unique anthology which collects important recent work, much of which is not easily available elsewhere, on core metaethical issues. Naturalist (...) moral realism, once devastated by the charge of "naturalistic fallacy," has been reinvigorated, as have versions of moral realism that insist on the discontinuity between ethics and science. Irrealist, expressivist programs have also developed with great subtlety, encouraging the thought that a noncognivist account may actually be able to explain ethical judgments' aspirations to objectivity. Neo-Kantian constructivist theories have flourished as well, offering hope that morality can be grounded in a plausible conception of reasonable conduct. Together, the positions advanced in the essays collected here address these recent developments, constituting a rich array of approaches to contemporary moral philosophy's most fundamental debates. An extensive introduction by Darwall, Gibbard, and Railton is also included, making this volume the most comprehensive and up-to-date work of its kind. Moral Discourse is ideally suited for use in courses in contemporary ethics, ethical theory, and metaethics. (shrink)

I conclude that Gibbard fails to solve several of the traditional problems for expressivism. He solves some of these problems, but his solutions to them in effect give up expressivism. Of course, one might respond that it does not really matter whether his theory is expressivist. In some ways, I agree. Gibbard says many fascinating things about morality which have at most indirect connections to his expressivist analysis. I am thinking especially of his later discussions of hyperscepticism, parochialism, (...) and indirect pragmatism. These views could still be developed even if he gave up expressivism. All I have tried to show here is that he does need to give up expressivism unless he can solve the problems that I have raised. (shrink)

I can ask myself what to do, and I can ask myself what I ought to do. Are these the same question? We can imagine conjuring up a distinction, I’m sure. Suppose, though, I just told you this: “I have figured out what I ought to do, and I have figured out what to do.” Would you understand immediately what distinction I was making? To do so, you would have to exercise ingenuity. I have in mind here an “all things (...) considered” ought that I can use in my thinking, an ought that is not specifically moral, in that it doesn’t settle by sheer rules of language that I ought always to abide by morality. For this ought, the question of what I ought to do seems just to be the question of what to do. (shrink)

I can ask myself what to do, and I can ask myself what I ought to do. Are these the same question? We can imagine conjuring up a distinction, I’m sure. Suppose, though, I just told you this: “I have figured out what I ought to do, and I have figured out what to do.” Would you understand immediately what distinction I was making? To do so, you would have to exercise ingenuity. I have in mind here an “all things (...) considered” ought that I can use in my thinking, an ought that is not specifically moral, in that it doesn’t settle by sheer rules of language that I ought always to abide by morality. For this ought, the question of what I ought to do seems just to be the question of what to do. (shrink)

Rawls' Difference Principle asserts that a basic economic structure is just if it makes the worst off people as well off as is feasible. How well off someone is is to be measured by an ‘index’ of ‘primary social goods’. It is this index that gives content to the principle, and Rawls gives no adequate directions for constructing it. In this essay a version of the difference principle is proposed that fits much of what Rawls says, but that makes use (...) of no index. Instead of invoking an index of primary social goods, the principle formulated here invokes a partial ordering of prospects for opportunities. (shrink)