Nothing ‘Mere’ to It: Reclaiming Subjective Accounts of Normativity of Law

Journal of Human Values 25 (1):1-14 (2019)
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Abstract

If the bindingness of morality was to rest on something as ‘subjective’ as the non-cognitivist says it does, the grouse goes, and morality itself would come down crashing. Nothing less than an ‘objective’ source of normativity, it is supposed, could hold morality in orbit. Some of these worries automatically morph into worries about the projectivist model of normativity of law as well: one which understands the authority or normativity of law in terms of subjective attitudes taken towards the law. As well as the stock worries about non-cognitivism, there are some additional ones that the projectivist model brings in its wake that it cannot account for the ‘uniform’ bindingness of law and that a subjective source of normativity of law based on mental states is unintelligible. This essay makes the case for acquitting the projectivist model of normativity of law from the above charges. But the route to that necessarily leads through first acquitt...

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Business Ethics and Quantification: Towards an Ethics of Numbers.Gazi Islam - 2021 - Journal of Business Ethics 176 (2):195-211.
Moore’s Paradox and Normative Detachment.Shivprasad Swaminathan - 2022 - Journal of Human Values 28 (3):209-220.

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References found in this work

Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature.Richard Rorty - 1979 - Princeton University Press.
On What Matters: Two-Volume Set.Derek Parfit - 2011 - New York: Oxford University Press.
The moral problem.Michael Smith - 1994 - Cambridge, Mass., USA: Blackwell.
The sources of normativity.Christine M. Korsgaard - 1996 - New York: Cambridge University Press. Edited by Onora O'Neill.

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