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  1. The sense of incredibility in ethics.Nicholas Laskowski - 2019 - Philosophical Studies 176 (1):93-115.
    It is often said that normative properties are “just too different” to reduce to other kinds of properties. This suggests that many philosophers find it difficult to believe reductive theses in ethics. I argue that the distinctiveness of the normative concepts we use in thinking about reductive theses offers a more promising explanation of this psychological phenomenon than the falsity of Reductive Realism. To identify the distinctiveness of normative concepts, I use resources from familiar Hybrid views of normative language and (...)
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  2. Epistemic modesty in ethics.Nicholas Laskowski - 2018 - Philosophical Studies 175 (7):1577-1596.
    Many prominent ethicists, including Shelly Kagan, John Rawls, and Thomas Scanlon, accept a kind of epistemic modesty thesis concerning our capacity to carry out the project of ethical theorizing. But it is a thesis that has received surprisingly little explicit and focused attention, despite its widespread acceptance. After explaining why the thesis is true, I argue that it has several implications in metaethics, including, especially, implications that should lead us to rethink our understanding of Reductive Realism. In particular, the thesis (...)
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  3. How to Pull a Metaphysical Rabbit out of an End-Relational Semantic Hat.Nicholas Laskowski - 2014 - Res Philosophica 91 (4):589-607.
    Analytic reductivism in metaethics has long been out of philosophical vogue. In Confusion of Tongues: A Theory of Normativity (2014), Stephen Finlay tries to resuscitate it by developing an analytic metaethical reductive naturalistic semantics for ‘good.’ He argues that an end-relational semantics is the simplest account that can explain all of the data concerning the term, and hence the most plausible theory of it. I argue that there are several assumptions that a reductive naturalist would need to make about contextual (...)
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  4. Non-Analytical Naturalism and the Nature of Normative Thought: A Reply to Parfit.Nicholas Laskowski - 2015 - Journal of Ethics and Social Philosophy 9 (1):1-5.
    Metaethical non-analytical naturalism consists in the metaphysical thesis that normative properties are identical with or reducible to natural properties and the epistemological thesis that we cannot come to a complete understanding of the nature of normative properties via conceptual analysis alone. In On What Matters, Derek Parfit (2011) argues that non-analytical naturalism is either false or incoherent. In § 1, I show that his argument for this claim is unsuccessful, by showing that it rests on a tacit assumption about the (...)
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  5. Moral Realism, Speech Act Diversity, and Expressivism.Nicholas Laskowski - 2019 - Philosophical Quarterly 69 (274):166-174.
    In his highly engaging book, Speech and Morality, Terence Cuneo advances a transcendental argument for moral realism from the fact that we speak. After summarizing the major moves in the book, I argue that its master argument is not as friendly to non-naturalist versions of moral realism as Cuneo advertises and relies on a diet of insufficient types of speech acts. I also argue that expressivists have compelling replies to each of Cuneo's objections individually, but taken together, Cuneo's objections provide (...)
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  6. Parfit, Derek. On What Matters. Vol. 3. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017. Pp. 488. $45.00 .Singer, Peter, ed. Does Anything Really Matter? Essays on Parfit on Objectivity. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017. Pp. 288. $45.00. [REVIEW]Nicholas Laskowski - 2018 - Ethics 128 (2):496-505.
    Over the course of summarizing Volume Three and Does Anything Really Matter?, I argue that Parfit does not give us strong reason to think that Naturalists, Expressivists, and Non-Realist Cognitivists agree.
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  7. Speech and Morality: On the Metaethical Implications of Speaking, written by Terence Cuneo. [REVIEW]Nicholas Laskowski - 2017 - Journal of Moral Philosophy 14 (6):781-784.