PEA Soup

Smith's Objection to Buck-Passing

I very much love Michael Smith’s recent paper “A Constitutivist Theory of Reasons: Its Promise and Parts” (Law, Ethics and Philosophy 2013, also available on his website). One thing that strikes me about this paper is that, whilst discussing Parfit’s views on practical reasons, Smith seems to also create a powerful objection to the buck-passing views of value, which at least to me seems original and something that hasn’t been discussed in the vast buck-passing literature before. So, what I want to do below is to outline this argument briefly and then introduce some of the ways this argument could be resisted. For what it’s worth, my own commitment to buck-passing might be getting weaker because of this argument.

Regret

Consider the question “Can regret be appropriate even apart from any belief that one’s choice was misguided or irrational if a monistic theory of the good is true?”  According to the relevant notion of regret, regretting is to be understood, roughly, as mourning the loss of a forgone good.  This notion of regret leaves room for the possibility that there may be cases of rational regret that do not involve the agent seeing her prior choice as in some way misguided.  It is commonly held that this can easily occur when there is a plurality of distinct kinds of goods at stake.  More controversial is the suggestion (which can be found in Hurka’s work) that this can also easily occur when there is only one distinct kind of good at stake.  According to Hurka (“Monism, Pluralism, and Rational Regret”), goods with different “intrinsic properties” can be distinct “in the way that matters for rational regret” without being goods of distinct kinds, and so monistic theories of the good can accommodate “rational regret” as well as pluralistic theories.  But it might be, and indeed has been, argued (by, in particular, Stocker (Plural and Conflicting Values)) that, insofar as different intrinsic properties can be distinct in the way that matters for rational regret, we can think of the different properties as tied to different values, and so we do not have a case of rational ‘monistic’ regret.  And here we seem to reach a stalemate grounded in what seems to be something like a terminological issue, namely whether to count a theory of the good that takes say, pleasure, as the only good as monistic, if it also allows for distinct kinds of pleasure that make room for rational regret.  I am trying to develop a position that gets beyond this stalemate, but am now wondering whether my characterization of stalemate seems fair or if there is a better interpretation of the dynamic of the debate that makes the dispute seem more substantial.  

 

Non-Natural Normative Properties and the Principle of Parsimony

Disclaimer: This is way outside of my wheelhouse. So the chances that this is just misguided are great. But it’s my month to post and I’m answering the editor’s (Half-Assed) Plea for Half-Assedness.

Many moral skeptics appeal to the following metaphysical thesis in supporting their view:

• Metaphysical Naturalism (NAT) – There are only natural properties.

And ethical non-naturalists are committed to the following metaphysical thesis:

• Metaphysical Plurality Thesis (PLU) – In addition to natural properties, there are non-natural properties.

Now, many think that NAT is more plausible than PLU on the grounds of parsimony. I think that this is a mistake.

Normative Necessity and Normative Knowledge

I hope Ralph won't mind if I piggyback on his post, but I'm just getting started on a paper that's partly about normative necessity, and I thought I'd get the old juices flowing with some PEA Soup discussion. (Plus it's February and my name starts with a D!)

Is normative necessity distinct from metaphysical necessity?

In “Varieties of Necessity” (in Gendler and Hawthorne, Conceivability and Possibility, Oxford 2002), Kit Fine argued that we need to recognize that certain normative truths are in a sense necessary, and that the kind of necessity in question is sui generis, rather than being a special case of metaphysical necessity.

I shall not dispute Fine’s argument for the conclusion that there are normative necessities. However, I shall dispute his argument for the conclusion that these normative necessities are sui generis. On the contrary, as I shall argue, Fine does not give us a compelling reason to deny that normative necessity is a species of metaphysical necessity.

Normative Beliefs and Epistemic Norms

As a part of a paper I am working on (very early stages and so the rest will be very sketchy), I would like to argue that different epistemic norms govern normative beliefs and other beliefs with ordinary, purely naturalist contents. By epistemic norms I mean norms that describe what type of evidence and defeaters are canonically relevant for when you can hold the beliefs in question with warrant. It seems to me that there is an interesting asymmetry between the evidence and defeaters that are relevant for holding normative beliefs with warrant and the ones that are relevant for other beliefs with ordinary, purely naturalist contents. I’ll briefly explain this asymmetry below. I would like some help from the readers of this blog with regards to questions about whether this asymmetry is plausible, whether these norms could be different in some other ways and especially whether there is any literature I could draw from.

The Empirical Armchair (by Featured Philosopher, Steve Finlay)

Thanks to Brad Cokelet and the PEA Soup crew for the invitation to join an illustrious line-up!

Earlier this year my first book was published (Confusion of Tongues: A Theory of Normative Language, OUP).  In the first part, I offer unifying semantic analyses for central, thin normative terms ‘good’, ‘ought’, and ‘reason’ (an “end-relational” theory).  In the second part, I argue that when supplemented with a sensitivity to pragmatics, this theory solves many central problems of metaethics, including puzzles about practicality, categoricity, final value, and disagreement.  A general theme is that metaethical puzzles largely result from philosophers’ confusion about our own language. 

I’m very happy here to discuss any questions or objections readers might have.  However, I thought I’d use the opportunity to focus particularly on meta-metaethical issues about philosophical method, as I’m currently trying to finish a paper for a volume on empirical approaches to metaethics (eds. Cuneo & Loeb), loosely based around a chapter I cut from the book at the last moment.  I’m sticking my neck out here, because I don’t have broad expertise in metaphilosophy, so probably some or much of what I say is naive.  But it seems an ideal topic for a blog discussion (honoring Sobel’s “plea for half-assedness”).  I enthusiastically welcome any suggestions of work I should be reading or citing, including your own.

“The Empirical Armchair”

I argue that a particular kind of armchair, analytic method is at once (i) a viable, and (ii) an empirical approach to answering metaethical questions about the nature of normative properties.  I also suggest it is (iii) uniquely apt, and (iv) the dominant actual method, despite what metaethicists may claim to be doing.  (Hopefully that rattles a few chains). 

CFA, Theistic Ethics Workshop

The organizers of the first annual Theistic Ethics Workshop encourage abstract submissions for our inaugural meeting at the Graylyn Conference Center (www.graylyn.com) on the campus of Wake Forest University. The workshop will be held on October 8-10, 2015, and details can be found here:

http://users.wfu.edu/millerc/Theistic%20Ethics%20Workshop

Call for Papers: Marc Sanders Prize in Metaethics

From Russ Shafer-Landau:

I'm very pleased to announce a Call for Papers for the 3^rd annual Marc Sanders Prize in Metaethics. All of the relevant details can be found here.

The winner of the prize will receive $10,000, present his or her paper at the next Wisconsin Metaethics Workshop, and have the winning paper included in a forthcoming volume of Oxford Studies in Metaethics.

Some thoughts on constructing and justifying semantic and metasemantic theories

Hi, everyone.  Meena Krishnamurthy has very generously allowed me to post a few prelimary thoughts on the above topic and I thought I'd shard the link here to maximize the likelihood that I have a chance to benefit from your comments.  Here's the introduction to the post, as well as the opening paragraph.  For the rest, see here:

http://politicalphilosopher.net/2014/10/10/featured-philosop-her-janice-dowell/

These are a few early-stage thoughts on how we might best construct and justify semantic and metasemantic theories.  My own immediate interest in this topic stems from my interest in assessing rival semantic theories for modal expressions in English, especially deontic ones.  But my hope is that these thoughts are of some interest to those interested in semantic and metasemantic theorizing more broadly, including metaethicists interested in understanding the semantics of normative and evaluative expressions in English.  Comments, questions, and suggestions very welcome.

Constructing and Justifying Semantic and Metasemantic Theories

Recently, there’s been a lot of really interesting work done by philosophers of language and linguists on understanding what sorts of meanings a semantic theory for some natural language, L, should assign the expressions of L. Is the content of a sentence at a context a set of worlds, a set ‘centered’ worlds, a set of probability spaces, a structured proposition, or what? In related debates, metaethicists wonder what sorts of meanings such a theory should assign L’s normative or evaluative expressions. How might we best approach these questions? What constraints, if any, do a plausible metasemantic theory place on good answers to them?  Here are some preliminary thoughts about some of the constraints on constructing plausible semantic and metasemantic theories. (NB: Some of these thoughts are expressed in a forthcoming paper, The Metaethical Insignificance of Moral Twin Earth.  The issues here, though, are not narrowly metaethical, but more broadly methodological ones for semantic and metasemantic theorizing.)