scholarly journals Moore’s Moral Facts and the Gap in the Retributive Theory

2011 ◽  
Vol 5 (3) ◽  
pp. 361-376 ◽  
Author(s):  
Brian Rosebury
Keyword(s):  
Retributive Theory ◽  
Moral Facts

scholarly journals There Are No Easy Counterexamples to Legal Anti-Positivism

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Emad H. Atiq
Keyword(s):  
General Theory ◽  
Social Philosophy ◽  
Social Practices ◽  
Legal Rule ◽  
False Negatives ◽  
Moral Properties ◽  
Theory Of Law ◽  
Inclusive Form ◽  
Moral Facts

Journal of Ethics & Social Philosophy, ForthcomingLegal anti-positivism is widely believed to be a general theory of law that generates far too many false negatives. If anti-positivism is true, certain rules bearing all the hallmarks of legality are not in fact legal. This impression, fostered by both positivists and anti-positivists, stems from an overly narrow conception of the kinds of moral facts that ground legal facts: roughly, facts about what is morally optimific — morally best or morally justified or morally obligatory given our social practices. A less restrictive view of the kinds of moral properties that ground legality results in a form of anti-positivism that can accommodate any legal rule consistent with positivism, including the alleged counterexamples. I articulate an ‘inclusive’ form of anti-positivism that is not just invulnerable to extensional challenge from the positivist. It is the only account that withstands extensional objections, while incorporating, on purely conceptual grounds, a large part of the content of morality into law.

scholarly journals Belief Pills and the Possibility of Moral Epistemology

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Neil Sinclair
Keyword(s):  
Moral Epistemology ◽  
Moral Truth ◽  
Recent Attempt ◽  
Evolutionary Debunking Arguments ◽  
Debunking Arguments ◽  
Moral Judgements ◽  
Evolutionary Debunking ◽  
Evolutionary Explanations ◽  
Moral Facts

This chapter argues that evolutionary debunking arguments are dialectically ineffective. Such arguments rely on the premise that moral judgements can be given evolutionary explanations which do not invoke their truth. The challenge for the debunker is to bridge the gap between this premise and the conclusion that moral judgements are unjustified. After discussing older attempts to bridge this gap, this chapter focuses on Joyce’s recent attempt, which claims that ‘we do not have a believable account of how moral facts could explain the mechanisms…which give rise to moral judgements’. It argues that whether there is such an account depends on what it is permissible to assume about moral truth and that it is reasonable to make assumptions which allow for the possibility of at least partial moral epistemologies. The challenge for the debunker is to show that these assumptions are unreasonable in a way which does not render their debunking argument superfluous.

Nietzsche’s Anti-Realism about Value

2019 ◽  
pp. 17-48
Author(s):  
Brian Leiter
Keyword(s):  
Moral Values ◽  
Moral Judgments ◽  
Explanatory Role ◽  
Moral Philosophers ◽  
Moral Facts

Nietzsche defends the metaphysical thesis that there are no objective (i.e. mind-independent) facts about values, including moral values. His primary arguments for his moral anti-realism are “best explanation” arguments: the best explanation of our moral judgments, indeed of the two-millennium long disagreements among moral philosophers, make no reference to objective moral facts. The details of an “inference to the best explanation” are laid out, and illustrated with Nietzsche’s own texts. Contemporary attempts to defend the explanatory role of moral facts are critiqued, and the radical implications of the argument from disagreement among philosophers considered and defended.

The Modal Status of Moral Principles

2021 ◽  
pp. 257-280
Author(s):  
Gideon Rosen
Keyword(s):  
Laws Of Nature ◽  
Conventional Wisdom ◽  
Metaphysical Necessity ◽  
Moral Principles ◽  
Moral Facts

Conventional wisdom holds that pure moral principles hold of metaphysical necessity, from which it follows that it is metaphysically impossible for the moral facts to vary independently of the descriptive facts. Moral contingentists deny this, holding that the moral laws are in some cases like the laws of nature: metaphysically contingent, but necessary in a weaker sense. The present chapter makes a preliminary case for moral contingentism and defends the view against recent objections due to Lange (2018) and Dreier (2019).

Moral realism

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jonathan Dancy
Keyword(s):  
Moral Realism ◽  
Moral Fact ◽  
Moral Realist ◽  
The World ◽  
The Right ◽  
Natural Fact ◽  
Moral Facts

Moral realism is the view that there are facts of the matter about which actions are right and which wrong, and about which things are good and which bad. But behind this bald statement lies a wealth of complexity. If one is a full-blown moral realist, one probably accepts the following three claims. First, moral facts are somehow special and different from other sorts of fact. Realists differ, however, about whether the sort of specialness required is compatible with taking some natural facts to be moral facts. Take, for instance, the natural fact that if we do this action, we will have given someone the help they need. Could this be a moral fact – the same fact as the fact that we ought to do the action? Or must we think of such a natural fact as the natural ‘ground’ for the (quite different) moral fact that we should do it, that is, as the fact in the world that makes it true that we should act this way? Second, realists hold that moral facts are independent of any beliefs or thoughts we might have about them. What is right is not determined by what I or anybody else thinks is right. It is not even determined by what we all think is right, even if we could be got to agree. We cannot make actions right by agreeing that they are, any more than we can make bombs safe by agreeing that they are. Third, it is possible for us to make mistakes about what is right and what is wrong. No matter how carefully and honestly we think about what to do, there is still no guarantee that we will come up with the right answer. So what people conscientiously decide they should do may not be the same as what they should do.

Part III Themes, Ch.13 Legitimacy

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Lim Brendan
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Popular Sovereignty ◽  
Moral Facts

This chapter charts the uneven progression since federation of popular sovereignty as a legitimating force in Australian constitutionalism. It describes how the sociological and moral facts which lie outside the constitution, but which shape our understanding of its legitimacy, can come to be incorporated within the constitution, and to shape our understanding of its law. The chapter begins with the particular conception of popular sovereignty that the Constitution introduced into the regime. This was a political rather than a juridical conception; a fact determining legitimacy rather than legality. But the chapter reveals that the boundary between legitimacy and legality is a porous one. In a wide variety of ways, conceptions of legitimacy influence standards of legality. The course of that influence is then traced through the twentieth century before the chapter returns to arguments presented by Sir Edmund Barton on the last day of the Australasian Federal Conventions in 1898.

scholarly journals Debunking, supervenience, and Hume’s Principle

2019 ◽  
Vol 49 (8) ◽  
pp. 1083-1103 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mary Leng
Keyword(s):  
Mathematical Realism ◽  
Mathematical Beliefs ◽  
Conceptual Truth ◽  
Hume’S Principle ◽  
Moral Beliefs ◽  
Debunking Arguments ◽  
Moral Facts

AbstractDebunking arguments against both moral and mathematical realism have been pressed, based on the claim that our moral and mathematical beliefs are insensitive to the moral/mathematical facts. In the mathematical case, I argue that the role of Hume’s Principle as a conceptual truth speaks against the debunkers’ claim that it is intelligible to imagine the facts about numbers being otherwise while our evolved responses remain the same. Analogously, I argue, the conceptual supervenience of the moral on the natural speaks presents a difficulty for the debunker’s claim that, had the moral facts been otherwise, our evolved moral beliefs would have remained the same.

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