Ontological Advantages

This chapter aims to make clear the ontological consequences of adopting a modal normativist position. By combining normativism with the easy approach to ontology, we can see that modal normativism gives us a form of simple realism, according to which there are modal facts, properties, and even possible worlds, in the only sense that has sense. Such entities are not, however, “posited” as truthmakers that are supposed to “explain” what “makes our modal claims true.” But although the normativist accepts that there are modal facts and properties, the view also brings ontological advantages, avoiding ontological problems that plague traditional realist views, including placement problems and the grounding problem. The normativist view is also compared here to the forms of “classificatory conventionalism” advocated by Ross Cameron and Theodore Sider.

Is Sider still a perdurantist?

In Writing the Book of the World (2011) Theodore Sider claims that on the fundamental level of reality there are no objects composed of parts, which makes his view a version of mereological nihilism. However, in his previous book entitled Four-Dimensionalism (2001), Sider endorses mereological universalism, the thesis that every class of objects has a mereological fusion, i.e. that there exists an additional object containing those objects as parts, which plays a crucial role in his argument from vagueness in favour of perdurantism, that is the thesis of the existence of temporal parts of material objects. In this paper I will investigate whether Sider can still be a perdurantist in spite of his latest commitment to mereological nihilism.

The Self-other Asymmetry and Act-utilitarianism

The self-other asymmetry is a prominent and important feature of common-sense morality. It is also a feature that does not find a home in standard versions of act-utilitarianism. Theodore Sider has attempted to make a place for it by constructing a novel version of utilitarianism that incorporates the asymmetry into its framework. So far as I know, it is the best attempt to bring the two together. I argue, however, that Sider's ingenious attempt fails. I also offer a diagnosis that explains why no theory that remains recognizably act-utilitarian can successfully incorporate the asymmetry.