Accommodation to Injustice

Suppose we suffer or witness an injustice. Often we will respond with a combination of anger, grief, resentment, indignation, or horror. And it seems that this is how it should be: the injustice is the reason for our emotional response. However, it is a striking fact that our anger, grief, or horror will diminish over time, often fairly quickly, even if the injustice persists. We accommodate ourselves to the injustice. Indeed, this is good for us, and it may even seem appropriate; it is often wrong to dwell on a wrong. But how could accommodation be appropriate if the injustice remains unchanged? And how could we make sense of accommodation when we anticipate it? This chapter argues that accommodation to injustice poses an insurmountable problem for understanding our emotional response to injustice and reveals something incomprehensible at the heart of our moral outlook.

Quasi-Dependence

Quasi-realists aim to account for many of the trappings of metanormative realism within an expressivist framework. Chief among these is the realist way of responding to the Euthyphro dilemma: quasi-realists want to join realists in being able to say, “It’s not the case that kicking dogs is wrong because we disapprove of it. Rather, we disapprove of kicking dogs because it’s wrong.” However, the standard quasi-realist way of explaining what we are up to when we assert the first of these two sentences rests on a mistaken identification of metaphysical dependence (or grounding) with counterfactual covariation. This chapter proposes a better way for expressivists to understand such sentences, on which they serve to express complex states of mind in which an attitude bears a relation of psychological dependence (or basing) to another state of mind. It is argued that this proposal is a natural, versatile, and fruitful approach for expressivists to take that helps them secure the first half of the Euthyphro contrast—but at the cost of making it difficult to see how expressivists can make sense of that contrast’s second half.

Getting a Moral Thing into a Thought

Non-naturalism is the view that normative properties are response-independent, irreducible to natural properties, and causally inefficacious. An underexplored question for non-naturalism concerns the metasemantics of normative terms. Ideally, the non-naturalist could remain ecumenical, but it appears they cannot. Call this challenge the metasemantic challenge. This chapter suggests that non-naturalists endorse an epistemic account of reference determination of the sort recently defended by Imogen Dickie, with some modifications. An important implication of this account is that, if correct, a fully fleshed out moral epistemology will simultaneously rebut metasemantic objections to non-naturalism. Thus, both the metasemantic and the more widely discussed epistemological challenges in effect amount to one. Before setting out the positive view, the chapter considers why all of the traditional metasemantic theories cause trouble for the non-naturalist. This includes discussions of teleosemantics, conceptual role semantics, as well as Schroeter and Schroeter’s “connectedness” model.

Excuse without Exculpation

Can moral ignorance excuse? This chapter argues that philosophical debate of this question has been based on a mistaken assumption: namely that excuses are all-or-nothing affairs; to have an excuse is to be blameless. The chapter argues that we should reject this assumption. Excuses are not binary but gradable: they can be weaker or stronger, mitigating blame to greater or lesser extent. This chapter explores the notions of strength of excuses, blame mitigation and the relationship between excuses and moral responsibility. These ideas open up some principled middle-ground between the two positions staked out in the literature. Moral ignorance may well excuse but it does not exculpate.

Who’s on First?

“X-Firsters” hold that there is some normative feature that is fundamental to all others (and, often, that there’s some normative feature that is the “mark of the normative”: all other normative properties have it, and are normative in virtue of having it). This view is taken as a starting point in the debate about which X is “on first.” Little has been said about whether or why we should be X-Firsters, or what we should think about normativity if we aren’t X-Firsters. Hence the chapter’s two main goals. First, to provide a simple argument that one shouldn’t be an X-Firster about the normative domain, which starts with the observation that analogous views have dubious merits in analogous domains. Second, to offer an alternative view—taking normativity to be a determinable explained in terms of its determinates—that offers an interesting way to think about the structure and unity of normativity.

The Reliability Challenge in Moral Epistemology

The Reliability Challenge to moral non-naturalism has received substantial attention recently in the literature on moral epistemology. While the popularity of this particular challenge is a recent development, this form of the challenge can be traced back to a skeptical challenge in the philosophy of mathematics raised by Paul Benacerraf. The current Reliability Challenge is widely regarded as the most sophisticated way to develop this skeptical line of thinking, making the Reliability Challenge the strongest epistemic challenge to normative non-naturalism. In this chapter, I argue that the innovations that have occurred since Benacerraf’s statement of the challenge are misconceived and confused in a number of ways. The Reliability Challenge is not the most potent epistemic challenge to moral non-naturalism. The most potent challenge comes from the fact that there is a causal condition on knowledge—or, more precisely, a becaual condition—that non-natural moral facts cannot satisfy.

Moral Realism and Philosophical Angst

This chapter defends pro-realism, the view that it is better if moral realism is true rather than any of its rivals. After offering an account of philosophical angst, I make three general arguments. The first targets nihilism: in securing the possibility of moral justification and vindication in objecting to certain harms, moral realism secures something that is non-morally valuable and even essential to the meaning and intelligibility of our lives. The second argument targets antirealism: moral realism secures a desirable independence for moral justification that is qualitatively different from the anti-realistic construal of independence that is only explicable in terms of degrees of distance from our subjective responses and attitudes. Finally, the chapter argues that while the pan-expressivist semantic program of quasi-realism has significant effects on what can be appropriately said in meta-ethical discourse, it provides no comfort to the pro-realist who is already angsty about anti-realism.

Reason and Respect

This chapter develops and defends an account of reason: to reason is to scrutinize one’s attitudes by consulting the perspectives of other persons. The principal attraction of this account is its ability to vindicate the unique of authority of reason. The chapter argues that this conception entails that reasoning is a robustly social endeavor—that it is, in the first instance, something we do with other people. It is further argued that such social endeavors presuppose mutual respect on the part of those participating in them. The account therefore yields a form of Kantian constructivism: we have an unconditional duty of respect for persons because such a duty is implicit in the very nature of reasoning.

Resisting Reductive Realism

Ethicists struggle to take reductive views seriously. Influential proponents of reductive views themselves admit as much. Ethicists also have trouble conceiving of some supervenience failures. Understanding why ethicists resist reductive views and why ethicists have trouble conceiving of some supervenience failures shores up new evidence for various theses about the distinctiveness of our use of normative concepts. This chapter builds on previous work to make a cumulative case for the view that what it is to use a normative concept is to use an unanalyzable natural-cognitive concept that is related to noncognitive elements of our psychology.

Welfare and Rational Fit

We commonly talk about what is good for someone or something. But the expression “good for” seems to refer to differing relations depending on the context of use. This chapter focuses on the welfarist good-for relation and undertakes to defend a particular view about the structure and nature of this good-for value. After discussing the basic structure of welfarist good-for, the chapter considers and critically assesses alternative views, including Moore’s eliminativist view, the “private ownership” view Wayne Sumner attributes to Moore, and both Donald Regan’s and Guy Fletcher’s (more recent) “locative analyses.” According to the rational fit theory of welfare defended herein, the welfarist good-for relation is a reason-giving relation of fit between a welfare object and a welfare subject, where a welfare subject is a valuable being.