Contemporary Metaethics Research Articles

The Euthyphro, Divine Command Theory and Moral Realism

AbstractDivine command theories of metaethics are commonly rejected on the basis of the Euthyphro problem. In this paper, I argue that the Euthyphro can be raised for all forms of moral realism. I go on to argue that this does not matter as the Euthyphro is not really a problem after all. I then briefly outline some of the attractions of a divine command theory of metaethics. I suggest that given one of the major reasons for rejecting such an analysis has been found to be unsound divine command theories deserve to be taken more seriously in contemporary metaethics.

Options for Hybrid Expressivism

In contemporary metaethics, various versions of hybrid expressivism have been proposed according to which moral sentences express both non-cognitive attitudes and beliefs. One important advantage with such positions, its proponents argue, is that they, in contrast to pure expressivism, have a straightforward way of avoiding the Frege-Geach problem. In this paper, I provide a systematic examination of different versions of hybrid expressivism with particular regard to how they are assumed to evade this problem. The major conclusion is that none of these views succeeds to provide both a fully satisfying interpretation of moral sentences and a convincing response to the Frege-Geach problem. I end by briefly considering alternative hybrid views that employ the notion of conventional or conversational implicature.

Contemporary Metaethics: An Introduction, 2nd Edition by Miller, Alexander

When the first edition of Alexander Miller's Contemporary Metaethics was published ten years ago, it immediately established itself as one of the best introductions to metaethics. With the publicat...

Skepticism about Naturalizing Normativity: In Defense of Ethical Nonnaturalism

There is perhaps no more widely shared con- viction in contemporary metaethics, even among those who hold otherwise divergent views, than that practical normativity must be capable of being naturalized (i.e., cap- tured fully within a metaphysically naturalist worldview). My aim is to illuminate the central reasons for skepticism about this. While certain naturalizing projects are plausi- ble for very limited purposes, it is unlikely that any can provide everything we might reasonably want from an account of goodness and badness, rightness and wrong- ness, and unqualified reasons for acting—at least if we are unwilling to accept certain deflationary or bullet-biting moves. Some naturalizing views can be shown to fail outright to capture the relevant normative facts or proper- ties, while others have more promise but can also be seen to have certain limitations and costs, failing to capture elements that some of us take to be important to an ade- quate theory of practical normativity. There are, of course, far more naturalizing moves than can be considered here, so the aim is not to establish the truth of nonnaturalism through a process of elimination. But I hope to say enough to bring out the central worries about naturalizing projects and to pose some challenges that apply more widely, with the aim of showing that ethical nonnaturalism remains an attractive and well-motivated option at least for those of us who reject both nihilism and various forms of ethical deflation.

Anger and moral judgment

Although theorists disagree about precisely how to characterize the link between anger and moral judgment, that they are linked is routinely taken for granted in contemporary metaethics and philosophy of emotion. One problem with this assumption is that it ignores virtues like patience, which thinkers as different as Cassian, Śāntideva, and Maimonides have argued are characteristic of mature moral agents. The patient neither experience nor plan to experience anger in response to (at least some) wrongs. Nevertheless, we argue, they remain capable of judging such actions to be wrong. This indicates that a different account of the relationship between anger and moral judgment is required. We conclude by proposing one such account, showing how a metaethicist who was more attentive to the normative ethics of anger might set about reconstructing her position.

Does metaethics rest on a mistake?

One consequence of the professionalization of philosophy is its ever increasing specialization. Within the normative domain, what has come to be known as metaethical inquiry is increasingly conducted independently of substantive ethical reflection. Even if this trend is intelligible given the economic and institutional pressures that spawned it, it is reasonable to wonder if insights are lost and distortions and illusions introduced by focusing exclusively on the limited perspective of metaethical inquiry. Dworkin laments this trend and is sceptical about contemporary metaethics. The division between ‘first-order’, ‘substantive’ normative inquiry and ‘second-order’, ‘meta’ normative inquiry has come to seem natural to us and is fundamental to the way we standardly present these topics in our teaching. But it has not always been so. Thus, for example, Rawls (2000) has claimed that the moral philosophies of Hume and Kant cannot intelligibly be presented in this way. Instead, they exemplify what he calls a ‘philosophical ethics’. Both Hume and Kant address metaphysical and epistemological questions about ethics, but they do so in a way that is not independent from substantive ethical reflection.

What Mystery of Moral Experience?

According to Michael Smith, a “central organizing problem” in contemporary meta-ethics concerns a particular way in which our moral thought and practice is or at least appears mysterious. Our “ordinary moral practice” and the “facts of ordinary moral experience,” he says, contain features which are incontrovertible but mutually incompatible. The features, taken individually, account for some of the basic and inalienable characteristics of our moral thought but they are, on his view, jointly inconsistent. Broadly speaking the features are objectivity and practicality. As Smith puts it: “The problem is that the objectivity and the practicality of moral judgment pull in quite opposite directions from each other…. The objectivity of moral judgement suggests that there are moral facts [and we have] beliefs about what these facts are … but it leaves entirely mysterious how or why having a moral view is supposed to have special links with [motivation]…. The practicality of moral judgement suggests just the opposite, that our moral judgements express our desires…. While this enables us to make good sense of the link [with motivation], it leaves entirely mysterious what a moral argument is supposed to be an argument about.” Let us understand what is meant by the mystery or problem in line with the intention Smith expresses as something which has an explanation, if baffling at first. But the formulation Smith gives of the problem, its standard formulation, involves a problematic psychological account of moral experience. The psychological account involves assuming that moral experience, and what is manifest in ordinary practice, can be accounted for in terms of propositional attitudes, an assumption which drives how the problem is characterized and proposed solutions to it. We need not deny that moral experience can be problematic or mysterious. The principal issue is that the standard view of what constitutes the mystery casts the problem in psychological terms, where the source of the problem is an alleged incompatibility of mental states. The idea is that although our moral thought and practice is apparently coherent, it is, mysteriously, made up of elements that cannot be coherently combined. On an alternative view, moral experience and the ordinary facts which constitute it are not exhausted by our mental states and cannot be exhausted by them. Much of the basic stuff of moral experience has nothing to do with our mental life at all. The ordinary facts of moral thought, discourse, and experience are not well accounted for, let alone exhausted by facts about our mental states or propositional attitudes.

Hegel’s grounding of intersubjectivity in the master–slave dialectic

In this article I seek to explain Hegel’s significance to contemporary meta-ethics, in particular to Kantian constructivism. I argue that in the master–slave dialectic in the Phenomenology of Spirit, Hegel shows that self-consciousness and intersubjectivity arise at the same time. This point, I argue, shows that there is no problem with taking other people’s reasons to motivate us since reflection on our aims is necessarily also reflection on the needs of those around us. I further explore Hegel’s contribution to the debate about internal and external reasons. I end by arguing that we should understand reasons as historically constructed in the sense that who counts as an intrinsic bearer of value changes over time. I thus argue that the struggle for recognition is in fact the beginning of the long march toward the idea of recognition and the Kantian kingdom of ends. This march, however, is driven by the need to overcome injustice as it is instantiated at the beginning of history by the master’s absolute domination of the slave.

On Constitutive Normativity

The paper deals with the so-called in contemporary meta-ethics, as treated in Apel and Habermas' discourse ethics and in Korsgaard work on normativity. An effort is made here to link this strategy with the traditional form of transcendental arguments, and to merge the two-above mentioned approaches, the former based on an argument from discourse, the latter based on an argument from agency, into a single one based on an argument from linguistic agency. In the final part of the paper, the question is addressed whether this reformulation of the constitutivist strategy helps in addressing the most fundamental objections raised against it.

Methods of ethics and the descent of man: Darwin and Sidgwick on ethics and evolution

Darwin’s treatment of morality in The Descent of Man has generated a wide variety of responses among moral philosophers. Among these is the dismissal of evolution as irrelevant to ethics by Darwin’s contemporary Henry Sidgwick; the last, and arguably the greatest, of the Nineteenth Century British Utilitarians. This paper offers a re-examination of Sidgwick’s response to evolutionary considerations as irrelevant to ethics and the absence of any engagement with Darwin’s work in Sidgwick’s main ethical treatise, The Methods of Ethics. This assessment of Sidgwick’s response to Darwin’s work is shown to have significance for a number of ongoing controversies in contemporary metaethics.

Naturalizm moralny i trzy stopnie normatywności

Artykuł poświęcony jest żywo dyskutowanym kwestiom we współczesnej metaetyce — normatywności moralności i możliwości jej naturalistycznego ujęcia. Autor stara się pokazać, iż normatywność w etyce można rozumieć co najmniej na trzy sposoby, które rozróżnia według kryterium opartego głownie na stopniu „rygoryzmu” moralności. Zarysowuje trzy stopnie normatywności, które określa jako: generyczny, motywacyjny i autorytatywny. Następnie podejmuje pytanie o to, jaki stopień normatywności jest właściwy moralności. W trzecim kroku bada możliwość naturalistycznego wyjaśnienia każdego ze stopni normatywności. Rezultat rozważań prowadzi autora do tezy, iż moralność jest normatywna tylko w najsłabszym, generycznym sensie; nawet jeśli naturalistyczne ujęcie silniejszych stopni normatywności jest niemożliwe, to okoliczność ta nie obala stanowiska naturalistycznego.

Teaching & Learning Guide for: Moral Realism and Moral Nonnaturalism

Teaching & Learning Guide for: Moral Realism and Moral Nonnaturalism

Recent Faces of Moral Nonnaturalism

AbstractDespite having occupied a peripheral position in contemporary metaethics, moral nonnaturalism has recently experienced a revival of sorts. But what is moral nonnaturalism? And what is there to be said in favor of it? In this article, I address these two questions. In the first place, I offer an account of what moral nonnaturalism is. According to the view I propose, nonnaturalism is better viewed not as a position, but as a theoretical stance. And, second, I critically engage with three recent arguments for moral nonnaturalism offered by Russ Shafer‐Landau, Kit Fine, and Jean Hampton, respectively.

Green's Rights Recognition Thesis and Moral Internalism

T. H. Green claimed that ‘rights are made by recognition. There is no right but thinking makes it so’. This ‘rights recognition thesis’ is widely rejected. I argue in this article that, so far from being an idiosyncratic doctrine of 19th-century British Idealism, the rights recognition thesis implies a compelling conception of rights, and one that, surprisingly, is more in tune with contemporary meta-ethics than are many contemporary rights theories. Green's moral theory, I argue, is a form of the widely embraced doctrine of ‘moral internalism’. Such internalism, conjoined with a generally embraced analysis of rights, leads to some version of the rights recognition thesis.

The Return of Moral Fictionalism

Fictionalism has made a comeback over the last two decades as one of the standard responses to ontologically problematic domains. It has been applied to mathematics, modality, unobservables, identity claims, and existence claims. Moral discourse has struck many as potentially ontologically problematic, but within contemporary analytic metaethics there has been no sustained defense of moral fictionalism. Very recently moral fictionalism has also finally begun to return. On the dust cover of Richard Joyce’s new book, The Myth of Morality— a sustained defense of moral fictionalism—David Lewis writes: ‘‘Moral fictionalism is an idea whose time has come.’’ In one sense, Lewis is right: in addition to Joyce’s book there seems to be quite a bit of interest in moral fictionalism though much of it expressed merely in conversation or still in the publication pipeline. The appeal of fictionalism often lies, I suspect, in its ability to look like a relatively less problematic alternative to both traditional noncognitivism and moral realism: we can do without the noncognitivist’s problematic account of moral language and we can do without the realist’s problematic metaphysics. In this paper I will not argue that moral fictionalism cannot work. Instead I will argue (i) that a correct understanding of the dialectical situation in contemporary metaethics shows that fictionalism is only an interesting new alternative if it can provide a new account of normative content: what is it that I am thinking or saying when I think or say that I ought to do something; and (ii) that fictionalism, qua fictionalism, does not provide us with any new resources for providing such an account.

An introduction to contemporary metaethics

An introduction to contemporary metaethics

Conceptual Role Semantics for Moral Terms

One of the central questions of metaethics is semantical. An answer to this semantical question would be an account of the meaning of moral statements. There are three main approaches to this semantical question that are most familiar in contemporary metaethics: (i) noncognitivism or expressivism, (ii) noncircular analysis, and (iii) the causal theory of reference. In this paper, I shall present a new approach to this question, an approach that I call conceptual role semantics for moral terms. In conclusion, I shall try to indicate briefly why my approach is preferable to those three more familiar alternatives. First, however, I shall say something about this semantical question, and why it matters to the rest of metaethics.