David Copp

According to the basic needs principle, a state in favorable circumstances must enable its members to meet their basic needs throughout a normal life-span. Applied to the international situation, I argue, this principle implies that a global state would have a duty (ceteris paribus) to enable subordinate states to meet their members‘ needs. In the absence of a global state, existing states have a duty (ceteris paribus) to work to create a system of institutions that would enable each state to meet its members‘ needs. Near the conclusion, I respond to skeptical objections about global justice.

"Moral skepticism" is the thesis that no moral code or standard is or could be objectively justified. It constitutes as important a challenge to anti-skeptical moral theory as does skepticism about God to theistic philosophies. It expresses intuitive doubts, but it also entails the falsity of a variety of philosophical theories. It entails a denial of moral knowledge and truth, but one could reject it without holding that there is such knowledge or truth. An anti-skeptical theory could be a familiar "epistemic theory," but it could also be a "practical theory," according to which some moral code has an appropriate justification in practical reason.

A person who sees that she morally ought to do something might wonder whether it would make sense for her to do it. Perhaps Aurelia is on a crowded bus, standing next to an old man whose wallet is almost falling out of his pocket. She says, “I see that the morally right thing would be to warn this man to take care of his wallet. But why should I do the right thing? In fact, why shouldn't I steal his wallet? It would be wrong of me to do this, but so what? No one is looking. I won't get caught. What's to fear?“We can imagine different scenarios of this kind. In one scenario, Aurelia is on the verge of deciding to steal the old man's wallet. She believes it would be wrong to do this, and she is asking whether there is any reason not to go ahead.

In this essay, I propose a standard of practical rationality and a grounding for the standard that rests on the idea of autonomous agency. This grounding is intended to explain the “normativity” of the standard. The basic idea is this: To be autonomous is to be self-governing. To be rational is at least in part to be self-governing; it is to do well in governing oneself. I argue that a person's values are aspects of her identity—of her “self-esteem identity”—in a way that most of her ends are not, and that it therefore is plausible to view action governed by one's values as self-governed. This is also plausible on independent grounds. Given this, I say, rational agents comply with a standard—the “values standard”—that requires them to serve their values, and to seek what they need in order to continue to be able to serve their values. Footnotesa I am grateful to many people for helpful comments and discussion over the many years in which I have been developing the ideas in this essay. With apologies to those whose help escapes my memory, I would like to thank Nomy Arpaly, Sam Black, Michael Bratman, Justin D'Arms, Dan Farrell, Pat Greenspan, Don Hubin, Dan Jacobson, Marina Oshana, Michael Ridge, Michael Robins, David Sobel, Pekka Väyrynen, and David Velleman. I presented early versions of some of the ideas in this essay to audiences in the departments of philosophy at the University of Alberta, the University of Maryland at College Park, l'Université de Montréal, the University of Southern California, and the University of Florida, to the 1999 Conference on Moral Theory and Its Applications, Le Lavandou, France, and to the 2001 Conference on Reason and Deliberation, Bowling Green State University. I am grateful for the helpful comments of those who participated in the discussions on all of these occasions and especially to the other contributors to this volume, and its editors. I owe special thanks to Ellen Paul for encouraging me to integrate my thinking on identity with my thinking on rationality and for her useful comments.

As practiced by Alvin Goldman, social epistemology addresses the epistemic consequences and requirements of social practices and institutions. Since political institutions have epistemic consequences and requirements, social epistemology has a great deal to offer to political philosophy. Goldman’s work in this area is rich and interesting, and, in his recent book, Knowledge in a Social World, he has much to say that deserves the attention of political philosophers. I highly recommend, for example, his discussion of freedom of expression, and his critique of post-modernist views about truth. In this essay, I shall focus on Goldman’s characteristically sophisticated and well-informed discussion of the epistemic requirements of democracy. I shall argue that there are instructive mistakes in Goldman’s views, but in drawing attention to these mistakes, I do not want to obscure the significance of Goldman’s work. We value both democracy and knowledge, and, because of this, we need to pay attention to the questions Goldman has raised both about the requirements of democracy and about its impact on the distribution of knowledge.

Moral realismandantirealist-expressivismare of course incompatible positions. They disagree fundamentally about the nature of moral states of mind, the existence of moral states of affairs and properties, and the nature and role of moral discourse. The central realist view is that a person who has or expresses a moral thought is thereby in, or thereby expresses, acognitivestate of mind; she has or expresses abeliefthat represents a moral state of affairs in a way that might be accurate or inaccurate. The view of antirealist-expressivism is that such a person is in, or expresses, aconativestate of mind, one that consists in a certain kind of attitude or motivational stance toward something, such as an action or a person. Realism holds that moral thoughts have truth conditions and that in some cases these truth conditions are satisfied so that our moral thoughts are true. Antirealist-expressivism holds, to a first approximation, that the distinctive moral content of a moral thought does not have truth conditions.

What accounts for the offensive character of pejoratives and slurs, words like ‘kike’ and ‘nigger’? Is it due to a semantic feature of the words or to a pragmatic feature of their use? Is it due to a violation of a group’s desires to not be called by certain terms? Is it due to a violation of etiquette? According to one kind of view, pejoratives and the non-pejorative terms with which they are related—the ‘neutral counterpart’ terms—have different meanings or senses, and this explains the offensiveness of the pejoratives. We call theories of this kind, semantic theories of the pejoratives. Our goal is broadly speaking two-fold. First, we will undermine the arguments that are supposed to establish the distinction in meaning between words like ‘African American’ and ‘nigger’. We will show that the arguments are suspect and generalize in untoward ways. Second, we will provide a series of arguments against semantic theories. For simplicity, we focus on a semantic theory that has been proposed by Hom and Hom and May. By showing the systematic ways in which their view fails we hope to provide general lessons about why we should avoid semantic theories of the pejoratives

We have the intuition that the function of morality is to make society possible. That is, the function of morality is to make possible the kind of cooperation and coordination among people that is necessary for societies to exist and to cope with their problems. This intuition is reflected in the 'society centered' moral theory I defended in my book, Morality, Normativity, and Society. The theory is a relativistic version of moral naturalism and moral realism. This paper briefly explains some of the basic ideas of my theory and attempts to answer some of the most common objections. I argue that, despite its relativism, my views allow that certain things are simply wrong to do, without any qualifications, and it allows that members of other societies, non-human animals, and even features of the environment, might have non-derivative moral status.