Mark van Roojen

Most contemporary moral philosophy is concerned with issues of rationality, universality, impartiality, and principle. By contrast Laurence Blum is concerned with the psychology of moral agency. The essays in this collection examine the moral import of emotion, motivation, judgment, perception, and group identifications, and explore how all these psychic capacities contribute to a morally good life. Blum takes up the challenge of Iris Murdoch to articulate a vision of moral excellence that provides a worthy aspiration for human beings. Drawing on accounts of non-Jewish rescuers of Jews during the Holocaust Blum argues that impartial principle can mislead us about the variety of forms of moral excellence.

Some moral debunkers such as Sharon Street argue that evolutionary debunking arguments favor a response-dependent or subjectivist metaethics over more realist metaethical accounts. I argue that this thought conflates meta-semantics with semantics by running together mind-dependent content determination relations with mind-dependent content. Insofar as reference is broadly an epistemic relation, evolutionary debunking arguments would cause trouble for mind-independent theories of reference and content determination, since there would be no guarantee that reference would track epistemic access. But a firmly realist theory of content is consistent with a mind-dependent theory of reference. I use David Hilbert's theory of color to illustrate.

Satisficing without thereby maximizing is rational provided that non-consequentialism is rational and provided that the preferred characterization of non-consequentialism is not one in which right action is justified in virtue of maximizing agent-relative value. Rather, the non-consequentialism which can serve to defend satisficing should be one in which the best characterization of certain reasons to act does not involve maximization of value of any sort, whether agent-relative or agent neutral. I argue there are reasons to prefer this sort of non-consequentialism to theories which defend non-consequentialism by construing value as agent-relative. An upshot is that satisficing cannot be well-defended within an overall consequentialist framework.

Rationalism offers an account of moral properties as a subset of the properties which serve to rationalize right actions, and these properties are fit to be the referents of our moral terms. That fitness can be exploited in constructing an externalist theory of reference determination for these terms. The resulting externalist theory draws support from standard responses to Moral Twin-Earth scenarios. The relevance of these responses to moral semantics has recently beenvigorously challenged by Dowell and by Schroeter and Schroeter. The social character of meaning relations, which can explain the openness of questions about an analysis, may thereby also make Twin-Earth judgements beside the point. But the resources available to translators go beyond semantic competence and it is these resources that nonetheless make the Moral Twin-Earth responses relevant.

This dissertation examines the relations between a Humean conception of reasons for action and desire, and ethical relativism. I argue that the former supports the latter by providing support for the idea that similarly situated people can have reasons to act differently. I then go on to examine the adequacy of the Humean account of rationality. In doing that, I assess an argument that this theory is most acceptable because if fits best with the Humean theory of motivation, a theory we have independent reason to accept. I argue that we do not have such independent reason, and that the Humean theory of rationality will have to be assessed on its merits. I then go on to argue that we have reason to modify the Humean theory of reasons, at least to accept a kind of reasoning I call analogical reasoning about ends. As a result, the Humean theory of motivation must be abandoned. ;I then examine the ramifications of accepting the modified account of rationality for the issue of ethical relativism. I conclude that relativism is still viable. In fact, if the Humean theory of reasons is modified only to accommodate analogical reasoning about ends, then relativism is to be preferred over non-relativist accounts of ethics. But, given that the Humean theory of rationality is false, it no longer should be seen as a constraint on acceptable accounts of rationality. Thus, further modifications to the theory of rationality might be in the offing, and some of those could be incompatible with relativism.