Simon Kirchin

This is an open access title available under the terms of a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 International licence. It is free to read at Oxford Scholarship Online and offered as a free PDF download from OUP and selected open access locations. We use evaluative terms and concepts every day. We call actions right and wrong, teachers wise and ignorant, and pictures elegant and grotesque. Philosophers place evaluative concepts into two camps. Thin concepts, such as goodness and badness, and rightness and wrongness have evaluative content, but they supposedly have no or hardly any nonevaluative, descriptive content: they supposedly give little or no specific idea about the character of the person or thing described. In contrast, thick concepts such as kindness, elegance and wisdom supposedly give a more specific idea of people or things. Yet, given typical linguistic conventions, thick concepts also convey evaluation. Kind people are often viewed positively whilst ignorance has negative connotations. The distinction between thin and thick concepts is frequently drawn in philosophy and is central to everyday life. However, very few articles or books discuss the distinction. In this full-length study, Simon Kirchin discusses thin and thick concepts, highlighting key assumptions, questions and arguments, many of which have gone unnoticed. Kirchin focuses in on the debate between 'separationists' (those who think that thick concepts can be separated into component parts of evaluative, often very 'thin', content and nonevaluative content) and 'nonseparationists' (who deny this). Thick Evaluation argues for a version of nonseparationism, and in doing so argues both that many concepts are evaluative and also that evaluation is not exhausted by thin positive and negative stances.

I consider the ‘normative relevance’ argument and the idea of grounding. I diagnose why there appears to be a tension between the conclusion that we are tempted to reach and the intuition that the normative is grounded in or by the non-normative. Much of what I say turns on the idea of the normative itself. In short, I think that concentrating on this idea can help us see how the tension arises. My aim is to encourage people to reconceptualize the debate so as to begin to offer additional insight. To that end, I spend some time contrasting normativity with evaluation, and then think how the debate may alter if we run it with the latter. I doubt that doing so will solve any problem, and I suspect that what I say will be controversial anyway. But there is some value to changing matters nonetheless. The idea that runs through this paper is that the whole issue is so complex and deep that we should not narrowly construe it with reference only to normativity.

For centuries, certain moral philosophers have maintained that morality is an illusion, comparable to talking of ghosts or unicorns. These moral skeptics claim that the world simply doesn’t contain the sort of properties (such as moral badness, moral obligation, etc.) necessary to render moral statements true. Even seemingly obvious moral claims, such as "killing innocents is morally wrong" fail to be true. What would lead someone to adopt such a radical viewpoint? Are the arguments in its favor defensible or plausible? What impact would embracing such a view have on one’s practical life? Taking as its point of departure the work of moral philosopher John Mackie (1917-1981), A World Without Values is a collection of essays on moral skepticism by leading contemporary philosophers, some of whom are sympathetic to Mackie’s views, some of whom are opposed. Rather than treating moral skepticism as something to dismiss as quickly as possible, this anthology is a comprehensive exploration of the topic, and as such will be a valuable resource for students of moral philosophy at all levels, as well as professionals in the field of meta-ethics. A World Without Values presents state-of-the-art arguments that advance the ongoing philosophical debate on several fronts, and will enjoy an important place on any meta-ethicist’s bookshelf for some years to come.

This paper examines the advantages and disadvantages of ethical intuitionism and is an extended critical discussion of an edited collection Rethinking Intutionism (ed.) Stratton-Lake (OUP) that has been much discussed. (My piece is one of the first discussions of it.) Along other matters, I argue for the original and fairly controversial claim that in order for intuitionism to hold water, we must allow that what is involved in full moral understanding can differ from person to person, rather than thinking that if a claim can be intuited rather than proved, everyone who intuits it understands it in the same way.

In this piece I try to nail a train of thought that is offered, typically by realists against anti-realists, as a reason for thinking that our raw moral phenomenology provides a reason to prefer moral realism. This idea is referred to often, but is rarely detailed. I argue that various arguments that one can devise which are in keeping with this train of thought fail. I conclude by saying, controversially, that moral phenomenology is fairly irrelevant when thinking about metaethics. This paper has been cited by a number of people in their recent work (for example, Horgan and Timmons, Loeb).

In this paper I argue for a particularist understanding of thick evaluative features, something that is rarely done and is fairly controversial. That is, I argue that sometimes that the fact that an act is just, say, could, in certain situations, provide one with a reason against performing the action. Similarly, selfishness could be right-making. To show this, I take on anti-particularist ideas from two much-cited pieces (by Crisp, and by McNaughton and Rawling), in the influential Moral Particularism anthology (eds.) Hooker and Little (OUP). My paper has already been cited by other people working in the field.

Many sites of war and conflict are turned into conflict heritage sites, explicitly created and maintained for tourism. Such sites raise a host of interesting questions and problems that are ripe for sustained philosophical attention. For example, is it ethical to create and visit such sites for pleasure given the conflict, death and suffering that occurred at them? Is it easier to justify creating and visiting such sites in the distant past rather than in the recent past, or does the passage of time make no moral difference? This chapter maps some of the main questions and considerations arising for conflict heritage tourism, and offers some initial responses in order to stimulate wider philosophical discussion.

This chapter focuses on the idea of self-evidence as used in modern writings about ethical intuitionism. It uses an argument against intuitionism given by Berys Gaut as a prompt to explore this idea. The chapter argues that intuitionists can respond, but that they must explain what it means to justify an ethical belief self-evidently. This occasions an introduction of two ways of capturing what it is to understand a belief, only one of which is plausible. However, adopting that plausible account causes a problem for intuitionists, which is shown when we think about both ‘theory’ and ‘anti-theory’ positions in normative ethics.

_Arguing about Metaethics_ collects together some of the most exciting contemporary work in metaethics in one handy volume. In it, many of the most influential philosophers in the field discuss key questions in metaethics: Do moral properties exist? If they do, how do they fit into the world as science conceives it? If they don’t exist, then how should we understand moral thought and language? What is the relation between moral judgement and motivation? As well as these questions, this volume discusses a wide range of issues including moral objectivity, truth and moral judgements, moral psychology, thick evaluative concepts and moral relativism. The editors provide lucid introductions to each of the eleven themed sections in which they show how the debate lies and outline the arguments of the papers. _Arguing about Metaethics_ is an ideal resource text for students at upper undergraduate or postgraduate level.

There has been a great deal written about normativity in recent years by philosophers, with a range of accounts developed and questions raised. Various normative notions (or seemingly normative notions) have all attracted a great deal of attention, notions such as reason, duty, ought, obligation, value, standard and norm, and the notion of fittingness. We find discussions of normativity, and perhaps the normative itself, in many domains of philosophical enquiry: ethics, aesthetics, epistemology, logic and more. Similarly, many figures from the history of philosophy have their thoughts cast in a normative manner. There has been so much written recently about the very idea of normativity that we need to take stock of where we are and think about how present work might point to future thought. In this introduction I summarize various trends of thought, questions and ideas that philosophers have recently discussed and use these as a platform to speculate as to what directions there might be for future work about normativity. I end by summarizing the chapters in this volume whilst tying them to my previous thoughts.

In the life sciences, there is an ongoing discussion about a perceived ‘reproducibility crisis’. However, it remains unclear to which extent the perceived lack of reproducibility is the consequence of issues that can be tackled and to which extent it may be the consequence of unrealistic expectations of the technical level of reproducibility. Large-scale, multi-institutional experimental replication studies are very cost- and time-intensive. This Perspective suggests an alternative, complementary approach: meta-research using sociological and philosophical methodologies to examine researcher trust in data. An improved understanding of the criteria used by researchers to judge data reliability will provide crucial, initial evidence on the actual scale of the reproducibility crisis and on measures to tackle it.