Jonathan Dancy

This chapter focuses on Bernard Williams's ‘What does Intuitionism Imply?’ (1988). It considers the justice of certain complaints that he makes about the position he associates with John McDowell. The chapter first considers, and reject, McDowell's appeal to the analogy with secondary qualities in his ‘Values and Secondary Qualities’ (1985). The chapter then considers and defends McDowell's reply to John Mackie's complaint that objective values do not pull their own weight; I try to show the justice of McDowell's reply in a way that detaches it from any reliance on the dispositional conception of value. Finally, the chapter turns to Williams's attempts to show that the objectivity of moral values cannot be sustained within the constraints of McDowell's approach, because of various explanatory failures. The chapters argues that everything that needs to be explained can be explained, and that we should prefer a sort of optimism to a Williams-style pessimism. The chapter ends by considering whether Williams is right to think of McDowell as an intuitionist.

This chapter considers the question of whether emotions are unitary states, starting from the question of what sort of unitariness might be involved. The views of Thomas Reid and Sabine Roeser are examined in this connection, and a normative form of unitariness is suggested as the most appropriate. Jesse Prinz’s remarks about ‘component theories’, the Problem of Parts and the Problem of Plenty, are examined and found unhelpful. The chapter ends by considering Peter Goldie’s conception of grief as a potentially unitary process rather than a state.

This chapter focuses on the issue of how we are to understand ‘contributory reasons’, particularly as they are related to oughts. It begins by rehearsing six proposals for understanding contributory reasons in terms of an ‘overall ought’, and by rejecting them all. It is proposed that a ‘reason is something that favours action’, where favouring is a normative relation in which a reason stands to a particular way of acting. Since the contributory cannot be reduced to an overall ought (or any overall notion, such as goodness), the chapter proposes to go the other way and reduce overall oughts to the contributory. However, instead of attempting to reduce overall oughts to favouring reasons, the notion of a ‘contributory ought’ is introduced — ‘a monadic feature of an action which is consequent on, or resultant from, some other feature — the ‘ought-making’ feature, whatever it is’. How are we to understand how an overall ought is related to the contributory ought? Here is where the appeal to _fittingness_, a notion employed by the classical intuitionists, offers promise. In partially defending this claim, it is argued that Michael Smith's ‘Humean realism’ and Allan Gibbard's expressivism lack the resources needed for adequately understanding practical reasons and oughts.

We know what to say about the agent who knowingly does the wrong thing. But what of the wrongdoer who doesn't know everything that matters? Some of the usual criticisms may apply, if some of the usual mistakes were made. Other usual criticisms will miss the mark. One task for moral theory is to explain this variety of censures and failures. Derek Parfit proposes that we define for each criticism a sense of 'wrong', and that each new sense be defined in terms of the 'ordinary' sense. The authors argue in favor of another approach, inspired by Parfit's earlier work, requiring only one sense of 'wrong'. They conclude by showing that their own approach is also deeply flawed—that neither theory can explain the many ways to do wrong in ignorance of what matters. This is not a conclusion with which moral theorists should be happy.

In this paper I lay out the bare bones of my conception of practical reasoning, which I understand as similar in all relevant respects to theoretical reasoning except that (as it is put) the conclusion of practical reasoning is either action or intention, while the conclusion of theoretical reasoning is belief. I then turn to ask how, on this conception, moral education is possible—understanding moral education as more practical than theoretical. We want people to do the right things, not just to believe that they ought to do them. But the first task is to identify the right thing to do and this requires practical reasoning since it involves tracing reasons to act in one way rather than another, the right act being the one there is most reason (of a certain sort) to do. I maintain that a certain form of casuistry can take people who already have some competence with the notion of a reason and enable them to develop that competence by a process of explicit questioning, without our needing to see this process as a form of indoctrination.