Jonas Olson

Just as we can be more or less certain about empirical matters, we can be more or less certain about normative matters. Recently, it has been argued that this is a challenge for noncognitivism about normativity. Michael Smith presented the challenge in a 2002 paper and James Lenman and Michael Ridge responded independently. Andrew Sepielli has now joined the rescue operation. His basic idea is that noncognitivists should employ the notion of being for to account for normative certitude. We shall argue that the being for account of normative certitude is vulnerable to many problems shared by other noncognitivist theories. Furthermore, we shall argue that Sepielli’s account has its own problems: His favored normalization procedure for degrees of being for has highly problematic implications

This paper explores Franz Brentano’s metaethics by comparing it to Thomas Reid’s. Brentano and Reid share a commitment to moral realism and they are both aptly classified as intuitionists concerning moral knowledge and the nature of moral judgment. However, their respective versions of intuitionism are importantly different, in ways that reflect more general differences between their respective epistemological views. Sections III and IV of the paper focus more exclusively on Brentano’s metaethics and some of its unorthodox features. These features tie in with notorious difficulties for moral realism concerning the nature of moral truth and the relation between moral judgment and motivation to act.

This paper is a critical notice of a recent significant contribution to the debate about fitting attitudes and value, namely Toni Rønnow-Rasmussen’s Personal Value. In this book, Rønnow-Rasmussen seeks to analyse the notion of personal value—an instance of the notion of good for a person—in terms of fitting attitudes. The paper has three main themes: Rønnow-Rasmussen’s discussion of general problems for fitting attitude analyses; his formulation of the fitting attitude analysis of personal value and the notion of ‘for someone’s sake attitudes’; and his critique of the dichotomy between agent-neutral and agent-relative reasons.

In this paper, I defend the view that the values of concrete objects and persons are reducible to the final values of tropes. This reductive account has recently been discussed and rejected by Rabinowicz and Rønnow-Rasmussen (2003). I begin by explaining why the reduction is appealing in the first place. In my rejoinder to Rabinowicz and Rønnow-Rasmussen I defend trope-value reductionism against three challenges. I focus mainly on their central objection, that holds that the reduction is untenable since different evaluative attitudes have, ontologically speaking, different objects. I grant that this may well be so, but argue that the objection is based on an unwarranted, loose reading of the notion 'value for its own sake'. On the more reasonable strict reading, it is plausible to maintain that tropes are the sole ontological category that can properly be ascribed final value

We first deal with a few preliminary matters and discuss what-if any-distinct impact belief in moral error theory should have on our moral practice. Second, we describe what is involved in giving an answer to our leading question and take notice of some factors that are relevant to what an adequate answer might look like. We also argue that the specific details of adequate answers to our leading question will depend largely on context. Third, we consider three extant answers to our leading question: fictionalism, conservationism, and abolitionism. Of these three, conservationism seems most promising. However, conservationism leaves pertinent questions unanswered. In order to provide answers to these questions, and ultimately to provide an answer to our leading question, conservationism needs to be supplemented, yielding an account we call “negotiationism.” This final proposal is not neat and tidy, but it might work reasonably well in the moral environment in which error theorists are likely to find themselves.

Moral nihilism is the view that there are no moral facts or moral truths. It is the ontological component of moral error theory, which is the best-known and most comprehensive metaethical theory that involves moral nihilism. My main aim is to discuss some consequences of endorsing moral error theory or believing to some degree that moral error theory is true. In §2, I consider the implications for ordinary moral thought and discourse and the epistemological consequences for moral theorizing. In §3, I consider a recent challenge, according to which moral judgments do not have the epistemic profile that moral error theory alleges. I shall argue in §3–5 that the challenge can be met and that there is evidence that moral error theory is in fact correct about the epistemic profile of moral judgments.

Value theory, or axiology, looks at what things are good or bad, how good or bad they are, and, most fundamentally, what it is for a thing to be good or bad. Questions about value and about what is valuable are important to moral philosophers, since most moral theories hold that we ought to promote the good. This Handbook focuses on value theory as it pertains to ethics, broadly construed, and provides a comprehensive overview of contemporary debates pertaining not only to philosophy but also to other disciplines-most notably, political theory and economics.The Handbook's twenty-two newly commissioned chapters are divided into three parts. Part I: Foundations concerns fundamental and interrelated issues about the nature of value and distinctions between kinds of value. Part II: Structure concerns formal properties of value that bear on the possibilities of measuring and comparing value. Part III: Extensions, finally, considers specific topics, ranging from health to freedom, where questions of value figure prominently.

In this paper, I defend the view that the values of concrete objects and persons are reducible to the final values of tropes. This reductive account has recently been discussed and rejected by Rabinowicz and R0nnow‐Rasmussen (2003). I begin by explaining why the reduction is appealing in the first place. In my rejoinder to Rabinowicz and R0nnow‐Rasmussen I defend trope‐value reductionism against three challenges. 1 focus mainly on their central objection, that holds that the reduction is untenable since different evaluative attitudes have, ontologically speaking, different objects. I grant that this may well be so, but argue that the objection is based on an unwarranted, loose reading of the notion ‘value for its own sake’. On the more reasonable strict reading, it is plausible to maintain that tropes are the sole ontological category that can properly be ascribed final value.

This paper considers and argues against old and recent readings of Hume according to which his account of moral judgement is non-cognitivist. In previous discussions of this topic, crucial metaethical distinctions-between sentimentalism and non-cognitivism and between psychological and semantic non-cognitivism-are often blurred. The paper aims to remedy this and argues that making the appropriate metaethical distinctions undermines alleged support for non-cognitivist interpretations of Hume. The paper focuses in particular on Hume's so-called 'motivation argument' and argues that it is a poor basis for non-cognitivist interpretations. While there is textual support for attributing to Hume what may be called 'modally weak' motivational internalism, there is no solid textual support for attributing to him either psychological or semantic non-cognitivism. The paper also challenges briefly some further alleged support for non-cognitivist interpretations. It concludes by offering some positive evidence against such interpretations, namely that Hume appears to hold that there are moral beliefs and moral knowledge.

Are there moral facts? According to moral nihilism, the answer is no. Some moral nihilists are moral error theorists, who think that moral judgements purport to refer to moral facts, but since there are no moral facts, moral judgements are uniformly false or untrue. Terence Cuneo has recently raised an original and potentially very serious objection to moral error theory. According to Cuneo’s ‘normative theory of speech’, normative facts, some of which are moral facts, are crucially involved in explanations of how it is that we are able to perform illocutionary speech acts, such as asserting, promising, and commanding. Many versions of moral error theory reject not only moral facts, but also normative facts of the kind Cuneo takes to be among the prerequisites of our abilities to perform illocutionary speech acts. If Cuneo’s argument is successful, then, moral error theory has the unsettling implication that we do not speak, and possibly that we cannot speak. I shall argue, however, that the argument ultimately fails, chiefly because its core premise fails to establish that illocutionary speech acts are normative in the first place.

In his recent book The Value Gap (2021), Toni Rønnow-Rasmussen defends a pluralist view of final goodness and goodness-for, according to which neither concept is analysable in terms of the other. In this paper I defend a specific version of monism, namely so-called ‘Mooreanism’, according to which goodness-for is analysable partly in terms of final goodness. Rønnow-Rasmussen offers three purported counterexamples to Mooreanism. I argue that Mooreanism can accommodate two of them. The third is more problematic, but this is in the end not a decisive objection.