Joshua Gert

Chirimuuta's view and my own are as close as they are because we both take two quite controversial stances: pragmatism as against a correspondence-based view of perceptual success, and adverbialism as against a representational view of color experience. Unsurprisingly, of course, we do not understand these positions in precisely the same ways. In these comments I would like to see if I can persuade Chirimuuta to take two steps in my direction. The first step is to broaden her pragmatism so that it treats truth and accuracy in similar ways, for belief as well as perception, and for all sorts of properties. The second is to narrow her adverbialism so that it applies only to the fine-grained appearances of the colors, and leaves aside the coarse-grained colors themselves, which seem to remain as constant properties of objects, even as their appearances change.

Historically the notion of practical rationality has played two roles. One role is that of the fundamental normative term applying to actions. When theorists conceive of practical rationality in this sense, they claim that it is nonsense to ask "Why be rational?" This is because any informative answer would have to make use of a still more fundamental normative notion. The other role which rationality has historically played is connected with proper practical mental functioning. In this sense, rationality is more connected with the assessment of agents, although actions are still assessed as rational and irrational. My dissertation argues that one notion cannot play both of these roles. And though I admit that the "mental functioning" notion, which I continue to call "rationality," is a normative one, I argue that the former notion is both conceptually and normatively prior. I call this prior notion "advisability." ;I argue that the advisability of an action is relative to neither the beliefs nor the desires of the agent. And I argue that irrational actions are those which indicate that the agent is in a state of increased likelihood of doing unadvisable actions, and may be usefully criticized. My account of advisability, and of the relation between rationality and advisability, allows me to explain the following complexity in the notion of rationality. First, reasons stemming from harms to the agent provide prima facie rational requirements, regardless of whether the agent is motivated by them. Second, reasons stemming from the interests of others can only provide rational justification if the agent is motivated by them. Thus I permit a principled marriage of the insights of internalists and externalists about reasons.

Whether or not one endorses realism about colour, it is very tempting to regard realism about determinable colours such as green and yellow as standing or falling together with realism about determinate colours such as unique green or green31. Indeed some of the most prominent representatives of both sides of the colour realism debate explicitly endorse the idea that these two kinds of realism are so linked. Against such theorists, the present paper argues that one can be a realist about the determinable colours of objects, and thus hold that most of the colour ascriptions made by competent speakers are literally true, while denying that there are any positive facts of the matter as to the determinate colours of objects. The result is a realistic colour realism that can certify most of our everyday colour ascriptions as literally correct, while acknowledging the data regarding individual variation

The question “Why be moral?” is open to at least three extremely different interpretations. One way to distinguish these interpretations is by picturing the question as being asked by, respectively, Allan, who is going to act immorally unless he can be convinced to act otherwise, Beth, who is perfectly happy to do what is morally required on a certain occasion but who wants to know what is it about the act that makes it morally required, and Charles, who is trying to understand why rational people act morally. An answer to the question as understood by Allan is, for some, the holy grail of moral philosophy, and it is also perhaps the default understanding of the question. The question as asked by Beth is what David Copp, in his contribution to this volume, calls the “why-think-morality-requires-this” question. The question as asked by Charles can be called the “what-rationally-justifies-moral-behaviour” question. Charles’ question, importantly, is about rationalpermissibility,and it is most pointed when moral behaviour requires sacrifice.

Abstract: The point of this paper is to undermine the support that particularism in the domain of epistemic reasons might seem to give to particularism in the domain of practical reasons. In the epistemic domain, there are two related notions: truth and the rationality of belief. Epistemic reasons are related to the rationality of belief, and not directly to truth. In the domain of practical reasons, however, the role of truth is taken by the notion of objective rationality. Practical reasons are directly relevant to this objective notion, and therefore the reasons to expect holism and particularism in the epistemic domain do not transfer to the domain of practical rationality.

This article uses a particular view of the basic emotions in order to develop and defend an account of paradigmatic emotion-linked evaluative properties. The view is that felt emotions are constituted by an awareness that one is about to behave in a certain way. This view provides support for a fitting-attitude account of certain evaluative properties. But the relevant sense of fittingness is not to be understood in terms of reasons. The account therefore sidesteps the well-known Wrong Kind of Reasons problem. Throughout the article, a contrast is made with the rational sentimentalism of Justin D’Arms and Daniel Jacobson.

Many philosophers have argued that a necessary condition on an action's being intentional is that the agent has the ability to alter the probabilities of the relevant outcome. These philosophers would hold that this condition is what allows us to deny that an agent, for example, intentionally rolls something other than five fives with a set of dice, despite that agent's being virtually sure that this will be the outcome of the roll. The current paper uses some examples to cast this explanation, and the necessity of the associated condition, into doubt. It then suggests that what actually differentiates intentional from unintentional action – in the examples that falsify the hypothesis about control – is to be found in the agent's representation of the processes by which the relevant outcomes are produced. In particular, the agent must represent the outcome as happening because of what she does.

Many contemporary accounts of normative reasons for action accord a single strength value to normative reasons. This paper first uses some examples to argue against such views by showing that they seem to commit us to intransitive or counterintuitive claims about the rough equivalence of the strengths of certain reasons. The paper then explains and defends an alternate account according to which normative reasons for action have two separable dimensions of strength: requiring strength, and justifying strength. Such an account explains our intuitions in the cases that make trouble for single-value views. The justifying/requiring account is compared with two other solutions that have been offered to justify and explain our intuitions about these sorts of cases. These other solutions appeal to the notions of incommensurability of reasons, and to second-order normative entities called `exclusionary permissions'. It is argued that the justifying/requiring distinction provides a superior solution.

This paper calls into question the idea that moral disgust is usefully regarded as a form of genuine disgust. This hypothesis is questionable even if, as some have argued, the spread of moral norms through a community makes use of signaling mechanisms that are central to core disgust. The signaling system is just one part of disgust, and may well be completely separable from it. Moreover, there is plausibly a significant difference between the cognitive scientist’s concept of an emotion and the everyday notion of that emotion. Finally, even if, as this paper contests, some form of disgust were directly elicited by the moral wrongness of certain kinds of behavior, research on the socio-moral elicitors of the disgust mechanism would still be unlikely to shed much direct light on the nature or content of morality

This discussion examines two of the central notions at work in Sterba’s From Rationality to Equality: question-beggingness, and the notion of a rational requirement. I point out that, against certain unreasonable positions, begging the question is a perfectly reasonable option. I also argue that if we use the sense of “rational requirement” that philosophers ought to have in mind when defending the idea that morality is rationally required, then Sterba has not succeed in defending this idea. Rather, he has at most demonstrated the rational preferability of morality over two other positions: an extreme egoism, and a very particular form of altruism. But another position exists: one that holds altruistic reasons to exist, and to be capable of justifying sacrifices, but that also holds that they do not require us to sacrifice our interests in the way that morality sometimes does require

In a number of recent publications, Douglas Portmore has defended consequentialism, largely on the basis of a maximizing view of practical rationality. I have criticized such maximizing views, arguing that we need to distinguish two independent dimensions of normative strength: justifying strength and requiring strength. I have also argued that this distinction helps to explain why we typically have so many rational options. Engaging with these arguments, Portmore has (a) developed his own novel maximization-friendly method of explaining the ubiquity of rational options, and (b) criticized one argument in favour of a substantive justifying/requiring distinction in the domain of practical rationality. The present article defends the justifying/requiring distinction, and criticizes Portmore's maximization-friendly strategy for explaining the ubiquity of rational options.

Over-simple internalist accounts of practical reasons imply that we cannot have reasons to become more rational, because they claim that we have a reason to φ only if we would have some desire to φ if we were fully rational. But if we were fully rational, we would have no desire to become more rational. Robert Johnson has recently argued that in their attempts to avoid this problem, existing versions of internalism yield reasons which do not have an appropriate connection with potential explanations of action. I suggest that the problem is partly a result of failure to see that action-tokens are usually tokens of a wide variety of action-types, and that the internalist conditional need only be true of one of these types in order to justify a reason claim about the token

Julia Markovits has recently argued for what she calls the ‘Coincident Reasons Thesis’: the thesis that one’s action is morally worthy if and only if one’s motivating reasons for acting mirror, in content and strength, the reasons that explain why the action ought, morally, to be performed. This thesis assumes that the structure of motivating reasons is sufficiently similar to the structure of normative reasons that the required coincidence in content and strength is a genuine possibility. But because motivating reasons have only one dimension of strength, while normative reasons have both justifying and requiring strength, one’s motivating reasons can no more coincide with the normative reasons of relevance to one’s action than a line can coincide with a square, or a square with a cube. It is possible to amend the Coincident Reasons Thesis so that it concerns only one dimension of normative strength: for example, requiring strength. But such an amended thesis yields implausible verdicts. In particular it requires us either to deny the existence of supererogatory action, or—still less plausibly—to hold that such action has less moral worth than does doing the morally required minimum

In The Sources of Normativity, Christine Korsgaard presents and defends a neo-Kantian theory of normativity. Her initial account of reasons seems to make them dependent upon the practical identity of the agent, and upon the value the agent must place on her own humanity. This seems to make all reasons agent-relative. But Korsgaard claims that arguments similar to Wittgenstein’s private-language argument can show that reasons are in fact essentially agent-neutral. This paper explains both of Korsgaard’s Wittgensteinian arguments, and shows why neither of them work. The paper also provides a brief sketch of a different Wittgensteinian account of reasons that distinguishes the normative role of justification from that of requirement. On this account, the real agent-neutrality of reasons applies to their justificatory role, but not to their requiring role

Abstract: This article explains and motivates an account of one way in which we might have substantive a priori knowledge in one important class of domains: domains in which the central concepts are response-dependent. The central example will be our knowledge of the connection between something's being harmful and the fact that it is irrational for us to fail to be averse to that thing. The idea is that although the relevant responses (basic aversion in the case of harm, and a kind of interpretive failure in the case of irrationality) are produced by independent psychological mechanisms, they have distal causes that turn out to be related in ways that—once language enters the picture—yield epistemically accessible necessary connections between the referents of their corresponding terms.

First, some stage setting is necessary. According to Raz, what makes us into rational agents is our ability to perceive normative aspects of the world, appreciate their normative significance, and respond appropriately. Although he concentrates on the rationality of action, our beliefs, feelings, and emotions also demonstrate this ability. This characterization of his view already indicates that, according to Raz, the world indeed has normative aspects. What this means is that aspects of the world have value, and that for agents who can engage with that value in the right way, these valuable aspects give reasons for action. For example, the goodness of novels provides reasons to read them, write them, discuss them, etc. A number of essays are attempts to clarify and defend this claim about the objectivity of evaluative thought, and to explain the nature and extent of its dependence on social practices.

1. IntroductionThe Emotional Construction of Morals is a tour de force that combines empirical data and philosophical argument in an impressively coherent way. Certainly it resists any sweeping assessment; a mere presentation of the principal lines of argument would itself take the space of an article. Also, and despite its systematic structure, I do not think Prinz's view places decisive weight on any small number of points. Consequently, I do not think it can be refuted in any wholesale way. Nevertheless, I often find myself in very sharp disagreement with Prinz. What I would like to do in this article, therefore, is to focus on what seem to be some broad issues of perspective, and see if I can convince readers that taking a slightly different perspective on certain matters might undermine the apparent force of much of what he has to say. In particular, I will focus on the analogy between moral properties and colour properties: an analogy to which Prinz himself appeals. As a corollary I will also try to show that Prinz's focus, for many purposes, on cannibalism and issues of sexual morality undermines the relevance of much of the empirical data he brings to bear in defending his sentimentalist moral theory.According to Prinz, moral judgements are manifestations of complex emotional dispositions that he calls ‘sentiments’. But unlike the expressivist, who might easily embrace the spirit of this claim, Prinz also holds that the existence of these sentiments is sufficient to generate moral properties and facts; moral properties are simply powers to activate our moral sentiments, and it is often a fact that an action has such a property. In holding moral properties to be powers of this sort, Prinz embraces both an analogy with colours, and a certain understanding of what colours are: secondary qualities understood …