Joshua Gert

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.

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

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 …

Terry Horgan and Mark Timmons have recently presented a series of papers in which they argue against what has come to be called the ‘new wave’ moral realism and moral semantics of David Brink, Richard Boyd, Peter Railton, and a number of other philosophers. The central idea behind Horgan and Timmons’s criticism of these ‘new wave’ theories has been extended by Sean Holland to include the sort of realism that drops out of response-dependent accounts that make use of an analogy between moral properties and secondary qualities. This paper argues that Holland’s extension depends crucially on the fact that his target is a direct response-dependent account of moral value. His argument does not work against such accounts of more basic normative notions such as ‘harm’ or ‘benefit’. And these more basic notions may then serve as the basic normative building blocks for an indirectly response-dependent moral theory.

One strategy for providing an analysis of practical rationality is to start with the notion of a practical reason as primitive. Then it will be quite tempting to think that the rationality of an action can be defined rather simply in terms of ‘the balance of reasons’. But just as, for many philosophical purposes, it is extremely useful to identify the meaning of a word in terms of the systematic contribution the word makes to the meanings of whole sentences, this paper argues that it is extremely useful to explain the nature of practical reasons in terms of the systematic contributions that such reasons make to the wholesale rational statuses of actions. This strategy gives us a clear view of two logically distinct normative roles for practical reasons – justifying and requiring – that are often conflated, and it allows us to give clear definitions of what ‘the strength of a reason’ means within each of these roles. The final section of the paper explores some implications of the resulting view for the internalism/externalism debate about practical reasons, and for the practical significance of moral theory.

It is a suggestive feature of English and other languages that an indicative sentence such as ‘Premarital sex is wrong’ can be described not only as an expression of the belief that premarital sex is wrong, but also as an expression of disapproval of premarital sex. Disapproval is plausibly regarded as an attitude that is distinct from belief, in that it does not have truth conditions. What sort of attitude, then, should we take ‘Premarital sex is wrong’ to express: disapproval, belief, or perhaps both? One group of contemporary philosophers advocates the first Option. They hold that evaluative claims serve essentially to express positive and negative attitudes that are more like desires than beliefs, and that cannot be said to be true or false — at least in the robust way in which claims about the ages of trees can be true or false. Call these philosophers ‘expressivists.’ Seemingly opposed to expressivists are those who hold that evaluative claims express beliefs, and can be true or false.

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.

Derek Parfit, Joseph Raz, and T. M. S canlon, among others, all hold that reasons for action are provided by facts about those actions. They also hold that the fact that an action would promote or achieve the object of an agent's desire is not one of the relevant facts, and does not provide a reason. Rather, the facts that provide reasons are typically facts about valuable states of affairs that the action is likely to bring about, or valuable properties that the action itself will instantiate. For this reason it is appropriate to call Parfit, Raz, and Scanlon "value-based" theorists about reasons for action. In contrast to value-based theorists, there is a strong current of contemporary theorizing, starting with Bernard Williams, that can be called "desire-based." Desire-based theorists argue that practical reasons should be understood in terms of the desires of the agents who are said to have those reasons

Perceptual-role theories of mental qualities hold that we can discover the nature of a being’s mental qualities by investigating that being’s capacity to make perceptual discriminations. Many advocates of perceptual-role theories hold that the best explanation of these capacities is that mental quality spaces are homomorphic to the spaces of the physical properties that they help to discriminate. This paper disputes this thesis on largely empirical grounds, and offers an alternative. The alternative explains interesting patterns in our perception of color differences and similarities across edges, emphasizing the importance of visual discontinuities. Further, it provides a simple explanation of the intransitivity of indiscriminability. The homomorphism thesis can explain this intransitivity only with the addition of an independently unsupported empirical hypothesis. Also, in contrast to the homomorphism thesis, the alternative view is perfectly consistent with empirical data that suggest that the visual system uses the dynamic allocation of a limited range of responses in order to discriminate a wider range of physical stimuli and that we are much better at detecting changes in relative luminance than changes in absolute luminance. Moreover, it does all this while using a more efficient strategy for encoding sensory information.

This article explains and defends the existence of value constancy, understood on the model of color constancy. Color constancy involves a phenomenal distinction between the transient color appearances of objects and the unchanging colors that those objects appear to have. The existence of value constancy allows advocates of response-dependent accounts of value to reject the question “What is the uniquely appropriate attitude to have toward this evaluative property?” as containing a false uniqueness assumption. Rejecting this assumption allows response-dependent accounts of value to deflect or answer a host of popular objections

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

René Jagnow [2012] argues that David Rosenthal's theory of consciousness cannot account for certain experiences that involve colours so fine-grained that we do not and cannot have concepts of them. Jagnow claims that an appeal to comparative concepts such as being slightly darker than cannot help Rosenthal, since, in order to apply such concepts, we would already need to be conscious of two distinct fine-grained colours. The present paper contests this claim. It appeals to the Cornsweet illusion and some other visual phenomena, in order to argue that our visual systems can and do represent brutely comparative matters

Ruth Chang has argued for the existence of a fourth positive value relation, distinct from betterness, worseness and equality, which she calls “parity.” In an earlier article I seemed to criticize Chang's suggestion by offering an interval model for the values of items that I claimed could accommodate all the phenomena characteristic of parity. Wlodek Rabinowicz, offering his own model of value relations, endorsed one central feature of my proposal: the need to distinguish permissible preferences from required ones. But he, along with Chang, correctly pointed out that my own model suffered from serious formal problems. The present article offers an improved interval model, but the main point is not the model itself. Rather, it is the derivation of the model from a response-dependent account of practical rationality. This derivation helps explain why we have a concept for which Rabinowicz's model is appropriate, and therefore supplements Chang's existence arguments. My conclusion is that we can take Chang's view, Rabinowicz's and mine as providing a reinforcing set of views

This book presents an account of normative practical reasons and the way in which they contribute to the rationality of action. Rather than simply 'counting in favour of' actions, normative reasons play two logically distinct roles: requiring action and justifying action. The distinction between these two roles explains why some reasons do not seem relevant to the rational status of an action unless the agent cares about them, while other reasons retain all their force regardless of the agent's attitude. It also explains why the class of rationally permissible action is wide enough to contain not only all morally required action, but also much selfish and immoral action. The book will appeal to a range of readers interested in practical reason in particular, and moral theory more generally.