Michael Ridge

People often say that some normative ethical theory, act consequentialism perhaps, faces some objection based on ‘obvious intuitions’. It is also sometimes said—e.g. by Bernard Williams—that a theory like act consequentialism can make some things _too_ obvious; can make obvious things that _aren’t_ obvious but deeply morally problematic and troubling even if correct. Ridge and McKeever agree that objections of Williams’ sort can sometimes have some weight; but how much weight, and how often? They remind us that the anti-theorist’s deeper aim is often to insist on the subtlety and variety of the moral landscape. But, the more subtle and variable the moral landscape can be, the less sure we can be that we know which cases truly are the ‘hard ones’. And if we cannot be confident which cases are hard, then we cannot have strong reason to reject a theory for miscategorizing hard cases.

Many games are essentially social, yet dominant theories of games struggle to accommodate this. This chapter argues that Bernard Suits’s rightly influential theory lacks a plausible explanation of what it is for two or more people to play a game _with_ one another. It then develops an alternative approach which takes a more interpersonal approach, emphasizing the role of _commitment_ in its account of multi-player games. It argues that this approach has several advantages over rival approaches. It concluded by extending this approach to deal with single-player games. The chapter argues that “game” and cognates are, in one useful sense, family resemblance terms, but in a way that can accommodate what is insightful in Suits’s approach, thus getting the best of both worlds.

Arguments from the practicality of moral judgment are typically taken to be among the more powerful arguments for meta-ethical expressivism. However, analogous arguments seem unpromising in meta-epistemology. Morality is obviously practical in a very direct way, whereas epistemic judgments tell one what to believe, not what to do. It is argued in this chapter that what epistemologists call ‘pragmatic encroachment’ provides the best starting point for an argument from practicality in meta-epistemology. However, the best argument drawing on this idea seems compelling only for judgments about what someone has _sufficient_ reason to believe, not judgments about what there is _some_ reason to believe. But a similar dichotomy can be found in the moral context, and seeing why this does not spell doom there helps in the meta-epistemological context too. The chapter concludes by defending a better strategy for defending epistemic expressivism which relies on a specific conception of non-representational ‘direction of fit’.

Ridge asks whether constructivism can be credibly regarded as a position in metaethics which is “at once thoroughgoing…, novel and plausible.” His defence of a negative answer proceeds by examining two recent papers by Christine Korsgaard and Sharon Street respectively. Korsgaard's version of constructivism sees normative concepts not as serving the function of describing reality but rather of helping us solve certain distinctively practical problems. Ridge is doubtful of her claim that this constitutes a genuine alternative to cognitivism and non-cognitivism as this account appears to be consistent with either. He further objects that Korsgaard's constructivism, in seeking to understand normative concepts as referring to solutions to practical problems, fails to provide a full and satisfactory account of such concepts, given that this talk of problems and their solutions is itself already normative”. Ridge now turns to Street according to whom a normative judgement of some agent is true if and only if it is able to withstand scrutiny from the standpoint of that agent's other normative judgement. Ridge's concern is that this leaves it unclear what a normative judgement is. After considering and rejecting some alternatives, Ridge proposes that the most attractive way of understanding normative judgements is as a kind of desire. But on this reading, Ridge doubts if Street's view constitutes a “genuinely new and thoroughgoing approach to metaethics” as opposed to “a form of sophisticated subjectivism” of the sort defended by Bernard Williams and others.

This chapter addresses the question of which meta-normative theories are best supported by the strongest form of motivational internalism that is pre-theoretically plausible. The first part of the chapter is devoted to arguing that a specific form of internalism satisfies these criteria (of strength and plausibility). The remainder of the chapter focuses primarily on how the availability of so-called “hybrid theories” in meta-normative theory makes answering the question, “which theories benefit most from the truth of internalism?” more subtle and interesting. The chapter’s conclusion is that both expressivism (hybrid and otherwise) and certain forms of hybrid cognitivism draw more dialectical dividends from the truth of the form of internalism under discussion than their rivals.

Many agree that, to be sound, judgements of value must take account of context. Yet there are distinct models for how this can be done. According to G. E. Moore, one can properly take account of context only by admitting organic unities—wholes whose value is not the sum of the value of their parts. According to Jonathan Dancy, one can properly take account of context only by recognizing holism about value; the value of a part can vary depending upon its surrounding context. In the present paper, we ask whether the doctrine of organic unities and holism about value are best seen as rival or compatible and we conclude that the views are compatible. This paper argues that holism is compatible with the doctrine of organic unities, and that there may well be values that behave both holistically and as organic unities.

This chapter defends an instrumentalist theory of practical rationality with a hybrid “twist.” The argument for instrumentalism draws heavily on the idea that any adequate analysis must link the “capacity” and “success” senses of “rational” in the right way. The chapter explains how “irrational” can and sometimes does function as a term of abuse in terms of a Gricean generalized conversational implicature that arises in many but not all contexts in which “irrational” is meaningfully uttered. In terms of a taxonomy, the chapter defends an “implicative” form of “ecumenical cognitivism.” This contrasts sharply with ecumenical expressivism, which better accounts for more robustly normative thought and discourse.

The present chapter attempts to resolve a puzzle about normative testimony. On the one hand, agents act on the advice of others, advice which purports to tell them what they have reason to do. When they do so, they can act for good reason. This thought, though, sits uneasily with another: that the mere fact that someone has advised a course of action is not itself a reason. An interesting view of reasons recently defended by Stephen Kearns and Daniel Star offers a resolution to the puzzle. On this view, reasons are evidence, specifically evidence concerning what one ought to do. If they are correct, then sufficiently good advice is, it turns out, itself a reason, and it is then no puzzle that an agent who acts on such advice is acting for a good reason. The chapter argues that this account of reasons is subject to counterexamples. There are reasons which are not evidence and evidence which is not a reason. This view of reasons cannot therefore hold the key to solving the puzzle of normative testimony. The solution to the puzzle of normative testimony lies instead in a more careful account of what it is to act for a reason. Such an account can preserve both the intuition that advice is not an independent reason and the thought that agents who act on sound advice act for good reason. The account also explains how agents can act for “elusive reasons.” These are facts which are reasons but which would not be if the agent became sufficiently aware of them.

In this paper, I develop an account of play and playfulness, argue it is superior to its rivals and investigate the value of play so understood. I begin by laying out some interesting semantic features of ‘play’ which have not previously been systematically investigated (section 1). A failure to note these distinctions can lead theorists (and has led them) into unwitting equivocations and confusions. Drawing on this broader semantic framework, I lay out and motivate a positive account of the meaning of ‘play’ and the nature of play full‐stop (section 2). I then survey some of this account’s main advantages (section 3) and argue that the theory helps us better understand the value of play (section 4), where this value should inform both moral theory and political philosophy. I then compare the proposal with rival theories (section 5). I conclude by suggesting directions for further research.

Michael Hickson as argued for the provocative thesis that chess is not a game – his “Illusory Checkmates: Why Chess is Not a Game.” More specifically, he (a) argues that chess is not a game in the sense provided by Bernard Suits’ highly influential work in the philosophy of games, and (b) responds to what he considers some of the most important objections to this thesis. In this paper I argue that Hickson is wrong, and that chess is, in fact, a game. The dialectic teaches us something important about the nuances of Suits’ rightly influential definition of ‘play a game’.

At least since the late Early Modern period, the Holy Grail of ethics, for many philosophers, has been to say how ethical values could have a kind of protagorean objectivity: values are to be both fully objective as values and yet depend on us by their very nature. More than any other contemporary foundational approach it is “constructivist” theories, such as those due to Rawls, Scanlon, and Korsgaard, which have consciously sought to explain how protagorean objectivity is a real possibility. Yet there remains considerable uncertainty about what the various versions of constructivism have in common, what, if anything, “constructivism” as a general approach is supposed to accomplish, and whether, if it is a general approach, it amounts to a distinctive foundational view.

JP argue that expressivists must admit that becoming competent with ethical utterances involves learning to make them only when one believes one has the relevant attitude. For expressivists hold that communicating our attitudes is the function of ethical utterances, in which case sincerity demands that we not utter an ethical sentence unless we believe we have the relevant attitude. So (b) is false, as long as we suppose that this commitment, as reflected in well-entrenched and clear-cut (henceforth, 'robust' abbreviates 'well-entrenched and clear-cut') conventions, means that ethical utterances express one's belief that one has the relevant attitude. This, in turn, means that (a) is false, if we grant that a belief expressed in virtue of such conventions provides the utterance's truth-conditions.

Most discussions of discourse about welfare and discourse about prudence are a “package deal” when it comes to their normativity—either both or neither are normative. In this paper I argue against this conventional “package deal” assumption. I argue that discourse about welfare is not normative in one useful sense of that term, but that prudential discourse is normative. My argument draws in part on ideas from Derek Parfit’s account of personal identity. I then offer a novel positive account of the meaning of ‘welfare’. On the proposed account, the concept of welfare is not itself normative, in the sense of functioning directly to settle the thing to do. Even a global nihilist can coherently make claims about welfare. However, the concept of welfare is in a sense I will articulate “conditionally normative,” and this merely conditional normativity explains many of the data points which might seem to imply that welfare discourse is normative.

While the meta-ethical error theory has been of philosophical interest for some time now, only recently a debate has emerged about the question what is to be done if the error theory turns out to be true. This paper argues for a novel answer to this question, namely revolutionary expressivism: if the error theory is true, we should become expressivists. Additionally, the paper explores certain important but largely ignored methodological issues that arise for reforming definitions generally and with a vengeance in the context of a radical error theory about all practical normative judgements, and suggests how these issues can be resolved

While the meta‐ethical error theory has been of philosophical interest for some time now, only recently a debate has emerged about the question what is to be done if the error theory turns out to be true. This paper argues for a novel answer to this question, namely revolutionary expressivism: if the error theory is true, we should become expressivists. Additionally, the paper explores certain important but largely ignored methodological issues that arise for reforming definitions generally and with a vengeance in the context of a radical error theory about all practical normative judgements, and suggests how these issues can be resolved.

In this essay we argue that there is a contradiction lurking at the heart of Bernard Suits's seminal book on the philosophy of games, The Grasshopper, which has oddly gone unnoticed for 43 years. Suits argues that games need inefficiency and defines inefficiency such that it wouldn't exist in Utopia. This trivially entails that there could be no games in Utopia, yet the whole normative point of The Grasshopper is that games would be the only worthwhileactivity in Utopia. We then diagnose Suits's error and suggest some ways forward.