Michael Ridge

Quasi-realists aspire to accommodate core features of ordinary normative thought and discourse in an expressivist framework. One apparent such feature is that we can be more or less confident in our normative judgments—they vary in credence. Michael Smith has argued that quasi-realists cannot plausibly accommodate these distinctions simply because they understand normative judgments as desires, but desires lack the structure needed to distinguish these three features. Existing attempts to meet Smith’s challenge have accepted Smith’s presupposition that the way to meet the challenge is to show that normative judgments have more structure than they initially seem to have. I argue that accepting this presupposition is accepting too much. The orthodox view of certitude, insofar as there is one, understands certitude very roughly in terms of counterfactual betting behaviour. Counterfactual betting behaviour, though, is not in any useful sense a structural feature of a given judgment. It is rather a more holistic feature of a given agent’s cognitive system. Insofar as it can meet the other challenges it faces, quasi-realism can characterize credences in terms of counterfactual betting behaviour and effectively say exactly what many realists will want to say about credences, thus meeting Smith’s challenge much more directly.

Constitutivism is best understood as a strategy for meeting a set of related metanormative challenges, rather than a fully comprehensive metanormative theory in its own right, or so many have plausibly argued. Whether this strategy succeeds may depend, in part, on which broader metanormative theory it is combined with. In this paper I argue that combining constitutivism with expressivism somewhat surprisingly provides constitutivists with their best chances for success, and that this combination of views has some surprising benefits for both parties.

Expressivists have a problem with collectives. I initially illustrate the problem against the background of Allan Gibbard’s expressivist theory, where it is especially stark. I then argue that the problem generalizes. Gibbard’s account entails that judgments about what collective agents ought to do are contingency plans for what to do if one is in the circumstances facing the relevant collective agent. So, for example, my judgment that the United States ought not to have invaded Iraq is a contingency plan for what to do if I find myself in the circumstances facing the United States on the eve of the Iraq war. I argue that, given plausible functionalist assumptions in the philosophy of mind expressivists would struggle to reject, such contingency plans are impossible for individual agents. Since normative judgments about collectives are possible, Gibbard’s theory is unacceptable. Having demonstrated the basic problem for Gibbard’s view, I then argue that the problem has a much wider scope. In particular, I argue that traditional forms of expressivism cannot simultaneously provide a plausible account of both agent-relative normative judgments and judgments about what collectives ought to do. Fortunately, all is not lost; hybrid or ‘ecumenical’ forms of expressivism can disarm the dilemma, or so I argue. I conclude by briefly sketching some further challenges ecumenical expressivism must overcome for its treatment of judgments about collectives to be fully satisfactory and indicate possible lines of argument to be pursued in future work on these challenges.

Meta-ethical non-cognitivism makes two claims—a negative one and a positive one. The negative claim is that moral utterances do not express beliefs which provide the truth-conditions for those utterances. The positive claim is that the primary function of such utterances is to express certain of the speaker's desire-like states of mind. Non-cognitivism is officially a theory about the meanings of moral words, but non-cognitivists also maintain that moral states of mind are themselves at least partially constituted by desire-like states to which moral utterances give voice. Non-cognitivists need a plausible account of what distinguishes whims, addictions and cravings from genuinely moral judgments. For while non-cognitivists maintain that in a suitably broad sense moral judgments just are constituted by desire-like states they also insist that not any old desire constitutes a genuinely moral judgment. Since the challenge is to demarcate what is distinctive about moral attitudes we might usefully call this the demarcation challenge.

Theories of practical reason can be divided in terms of a distinction between agent-relative and agent-neutral reasons for action. A reason is agent-relative just in case a full explanation of why it counts as a reason necessarily makes an ineliminable, non-trivial, pronominal back-reference to the agent who has the reason. By contrast, a reason is agent-neutral if the practical principle underwriting it needs make no such back-reference. Theories which hold that all reasons for acting are agent-relative I call agent-relativist, while theories which hold that all reasons for acting are agent-neutral I call agent-neutralist, and theories that allow for both kinds of reasons I call hybrid theories. In the present work, I explain why it is useful and legitimate to distinguish theories of practical reasons in this way, argue that none of the existing arguments for agent-relativism or for agent-neutralism is sound, and then provide my own positive argument for agent-neutralism with respect to "insistent reasons." On my account, a reason is insistent just in case recognizing the balance of such reasons favors an action and deliberately not performing it entails that one has acted irrationally. If there are also non-insistent reasons, which one might recognize on balance favor an action and deliberately not perform the action without thereby counting as irrational, my argument does not necessarily show that such reasons must also be agent-neutral.

Were there a species of creatures intermingled with men, which, though rational, were possessed of such inferior strength, both of body and mind, that they were incapable of all resistance, and could never, upon the highest provocation, make us feel the effects of their resentment; the necessary consequence, I think, is that we should be bound by the laws of humanity to give gentle usage to these creatures, but should not, properly speaking, lie under any restraint of justice with regard to them, nor could they possess any right or property, exclusive of such arbitrary lords. Our intercourse with them could not be called society, which supposes a degree of equality; but absolute command on the one side, and.

According to one formulation of Scanlon ’s contractualist principle, certain acts are wrong if they are permitted by principles that are reasonably rejectable because they permit such acts. According to the redundancy objection, if a principle is reasonably rejectable because it permits actions which have feature F, such actions are wrong simply in virtue of having F and not because their having F makes principles permitting them reasonably rejectable. Consequently Scanlon ’s contractualist principle adds nothing to the reasons we have not to act wrongly and is redundant. In ‘ Scanlon ’s contractualism and the redundancy objection’ I argued that the redundancy objection is based upon the false assumption that Scanlon regards his contractualist principle as a ground of moral wrongness – that is, as telling us what makes certain acts wrong. I pointed out that he does not regard his principle in this way, but regards it as telling us what moral wrongness is. So the redundancy objection is based on a mistake. Nonetheless, Scanlon is still vulnerable to a version of this objection because he regards the moral wrongness of j ing as a reason not to j. Given that he identifies the fact that j ing is wrong with the fact that j ing is permitted by a reasonably rejectable principle, he is committed to the view that his contractualist principle gives us a reason not to j. His critics can thus still insist that the only reason we have not to do such acts is provided.

Back in the bad old days, it was easy enough to spot non-cognitivists. They pressed radical doctrines with considerable bravado. Intoxicated by the apparent implications of logical positivism, early noncognitivsts would say things like, "in saying that a certain type of action is right or wrong, I am not making any factual statement..." (Ayer 1936: 107) Like most rebellious youths, non-cognitivism eventually grew up. Later non-cognitivists developed the position into a more subtle doctrine, no longer committed to the revisionary doctrines associated with its forefathers. For example, Simon Blackburn has undertaken the "quasi-realist" project of showing how a non-cognitivist can "earn" the right to the seemingly realist discourse on a less metaphysically controversial and semantically implausible basis by giving a non-cognitivist analysis of realist-sounding semantics and pragmatics (Blackburn 1993).

The basic idea of rule-utilitarianism is that right action should be defined in terms of what would be required by rules which would maximize either actual or expected utility if those rules gained general acceptance, or perhaps general compliance. Rule-utilitarians face a dilemma. They must characterize 'general acceptance' either as 100% acceptance, or as something less. On the first horn of the dilemma, rule-utilitarianism in vulnerable to the charge of utopianism; on the second, it is open to the charge of arbitrariness and lack of philosophical depth. I press this objection, and develop and defend an alternative version of rule-utilitarianism which can evade the dilemma. I call this new version 'variable-rate rule-utilitarianism'

Moral philosophy has long been dominated by the aim of understanding morality and the virtues in terms of principles. However, the underlying assumption that this is the best approach has received almost no defence, and has been attacked by particularists, who argue that the traditional link between morality and principles is little more than an unwarranted prejudice. In Principled Ethics, Michael Ridge and Sean McKeever meet the particularist challenge head-on, and defend a distinctive view they call "generalism as a regulative ideal.".

- Peter Railton1 Railton's remark is accurate; contemporary philosophers almost invariably suppose that morality is more vulnerable than empirical science to scepticism. Yet David Hume apparently embraces an inversion of this twentieth century orthodoxy.2 In book I of the Treatise, he claims that the understanding, when it reflects upon itself, "entirely subverts itself" (T 1. 4.7.7; SBN 267) while, in contrast, in book III he claims that our moral faculty, when reflecting upon itself, acquires "new force" (T 3.3.6.3; SBN 619). Such passages suggest Hume's view is that morality's claims on us are justified, whereas the understanding's claims are not -- that scepticism about empirical science, but not morality, is irresistible. However, this interpretation does not accurately reflect Hume's position. Indeed, any interpretation which has Hume concluding that the understanding's claims on us are not justified faces an obvious worry - it makes nonsense of the rest of his naturalistic project, including, but not limited to, his description and justification of our moral faculty. For in defending his account of our moral faculty and, perhaps more clearly, in arguing against those who believe in miracles, Hume inescapably presupposes that the understanding's claims on us are in some sense justified. In light of Hume's meticulous and enthusiastic pursuit of his larger naturalistic project, one might even be tempted to conclude that Hume never really thought his sceptical arguments were sound. It would, however, be a mistake to submit to this temptation -- to do so would be to ignore the last part of book I of the Treatise, in which Hume evidently does find such arguments to be sound. Hume is undeniably impressed by scepticism about the

-- Immanuel Kant (Kant 1990, p. 46/429) The idea that our most basic duty is to treat each other with respect is one of the Enlightenment’s greatest legacies and Kant is often thought to be one of its most powerful defenders. If Kant’s project were successful then the lofty notion that humanity is always worthy of respect would be vindicated by pure practical reason. Further, this way of defending the ideal is supposed to reflect our autonomy, insofar as it is always one’s own reason that demands that one treat humanity with respect. In this article, I consider what I take to be one of the most important and compelling attempts to defend the Kantian project. I draw the disappointing conclusion that this attempt does not succeed. The reasons this attempt fails shed some light on the difficulties facing any attempt to defend the Kantian project.

What place, if any, moral principles should or do have in moral life has been a longstanding question for moral philosophy. For some, the proposition that moral philosophy should strive to articulate moral principles has been an article of faith. At least since Aristotle, however, there has been a rich counter-tradition that questions the possibility or value of trying to capture morality in principled terms. In recent years, philosophers who question principled approaches to morality have argued under the banner of moral particularism. Particularists can be found in diverse areas of philosophical inquiry, and their positions and arguments are of broad interest.1 Despite its importance, a proper evaluation of particularism has been hindered both by the diversity of arguments employed to defend it, and, perhaps more significantly, by the diversity of positions that can fairly claim to be particularist. Our aim is first to explicate particularism by identifying a unified range of particularist theses and explaining both what unites them as versions of particularism as well as what distinguishes them from each other. We then articulate and evaluate the main arguments for particularism and explain how each is especially well-suited to supporting some conceptions of particularism rather than others. We tentatively conclude that the positive arguments for particularism are not convincing. They do, however, reveal particularism to be a surprisingly resilient position, one that is not readily refuted..

Particularism takes an extremely ecumenical view of what considerations might count as reasons and thereby threatens to ‘flatten the moral landscape’ by making it seem that there is no deep difference between, for example, pain, and shoelace color. After all, particularists have claimed, either could provide a reason provided a suitable moral context. To avoid this result, some particularists draw a distinction between default and non-default reasons. The present paper argues that all but the most deflationary ways of drawing this distinction are either implausible or else insufficient to help the particularist avoid flattening the moral landscape. The difficulty can be avoided, however, if we reject particularism's extremely ecumenical view of reasons