Andrew Sepielli

Suppose there is a clash between the verdicts we get when we train our evaluative focus on the world as conceptualized in ordinary ways — i.e. in terms of doing and allowing, harm, intention, consent, property, speech, and so on — and those we get when we focus on the world as conceptualized in the colder, more alien ways afforded by analyses of these ordinary concepts. Should either way of framing or conceptualizing the world be granted priority in ethical theory? This paper aims to make a bit of progress on this question, using Jonathan Bennett’s argument against the moral significance of the making/allowing distinction as a case study. I argue that we should give priority to the colder, more analytic framings — certainly in the context of Bennett’s argument, and perhaps elsewhere, too; I adduce evidence from the psychology and neuroscience of moral judgment in support of the idea that such framings may be free from biases that infect framings/descriptions in terms of the aforementioned ordinary concepts.

Several philosophers have tried to develop a framework for decision-making in the face of fundamental moral uncertainty. Critics argue that the project is misguided, as it assumes that there’s a kind of “subjective” rightness that depends on which moral views _might_ be true (rather than which ones _are_ true). This chapter replies to some such criticisms presented by Elizabeth Harman. Harman argues that “moral uncertaintists” seem committed to counterintuitive views about what’s right and what we’re culpable for, and that the only way of modifying the uncertaintist position to escape these commitments renders it uninteresting. However, uncertaintism can avoid these counterintuitive implications by focusing on epistemic probabilities of moral claims rather than subjective ones, and by positing different “orders” of subjective rightness. Further, the version of uncertaintism Harman calls “uninteresting” is not; it specifies what would count as one’s best try at doing what she has objective reason to do.

This chapter explores the possibility of a metaphysically deflationist, explanatorily robust version of moral realism. The view has no truck with inquiries into the naturalness, constitution, or reducibility of moral properties, and purports to dissolve, rather than solve, the “placement problem.” But it offers a general explanation from outside the ethical domain of how we can accurately represent the world in moral thought and talk; this distinguishes it from some versions of expressivism and constitutivism, and from quietism. It is often claimed that defenders of non-quietist moral realism “owe us” an account of what moral properties are like, how they fit into the world described by science, how we can “reach out to them” in thought and language, and how they can exert an influence on us so we can know of them. It is not clear, this chapter argues, that the robust realist is under any such obligation.

It's often claimed that when we are uncertain, we must guide our behavior by subjective norms — ones that are, in some sense, appropriately related to the subject's perspective. It is argued that this claim is correct, so long as we understand the uncertainty in question as phenomenally conscious uncertainty. However, there have been very few explicit attempts to explain why this claim is true. In this paper, first steps are taken towards such an explanation. After suggesting a characterization of subjective normative notions in terms of objective normative notions and the notion of trying, several candidate explanations and considered, and it is argued that each is unsatisfactory. The chapter then offers the author's own explanation of why subjective norms are sometimes necessary for the guidance of action, which adverts to what the author calls the “multidirectional” phenomenal character of conscious uncertainty.

The claim that there are objective ethical truths has attracted its share of doubters. Many have thought that such truths would require an extra-ethical foundation or vindication—in metaphysics, or the philosophy of language, or epistemology—and have worried that no such thing is available. Pragmatist Quietism argues that, on the contrary, there are objective ethical truths, and that these neither require nor admit of a foundation or vindication from outside of ethics. Recognizing that the idea of an ethical realm untethered from inquiry into reality, meaning, and knowledge may strike us as mysterious, this book offers a comprehensive meta-ethical worldview within which this jarring proposal may be ensconced. The key moves are, first, the assimilation of normative-ethical inquiry to the sorts of debates that many have labelled 'merely verbal' or 'non-substantive', and second, the adoption of pragmatism—the approach to inquiry and explanation on which we endeavour to guide our thinking by considerations of value, rather than aiming to correctly represent the world.

This chapter explores the possibility of a metaphysically deflationist, explanatorily robust version of moral realism. The view has no truck with inquiries into the naturalness, constitution, or reducibility of moral properties, and purports to dissolve, rather than solve, the “placement problem.” But it offers a general explanation from outside the ethical domain of how we can accurately represent the world in moral thought and talk; this distinguishes it from some versions of expressivism and constitutivism, and from quietism. It is often claimed that defenders of non-quietist moral realism “owe us” an account of what moral properties are like, how they fit into the world described by science, how we can “reach out to them” in thought and language, and how they can exert an influence on us so we can know of them. It is not clear, this chapter argues, that the robust realist is under any such obligation.

Meta-ethical quietists hold that only ethically-relevant considerations may bear on which ethical views to accept. Since the metaphysics of moral properties, the semantics of moral terms, and so forth, are generally not ethically relevant, they generally do not bear on whether to accept any particular ethical view, whether to drop our ethical beliefs wholesale, and so on. The quietist, then, rejects “external” or “sideways-on” vindications of ethics and ethical objectivity. In recent years, David Enoch (2011) and Tristram McPherson (2011) have offered an objection to quietist objectivism that turns this insistence on abjuring “external” vindications against the theory. They imagine alternative, “counter-normative” standards that conflict with ours—a standard of what we have “schmeason” to do, for instance, rather than what we have reason to do. To vindicate ethical objectivity, one would have to show why the “reasons”-standard is somehow privileged over the “schmeasons” standard. Enoch and McPherson argue that quietism cannot step outside the discourse of “reasons” in the way that’d be required to show this. In this paper, I explain how the quietist ought to respond to the “counternormativity” challenge.

Nobody's going to object to the advice "Do the right thing", but that doesn't mean everyone's always going to follow it. Sometimes this is because of our volitional limitations; we cannot always bring ourselves to make the sacrifices that right action requires. But sometimes this is because of our cognitive limitations; we cannot always be sure of what is right. Sometimes we can't be sure of what's right because we don't know the non-normative facts. But sometimes, even if we were to know all of the non-normative facts, we'd still not be sure about what's right, because we're uncertain about the normative reasons those facts give us. In this dissertation, I attempt to answer the question of what we're to do when we must act under fundamentally normative uncertainty. It's tempting to think that, in such circumstances, we should do what we regard as most probably right. I argue that this view is mistaken, for it is insensitive to how degrees of actions' values compare across different normative hypotheses; if an action is probably right, but, if wrong, is terribly, terribly, wrong, it may be rational not to do that action. A better answer is that we should do the action with the highest expected value. I spend the first part of the dissertation providing arguments for and rebutting arguments against this view of action under normative uncertainty. I spend the next part of the dissertation explaining what degrees of value are, and showing how they can be compared across normative hypotheses. In the remaining parts of the dissertation, I consider two questions related to our primary question -- first, what is one required, or obligated, to do under normative uncertainty; and second, what is it rational for one to do when one is not only normatively uncertain in the way we've been discussing, but also uncertain about what it is rational to do under this sort of normative uncertainty.