Benjamin Kiesewetter

It is often taken for granted that right‐makers, that is, the things that make something—say, an action—right, do so by explaining why it is right. This view can be spelled out in terms of metaphysical ground: right‐making just is grounding of rightness facts. In this paper, I present three challenges to this view and argue that no purely ground‐based account of right‐making is fully satisfactory. Instead, I defend a novel version of a reasons‐based account, according to which right‐makers are grounds that ground in virtue of being a normative reason. This reasons‐based account, I shall argue, provides a unified solution to the challenges outlined and entails nuanced distinctions that alternative accounts brush aside. I show that my account is applicable to value‐making relations on the assumption that value is not prior to normative reasons. The discussion thus reveals a novel argument for buck‐passing accounts of value, that is, the view that value can be explained in terms of normative reasons.

Epistemic Permissivists face a special problem about the relationship between our first- and higher-order attitudes. They claim that rationality often permits a range of doxastic responses to the evidence. Given plausible assumptions about the relationship between your first- and higher-order attitudes, it can't be rational to adopt a credence on the edge of that range. But Permissivism says that, for some such range, any credence in that range is rational. Permissivism, in its traditional form, cannot be right. I consider some new ways of developing Permissivism to avoid this argument, but each has problems of its own.

In his recent book, Michael Zimmerman continues to defend the Prospective View, according to which moral obligation depends on evidence about both empirical and evaluative factors. In my commentary, I shall first focus on Zimmerman’s framework in which different moral theories are defined and distinguished. I argue that Zimmerman fails to formulate a clear and coherent distinction between The Prospective View and the Objective View, which he rejects. Then I turn to the so-called constraint #2, a crucial premise in Zimmerman’s master argument against the Objective View. Here I argue that it should be given up so that we can give the right verdict in cases of fundamental moral uncertainty. More specifically, I shall argue that a morally conscientious agent can rationally choose the option that is guaranteed to be morally wrong in a Jackson-case of fundamental moral uncertainty. Finally, I shall argue that the Prospective View, in its most recent guise – according to which moral obligation depends on empirical and evaluative evidence the agent has actually availed herself of – has very troubling substantive implications that go against all traditional moral theories, as well as an earlier version of Zimmerman’s Prospective View.