David Copp

According to the Rationality Doctrine (RD), whether morality is normative depends on the existence of a link of an important kind between morality and rationality. The RD is intuitively appealing and has a historical pedigree. Versions have been endorsed by philosophers who otherwise disagree fundamentally. A version of it has been used in arguing against the chapter’s account of the normativity of morality on the basis that, allegedly, it fails to establish the right kind of link between morality and rationality. Yet there are different views about what kind of link is required. After addressing issues about the concepts of normativity and rationality, the chapter narrows attention to one account of the required link, the Basic Linkage Thesis (BLT). As the chapterr shows, there is reason to doubt the truth of the BLT, which means that, if we hold that morality is normative, we need to question the RD. The chapterr considers and criticizes arguments for the RD and then presents three arguments intended to show that the RD cannot reasonably be invoked in order to adjudicate among moral theories.

According to realist-expressivism, with certain qualifications moral assertions express both a moral belief and a corresponding conative state. Realist-expressivism is compatible with naturalistic moral realism and moral judgment externalism. Its cognitivist aspect can explain the logic of moral arguments. Its expressivist aspect can help explain the open feel of certain arguments as well as the intuition many people share that moral motivation is guaranteed by moral belief. Realist-expressivism can help explain the difference between moral thought and purely descriptive thought, since it can say that the assertability norms that directly govern uses of the moral terms also indirectly govern moral thought. Mark Schroeder has challenged this optimistic picture, but his argument depends on the premise that valid arguments have the “inference-licensing property.” This chapter argues that this premise is false on the interpretation needed by Schroeder’s argument and concludes that Schroeder is incorrect. Realist-expressivism can have it both ways.

Moral and political philosophers commonly appeal to moral “intuitions” at crucial points in their reasoning. This chapter considers recent challenges to this practice—here referred to as “the Method”—based in empirical studies of moral intuitions. It contends that such studies do not justify radical or revisionary conclusions about the Method. A method is aimed at achieving certain goals. The key issue is the nature of the goals in relation to which the Method is to be evaluated. This chapter argues that the relevant goal is not the “realist goal” of discovering the truth about moral and political matters. The central point is that, the chapter argues, the systematic philosophical study of moral and political questions would be worthwhile even if it turned out that moral realism cannot be vindicated or that the Method cannot be vindicated in relation to the realist goal. If this is correct, then the goal relative to which it is crucial to vindicate the Method is not the realist goal. A Rawlsian view is more plausible, according to which the relevant goal is to “characterize our moral sensibility” as it would be in “reflective equilibrium.” It turns out, however, that this Rawlsian view has some, perhaps unwelcome, deflationary implications.

There are two familiar and important challenges to the rule consequentialist picture, Smart’s “rule worship objection” and the “idealization objection.” This chapter defends rule consequentialism (RC) against these challenges. It argues that to satisfactorily meet the rule worship objection, we need to reconceptualize RC. We need to think of it as not fundamentally a rival to act consequentialism or deontology or virtue theory. Instead, it can potentially adjudicate among these views. It is best viewed as a “second-order” theory that rests on a view about the nature and point of morality. The rule worship objection can be answered if we interpret RC in this way. The idealization objection can seem more difficult because it appears to arise from the basic RC approach to evaluating rules. This chapter suggests, however, that the idealization objection boils down to a familiar problem about conflicts of _pro tanto_ duties. RC can handle it in the way that it handles such conflict.

Moral claims not only purport to be true, they also purport to guide our choices. This book presents a new theory of normative judgment, the "standard-based theory," which offers a schematic account of the truth conditions of normative propositions of all kinds, including moral propositions and propositions about reasons. The heart of Copp's approach to moral propositions is a theory of the circumstances under which corresponding moral standards qualify as justified, the "society-centered theory." He argues that because any society needs a social moral code in order to enable its members to live together successfully, and because it would be rational for a society to choose such a code, certain moral codes, and the standards they include, are justified. According to the standard-based theory then, if certain moral standards are indeed justified, corresponding moral propositions may be true.

This paper summarizes key aspects of Zhu Xi’s virtue theory, as it is presented by Professor Yong Huang, and it explains why Huang views this theory as an example of agent-focused naturalistic moral realism. The paper points out some apparent gaps in Huang’s argument, which create some lack of clarity as to whether Zhu Xi’s theory is genuinely a kind of moral realism and whether it is relevantly naturalistic. Despite these worries, however, Huang has shown that Zhu Xi’s theory is an example of a kind of naturalized virtue theory that would bear further study. Zhu Xi deserves recognition as a member of a venerable tradition of naturalistic theorizing about moral virtue that leads from Aristotle to contemporary philosophers such as Philippa Foot.

This book explicates and defends ethical naturalism. It explains the naturalist's position, why it is important, and why it is plausible even though it faces serious objections. The book answers in detail many such objections, including Moore's and Parfit's objections, and including the "just too different" objection. Underlying many of the objections, and motivating them, is the view that ethical naturalism is unable to account for the normativity of the ethical facts and properties that it postulates. This is the normativity objection, and the book as a whole deals with this objection. The book argues that ethical naturalism is able to answer the objection, and, surprisingly, that it is in a better position to explain the nature of normativity than its alternatives, such as nonnaturalism, constructivism, expressivism, and so on. The book evaluates various answers that ethical naturalists can offer to the challenge to explain what normativity consists in. It deals with technical issues about metaphysical analysis and grounding, both metaphysical grounding and normative grounding. It examines Cornell realism, the Canberra program, Neo-Humean subjectivism, Neo-Aristotelian naturalism, and Pluralist-Teleology.

Ethical naturalism is the doctrine that moral properties, such as moral goodness, justice, rightness, wrongness, and the like, are among the “natural” properties that things can have. It is the doctrine that moral properties are “natural” and that morality is in this sense an aspect of “nature.” Accordingly, it is a view about the semantics and metaphysics of moral discourse. For example, a utilitarian naturalist might propose that wrongness is the property an action could have of being such as to undermine overall happiness, where happiness is taken to be a psychological property. Unfortunately, it is unclear what the naturalist means by a “natural” property. For my purposes in this paper, I shall assume that natural properties are such that our knowledge of them is fundamentally empirical, grounded in observation. More precisely, a property is “natural” just in case any synthetic proposition about its instantiation can be known onlya posteriori,or with the aid of experience.

'Internalism’ in ethics is a cluster of views according to which there is an ‘internal’ connection between moral obligations and either motivations or reasons to act morally; ‘externalism’ says that such connections are contingent. So described, the dispute between internalism and externalism may seem a technical debate of minor interest. However, the issues that motivate it include deep problems about moral truth, realism, normativity, and objectivity. Indeed, I think that some philosophers view externalism as undermining the ‘dignity’ of morality. They might say that if morality needs an ‘external sanction’ - if the belief that one has an obligation is not sufficient motive or reason to do the right thing- then morality is debased in status. Even an arbitrary system of etiquette could attract an external sanction under appropriate conditions.Although I believe that the more interesting internalist theses are false, there are important truths that internalism is attempting to capture. The most important of these is the fact that moral judgments are intrinsically ‘normative’ or ‘choice-guiding,’ that they are, very roughly, relevant to action or choice because of their content.