David Enoch

Specific moral facts (like the fact that you ought to send the paper by that deadline) seem to be grounded in relevant natural facts (that you promised), together with relevant moral principles (that you ought to keep your promises). This picture—according to which moral principles play a role in grounding specific moral facts—is a very natural one, and it may be especially attractive to non-naturalist, robust realists. A recent challenge from Selim Berker threatens this picture, though. Moral principles themselves seem to incorporate grounding claims, and it’s not clear that this can be reconciled with according the principles a grounding role. This chapter responds to Berker’s Challenge, utilizing a (moderate) grounding pluralism. In particular, it argues that distinguishing between normative and metaphysical grounding is the key to saving the natural picture. It also shows how such a distinction is one that you have a reason to endorse independently of this challenge, as it does important work elsewhere in moral philosophy.

Public reason theorists in political philosophy—roughly, Rawlsians—often make what sure sound like epistemological statements. They talk about justifying principles to others, about the uncertainty with which we should hold our evaluative commitments, about reasonable persons and comprehensive doctrines, about a morally politically motivated higher epistemic standard, about intellectual modesty, and, of course, about the burdens of judgment. But they rarely explain, let alone defend, these seemingly epistemological commitments, nor do they engage contemporary epistemological literature. This paper exposes these commitments to epistemological scrutiny, arguing that at the end of the day they cannot be vindicated. It focuses on what, on such theories, a reasonable person who is nevertheless committed to a comprehensive doctrine believes, and on what epistemic standard may be politically relevant in this context.

In _Taking Morality Seriously_ (OUP 2011), Enoch puts forward an indispensability argument for irreducibly normative truths, modelled after indispensability arguments in the philosophy of mathematics. In contributions to this volume, Alan Baker and Mary Leng critically evaluate this indispensability argument for normative realism, partly by including more precise and up-to-date details about indispensability arguments for mathematical Platonism. This chapter responds to these criticisms. It is emphasized that Quinean holism need not be a premise for the indispensability argument; that there are several candidate metaethical analogues of ‘easy-road’ nominalism about mathematical objects; and that in some respects Enoch’s version of the indispensability argument is on safer grounds compared to the more common ones in the philosophy of mathematics.

Political liberalism seeks to define the principles of political association in terms that are independent, not only of religious convictions and substantive notions of the human good, but also of the individualist ideals, encouraging a self-critical attitude towards the conception of the good one espouses, to which the classical liberalism of Locke, Kant, and Mill typically appealed. This chapter explores the basic problem of political life to which political liberalism aims to provide a solution, the means—among which the moral assumptions, particularly a principle of equal respect for persons—by which it seeks to solve this problem, and the ends it can reasonably hope to achieve by the solution it develops.

Catherine the Great (apparently) wrote to the French philosopher Diderot something along the lines of: ‘You philosophers are fortunate. You write on paper, and paper is patient. Unfortunate emperor that I am, I write on the susceptible skins of living beings.’ Catherine expressed, I think, an important insight, that is true of the law as well: the law writes on the susceptible skins of living beings. This does not mean, of course, that we should not philosophise about the law, or that we should not take advantage of the benefits of having patient paper to write on. But as we do so, we should philosophise about the law all the time fully realising that the law itself does not write on patient paper, but on the susceptible skins of living beings. This has important implications to how we should—and how we should not—do philosophy of law. This article elaborates on these implications—both in general and using more specific examples.

Joseph Raz (1939–2022) was a towering figure in late twentieth-century and early twenty-first-century analytical philosophy. His work in moral, political, and legal philosophy profoundly influenced the discipline, informing debates about practical reasoning, value theory, foundations of liberalism, personal autonomy, perfectionism, the nature of authority, theories of rights, free expression, multiculturalism, the nature of promises, the rule of law, toleration and pluralism, and the nature of law, among others. This collection—the product of two highly selective, international conferences held in Raz’s honor soon after his passing—pays tribute to Raz’s enormous influence in moral, political, and legal philosophy. The collected essays all engage with Raz’s work, but not necessarily as critiques or interpretations of his work. The collection is a testament to Raz’s impact, direct and indirect, on a wide range of philosophical issues and on a large and diverse set of philosophical communities.

Everyone suspects that nudging offends against the nudged’s autonomy. But it has proved rather difficult to say why. In this paper I offer a new diagnosis of the tension between even the best cases of nudging and the value of autonomy. Relying on the distinction between autonomy as sovereignty and autonomy as non-alienation, I show that nudging need not offend against either. But it does sever the tie between them, it undermines the possibility of achieving non-alienation *in virtue of* having sovereignty. Analogies to common themes in virtue epistemology help to establish this point. If true, this diagnosis improves our understanding of nudging, of course, but it also improves our understanding of the value of autonomy—the full value of autonomy has the structure that is shared by many other achievements—that of an objective element, a subjective one, and the appropriate relations between the two.

If Badguy threatens Goodguy with harm, and Goodguy consents to giving his money to Badguy (to avoid the harm), Goodguy’s consent is invalid because coerced. But if under Badguy’s coercive threat Goodguy proceeds to consent to paying someone else (or to hiring a bodyguard), the consent may very well be valid. The challenge is to explain this difference. In this paper I argue that the way forward is to recognize that the content of consent is contrastive – one doesn’t just agree to giving the money; rather, one consents to giving-the-money-rather-than-some-alternative. And then the normative upshot of the relevant consent depends on what the morally relevant contrast is, which in turn depends on who is (before the relevant interaction) entitled to what against whom. We have, I think, independent reasons to understand consent contrastively, and once we do, we can solve the puzzle of third party coercion with ease.

Because you are highly unlikely to cast the deciding vote in the next elections, it is often said that you don’t have a reason to vote in order to change the outcomes. In a recent paper, however, Zach Barnett forcefully argues that this is a mistake. He shows how it follows, from rather conservative assumptions, that in many real-life cases the expected social value of voting is higher than its cost. Barnett is successful, we believe, in showing that the commonly held belief – that voters do not have a reason to vote in order to change the outcomes – is way too hasty. However, Barnett is – we argue in this paper – too quick on one key premise, and once this is noticed, it becomes unclear how often Barnett’s reasoning can point to a justification of voting to change the outcomes. Barnett’s reasoning, we conclude, may apply to significantly less real-life scenarios than he suggests.

Political philosophy should focus not on uplifting ideals, but rather, so I argue, on minimizing serious suffering. This is so not because other things do not ultimately matter (they do), but rather because in the political context, the stakes in terms of suffering are usually extremely high, so that any other considerations are almost always outweighed. Put in moderately deontological terms: the high stakes carry most political decisions across the thresholds of the relevant deontological constraints. While the argument is substantive rather than exegetical, I engage in detail Judith Shklar's “Liberalism of Fear”. I share with Shklar her pessimistic starting point, but I also show how a focus on suffering (rather than cruelty and fear) is what plausibly follows from such a starting point. I then pursue the implications of this difference—they are theoretically profound, but perhaps less significant practically.

Suppose someone is brought up as an orthodox Jew, and so only eats kosher, is very conservative sexually, etc. Suppose they then find out that this Judaism stuff is just all a big mistake. If they then regret all the shrimp they could have eaten, all the sex!, this makes perfect sense. Not so, however, if someone finds out that moral realism is false, and they now regret all the fun they could have had hurting people’s feeling, etc. Even if this does make sense, there’s a strong disanalogy between the moral and the religious case. This asymmetry, on a realist picture of morality, calls for explanation. This chapter tries to explain it. The discussion engages some topics familiar from objections to Robust realism—the why-be-moral challenge, the status of de-dicto moral motivation, and whether and why we should care about the moral properties, robustly realistically understood.

In this paper, we develop an account of the justification thinkers have for employing certain basic belief-forming methods. The guiding idea is inspired by Reichenbach's work on induction. There are certain projects in which thinkers are rationally required to engage. Thinkers are epistemically justified in employing any belief-forming method such that "if it doesn't work, nothing will" for successfully engaging in such a project. We present a detailed account based on this intuitive thought and address objections to it. We conclude by commenting on the implications that our account may have for other important epistemological issues and debates.

A spectre is haunting legal positivists – and perhaps legal philosophers more generally – the spectre of the normativity of law. Whatever else law is, it is sometimes said, it is normative, and so whatever else a philosophical account of law accounts for, it should account for the normativity of law. Of the many different possible ways of understanding "the" problem of the normativity of law, I focus here on the one insisting on the need to explain the reason-giving force of the law. But, I argue, once we are clear on just what reason-giving consists in, and on what claims about the reason-giving force of the law are at all plausible, accommodating the fact that the law gives reasons for action can be seen to be a pseudo-problem. In particular, not only doesn't legal positivism face an especially serious challenge here, but it can be seen to have a (modest) advantage over its competitors in accommodating one way in which the law can (perhaps) give reasons for action.

People are often offended by beliefs, expect apologies for beliefs, apologize for their own beliefs. In many mundane cases, people are morally criticized for their beliefs. Intuitively, then, beliefs seem to sometimes wrong people. Recently, the philosophical literature has picked up on this theme, and has started to discuss it under the heading of doxastic wrongdoing. In this paper we argue that despite the strength of such initial intuitions, at the end of the day they have to be rejected. If it can be ever truthfully asserted that beliefs wrong, this is always derivative – beliefs wrong only in virtue of other things (like evidence-gathering actions) wronging. We distinguish between modest and ambitious doxastic wrongdoing theories (the former deny, while the latter accept, the possibility of a morally wrong yet epistemically permissible belief); we argue that each of these options faces insurmountable problems; and we offer partly debunking explanations of the intuitions purportedly supporting doxastic wrongdoing.

Statistical evidence—say, that 95% of your co-workers badmouth each other—can never render resenting your colleague appropriate, in the way that other evidence (say, the testimony of a reliable friend) can. The problem of statistical resentment is to explain why. We put the problem of statistical resentment in several wider contexts: The context of the problem of statistical evidence in legal theory; the epistemological context—with problems like the lottery paradox for knowledge, epistemic impurism and doxastic wrongdoing; and the context of a wider set of examples of responses and attitudes that seem not to be appropriately groundable in statistical evidence. Regrettably, we do not come up with a fully general, fully adequate, fully unified account of all the phenomena discussed. But we give reasons to believe that no such account is forthcoming, and we sketch a somewhat messier account that may be the best that can be had here.