David Plunkett

This chapter clarifies and addresses a deep challenge to the conceptual ethics of normativity. The challenge arises from the fact that we need to use some of our own normative concepts in order to evaluate our normative concepts. This might seem objectionably circular, akin to trying to verify the accuracy of a ruler by checking it against itself. We dub this the _vindicatory circularity challenge_. If the challenge cannot be met, it would suggest that _all_ normative inquiry (not just the conceptual ethics of normativity) rests on worryingly arbitrary foundations. We defend a way of answering the challenge that adapts anti-skeptical resources from epistemology. Along the way, we reject several alternative replies to the challenge. These include dismissing the challenge because it cannot be formulated with our concepts, answering it by appeal to a distinctive normative concept, and answers that appeal to certain metaphysical or metasemantic resources.

Many of us care about the existence of ethical facts because they appear crucial to making sense of our practical lives. On one tempting line of thought, this idea can also play a central role in justifying our belief in those facts. David Enoch has developed this thought into a formidable new proposal in moral epistemology: that the deliberative indispensability of ethical facts gives us _epistemic_ justification for believing in such facts. This chapter argues that Enoch’s proposal fails because it conflicts with a central fact about epistemic justification: that the norms of epistemic justification have the content that they do in part because of some positive connection between those norms and the _truth_ of the beliefs that these norms govern. Alternatives to Enoch’s attempt to defend the idea that deliberative indispensability confers epistemic justification fail for parallel reasons. The chapter concludes that deliberative indispensability does not provide epistemic justification.

ABSTRACT This paper addresses an important but relatively unexplored question about the relationship between conceptual ethics and other philosophical inquiry: how does the epistemology of conceptual ethics relate to the epistemology of other, more “traditional” forms of philosophical inquiry? This paper takes as its foil the optimistic thought that the epistemology of conceptual ethics will be easier and less mysterious than relevant “traditional” philosophical inquiry. We argue against this foil by focusing on the fact that that conceptual ethics is a form of normative inquiry. Because of the epistemic difficulties that face normative inquiry, we should not expect conceptual ethics to constitute an epistemic panacea. Instead, although the epistemological upshots can vary from case to case, there are systematic reasons why this shift may exacerbate, rather than mitigate, the epistemic difficulties we face in pursuing philosophical inquiry.

Climate change is poised to threaten, disrupt, and transform human life, and the social, economic, and political institutions that structure it. In light of this, understanding climate change, and discussing how to address it, should be at the very center of our public conversation. Philosophy can make an enormous contribution to that conversation, but only if both philosophers and non-philosophers understand what it can contribute. The sixteen original articles collected in this volume both illustrate the diverse ways that philosophy can contribute to this conversation, and ways in which thinking about climate change can help to illuminate a range of topics of independent interest to philosophers.

The past few decades have witnessed an extraordinary revival of interest in metanormative non-naturalism. Despite this interest, it is still unclear how to understand the distinctive metaphysical commitments of this view. We illustrate the relevant difficulties by examining what is arguably the most prominent class of contemporary attempts to formulate non-naturalism’s metaphysical commitments. This class of proposals, exemplified in work by Gideon Rosen and Stephanie Leary, characterizes the distinctive metaphysical commitments of non-naturalism in terms of metaphysical grounding and essence. We argue that these proposals overgeneralize: they either misclassify intuitively naturalistic hypotheses about the metaphysics of normativity as “non-naturalist”, or misclassify hypotheses in other areas of metaphysics. We argue that this problem stems from features of grounding itself. We suggest a more promising alternative for formulating non-naturalism, which revolves around the notion of objective similarity between classes of properties. We conclude by drawing some general lessons for inquiry about the metaphysics of normativity, and about metaphysics in general.

In this article, we propose a novel account of general jurisprudence by situating it within the broader project of metanormative inquiry. We begin by showing how general jurisprudence is parallel to another well-known part of that project, namely, metaethics. We then argue that these projects all center on the same task: explaining how a certain part of thought, talk, and reality fits into reality overall. Metalegal inquiry aims to explain how legal thought, talk, and reality fit into reality. General jurisprudence is the part of metalegal inquiry that focuses on universal legal thought, talk, and reality.

This Handbook surveys the contemporary state of the burgeoning field of metaethics. Forty-four chapters, all written exclusively for this volume, provide expert introductions to: 1) the central research programs that frame metaethical discussions, 2) the central explanatory challenges, resources, and strategies that inform contemporary work in those research programs, an 3) debates over the status of metaethics, and the appropriate methods to use in metaethical inquiry. This is essential reading for anyone with a serious interest in metaethics, from those coming to it for the first time to those actively pursuing research in the field.

At least since the late Early Modern period, the Holy Grail of ethics, for many philosophers, has been to say how ethical values could have a kind of protagorean objectivity: values are to be both fully objective as values and yet depend on us by their very nature. More than any other contemporary foundational approach it is “constructivist” theories, such as those due to Rawls, Scanlon, and Korsgaard, which have consciously sought to explain how protagorean objectivity is a real possibility. Yet there remains considerable uncertainty about what the various versions of constructivism have in common, what, if anything, “constructivism” as a general approach is supposed to accomplish, and whether, if it is a general approach, it amounts to a distinctive foundational view.

In recent work, we have argued that a number of disputes of interest to philosophers – including some disputes amongst philosophers themselves – are metalinguistic negotiations. Prima facie, many of these disputes seem to concern worldly, non-linguistic issues directly. However, on our view, they in fact concern, in the first instance, normative questions about the use of linguistic expressions. This will strike many ordinary speakers as counterintuitive. In many of the disputes that we analyze as metalinguistic negotiations, speakers might quite strongly resist the idea that their debate is in any sense about language. In this paper, we explore and provide responses to what we take to be the best versions of an objection that our view involves an unacceptable attribution of false beliefs to ordinary speakers.

In recent work, several philosophers have begun to explicitly explore the conceptual ethics of normativity. Put roughly, this is a kind of normative and evaluative inquiry that aims to assess the normative words and concepts that we currently use, as well as salient possible alternative normative words and concepts that we might choose to adopt. One important question about this project is how it relates to more familiar metaethical or metanormative inquiries. This paper helps to illustrate the deep ways in which metanormative and conceptual ethics inquiries can interact, and why it is valuable for practitioners of these projects to attend to the relationships between them. The paper begins by introducing a powerful (although not exhaustive) model for thinking about this interaction, which generalizes on the recent “after error theory” literature. We argue that this model allows us to identify important and neglected views about the normative, and to better understand the argumentative burdens that philosophers take on in defending such views. We conclude by briefly discussing another way that thinking about error theory can be important for understanding the relationship between the conceptual ethics of normativity and metanormative inquiry: by complicating how we can understand the project of conceptual ethics itself.

Throughout his career, Michael Bratman has developed a detailed model of individual ‘planning agency’, and, more recently, models of joint action and aspects of social life that he argues such planning agency helps support. How might we empirically investigate whether these models capture what is going on in actual human lives? In this article, we critically engage with this broad question by focusing on what Bratman calls the ‘core capacity thesis’, which is at the center of his most recent discussions of how his work in the philosophy of action hangs together. In his own words, the core capacity thesis claims that ‘our capacity for planning agency plays basic roles in multiple, interrelated systems of human, mind-shaped practical organization, individual and social’. We explore how one might go about testing this thesis, focusing on Bratman's particular way of defending this thesis using the idea of ‘nested Cummins functions’. In so doing, we hope to contribute to a broader discussion about what the relationship is (or, perhaps more importantly, should be) between the kind of philosophy of action Bratman does and empirical work in fields such as psychology, cognitive science, and biology.

In this paper, we consider how the notion of metalinguistic negotiation interacts with various theories of generics. The notion of metalinguistic negotiation we discuss stems from previous work from two of us (Plunkett and Sundell). Metalinguistic negotiations are disputes in which speakers disagree about normative issues concerning language, such as issues about what a given word should mean in the relevant context, or which of a range of related concepts a word should express. In a metalinguistic negotiation, speakers argue about such issues implicitly, via competing “metalinguistic” usages of terms. Here, we argue that some disputes involving generics are best thought of as metalinguistic negotiations, and that these cases can be illuminating for our more general theorizing about generics. Specifically, we argue that the “contextualist” theory of generics that one of us (Sterken) has developed in other work is best equipped to account for these metalinguistic negotiations, relative to other leading views of generics. We thus argue for a “package deal” view of generics: a view that combines Plunkett and Sundell’s account of metalinguistic negotiation with Sterken’s contextualist view of generics.

Understood one way, the branch of contemporary philosophical ethics that goes by the label "metaethics" concerns certain second-order questions about ethics-questions not in ethics, but rather ones about our thought and talk about ethics, and how the ethical facts (insofar as there are any) fit into reality. Analogously, the branch of contemporary philosophy of law that is often called "general jurisprudence" deals with certain second order questions about law- questions not in the law, but rather ones about our thought and talk about the law, and how legal facts (insofar as there are any) fit into reality. Put more roughly (and using an alternative spatial metaphor), metaethics concerns a range of foundational questions about ethics, whereas general jurisprudence concerns analogous questions about law. As these characterizations suggest, the two sub-disciplines have much in common, and could be thought to run parallel to each other. Yet, the connections between the two are currently mostly ignored by philosophers, or at least under-scrutinized. The new essays collected in this book are aimed at changing this state of affairs. Dimensions of Normativity collects together works by metaethicists and legal philosophers that address a number of issues that are of common interest, with the goal of accomplishing a new rapprochement between the two sub-disciplines.

There has been growing excitement in recent years about “dual‐character” concepts. Philosophers have argued that such concepts can help us make progress on a range of philosophical issues, from aesthetics to law to metaphysics. Dual‐character concepts are thought to have a distinctive internal structure, which relates a set of descriptive features to an abstract value, and which allows people to use either the descriptive features or the abstract value for determining the extension of the concept. Here, we skeptically investigate the central argument in favor of their existence. Across three new empirical studies, we systematically demonstrate that the linguistic patterns that dual‐character concepts were originally posited to explain are likely better explained by much more general features of language use.

In both co-authored and solo-authored work over the past decade, we have developed the idea of “metalinguistic negotiation”. On our view, metalinguistic negotiation is a type of dispute in which speakers appear to use (rather than explicitly mention) a term in conflicting ways to put forward views about how that very term should be used. In this paper, we explore four possible dimensions of variation among metalinguistic negotiations, and the interactions among those dimensions. These types of variation matter for understanding the nature, and the potential range, of the phenomenon of metalinguistic negotiation. As an illustration of the latter, we argue in our concluding section that understanding the full range of forms that metalinguistic negotiations can take has implications for debates about the “implementation” of conceptual engineering proposals.

Take “legal reality” to be the part of reality that actual legal thought and talk is dis- tinctively about, such as legal institutions, legal obligations, and legal norms. Our goal is to explore whether legal reality is disunified. To illustrate the issue, consider the possibility that an important metaphysical thesis such as positivism is true of one part of legal reality (legal institutions), but not another (legal norms). We offer two arguments that suggest that legal reality is disunified: one concerns the heteroge- neity of different entities that are part of legal reality; the other concerns variation within legal thought and talk. We then show that taking the possibility of the disunity of legal reality seriously has important upshots for how we think about the positivist and antipositivist traditions, the debate between them, and their relation to other parts of legal theory, such as critical legal theory and legal realism.

When legal theorists ask questions about legal interpretation—such as what it fundamentally is, what it aims at, or how it should work—they often do so in ways closely tethered to existing legal practice. For example: they try to understand how an activity legal actors (purportedly) already engage in should be done better, such as how judges can better learn about the content of the law. In this paper, I discuss a certain kind of “conceptual ethics” approach to thinking about legal interpretation, which is less tethered to existing legal practice (or the existing meaning of core pieces of legal terminology). The approach I explore asks questions about legal interpretation in a way that is tethered to what legal (or “legal-ish”) concepts people should deploy, as part of arguments on behalf of engaging in legal (or “legal-ish”) practices different from our current ones. In exploring this approach, I aim to help us better understand the landscape of philosophical issues about legal interpretation, including parts of it that I think have been underexplored.

One of the primary goals of Pettit’s The Birth of Ethics is to offer a novel defense of a form of naturalistic realism in metaethics, drawing on a kind of “counterfactual genealogy” for ethical thought and talk, in a community he dubs “Erewhon”. We argue that Pettit’s argument faces a deep dilemma. The dilemma begins by noting the reasonable controversy about which metaethical view is true of our ethical thought and talk. We then ask: is the thought and talk in Pettit’s Erewhon apt for the same reasonable controversy? If so, this raises doubts about Pettit’s case for naturalistic realism about Erewhonian “ethical” thought and talk. If not, this disanalogy between Erewhonian “ethical” thought and talk and our ethical thought and talk renders it difficult to argue smoothly from Erewhonian premises to conclusions about our own ethical thought and talk. We then consider an alternative use that someone might make of Pettit’s discussion of Erewhon: as part of a conceptual ethics argument that we should use “ethical” concepts that are relevantly similarly to the ones described in Erewhon. We conclude by reflecting on the broader methodological significance of the sort of dilemma that we have posed.

Many legal positivists have argued that legal antipositivists, due to the central explanatory role they grant authoritatively normative facts, end up saddled with deep problems in their proposed epistemology about how we learn about the law, problems which positivists (and especially "exclusive" legal positivists) can avoid. In this chapter, I put forward a version of this kind of argument. I argue that there is an explanatory challenge tied to the epistemology of law that positivist theories are, in general, better equipped to deal with than antipositivist theories. This issue concerns explaining how people (including not only legal officials, such as judges, but also legal anthropologists, legal historians, and ordinary citizens etc.) are reliable in forming the correct judgments about legal content that they do in fact form. Reflection on this issue about reliability in our legal judgments lends support to positivism. It also, I argue, suggests reasons to favor exclusive legal positivism over inclusive legal positivism.

The past few decades have witnessed an extraordinary revival of interest in metanormative non-naturalism. Despite this interest, it is still unclear how to understand the distinctive metaphysical commitments of this view. We illustrate the relevant difficulties by examining what is arguably the most prominent class of contemporary attempts to formulate non-naturalism’s metaphysical commitments. This class of proposals, exemplified in work by Gideon Rosen and Stephanie Leary, characterizes the distinctive metaphysical commitments of non-naturalism in terms of metaphysical grounding and essence. We argue that these proposals overgeneralize: they either misclassify intuitively naturalistic hypotheses about the metaphysics of normativity as “non-naturalist”, or misclassify hypotheses in other areas of metaphysics. We argue that this problem stems from features of grounding itself. We suggest a more promising alternative for formulating non-naturalism, which revolves around the notion of objective similarity between classes of properties. We conclude by drawing some general lessons for inquiry about the metaphysics of normativity, and about metaphysics in general.

This paper addresses an important but relatively unexplored question about the relationship between conceptual ethics and other philosophical inquiry: how does the epistemology of conceptual ethics relate to the epistemology of other, more “traditional” forms of philosophical inquiry? This paper takes as its foil the optimistic thought that the epistemology of conceptual ethics will be easier and less mysterious than relevant “traditional” philosophical inquiry. We argue against this foil by focusing on the fact that that conceptual ethics is a form of normative inquiry. Because of the epistemic difficulties that face normative inquiry, we should not expect conceptual ethics to constitute an epistemic panacea. Instead, although the epistemological upshots can vary from case to case, there are systematic reasons why this shift may exacerbate, rather than mitigate, the epistemic difficulties we face in pursuing philosophical inquiry.

We explore an underappreciated tension at the heart of the debate over legal positivism. On the one hand, many legal philosophers aspire for the debate to tell us what law is, and the nature of law. But on the other hand, the positions in the debate are generally formulated such that they’re about something else: what law is necessarily connected to or dependent on. This is a genuine tension, because theses about what law is necessarily connected to or dependent on do not by themselves state or automatically settle what law is or the nature of law. This tension prompts us to propose a new approach to formulating positivism and antipositivism as theses about the real definition of law. Our proposal is simple, but fruitful. We argue that it better insulates and unifies the debate: that is, it prevents orthogonal theses from trivially vindicating or falsifying positivism and antipositivism, and it explains how different threads of the existing debate contribute to a single topic. We close by briefly considering two recent arguments about exclusive positivism, to illustrate how our discussion bears on contemporary jurisprudential debates.

The past few decades have witnessed an extraordinary revival of interest in metanormative non-naturalism. Despite this interest, it is still unclear how to understand the distinctive metaphysical commitments of this view. We illustrate the relevant difficulties by examining what is arguably the most prominent class of contemporary attempts to formulate non-naturalism’s metaphysical commitments. This class of proposals, exemplified in work by Gideon Rosen and Stephanie Leary, characterizes the distinctive metaphysical commitments of non-naturalism in terms of metaphysical grounding and essence. We argue that these proposals overgeneralize: they either misclassify intuitively naturalistic hypotheses about the metaphysics of normativity as “non-naturalist”, or misclassify hypotheses in other areas of metaphysics. We argue that this problem stems from features of grounding itself. We suggest a more promising alternative for formulating non-naturalism, which revolves around the notion of objective similarity between classes of properties. We conclude by drawing some general lessons for inquiry about the metaphysics of normativity, and about metaphysics in general.

One important activity in conceptual ethics and conceptual engineering involves proposing to associate a new semantics with an existing word. Many philosophers think that one important way to evaluate such a proposal concerns whether it preserves the “topic” picked out by the existing word, and several have offered competing proposals concerning what is required to preserve topic. Our paper is focused on the conceptual ethics question of how conceptual engineers should use the term ‘topic continuity’. We provide and defend a context-sensitive answer to this question. Our answer is motivated by the idea that there are several distinct considerations that we can reasonably care about (and which many conceptual engineers already do care about) in thinking about “topic continuity”, and, moreover, that how best to weigh them against each other can vary from context to context. On our proposal, ‘topic continuity’ can function as a useful representational device that enables coordination by inquirers with respect to these concerns. We conclude by locating our account in a broader way of thinking about topic continuity across a range of inquiries.