Enrico Galvagni

Mercy and justice are mutually tempering values. This paper explores the world of such intimately entangled values. Our moral life is enriched by a diversity of distinct values that cannot be reduced to dimensions of a single, master value; but value pluralism does not condemn us to moral chaos and moral tragedy. Values often combine in important ways without being merged into a single value. Some pairs or sets of values interact and come into conflict not merely incidentally but systematically, determined by features internal to them. They season, or temper, one another. When they combine in this way, we can find ways to manage responsibly and deliberatively the tensions among them. We cannot rule out the possibility of tragic dilemmas, but at the same time we need not find seeds of tragedy in every conflict of values. This is true, especially, of mercy and justice.

There seems a potential tension between Hume's naturalistic project and his normative ambitions. Hume adopts what I call a methodological naturalism: that is, the methodology of providing explanations for various phenomena based on natural properties and causes. This methodology takes the form of introducing ‘the experimental method of reasoning into moral subjects’, as stated in the subtitle of the Treatise; this ‘experimental method’ seems a paradigmatically descriptive one, and it remains unclear how Hume derives genuinely normative prescriptions from this methodology. In resolving this problem, I will argue that Hume's naturalistic methodology – that is, his ‘experimental philosophy’, or what has come to be known as his experimental method – consists of the systematization of phenomena pertaining to human nature. In applying his experimental method to normative subjects, Hume systematizes our normative judgements, deriving general principles of normative justification; he then reflexivel...

Hume offers not one, but two definitions of virtue: a more famous one in terms of usefulness or agreeability to the self or to others, and a second in terms of eliciting approbation or disapprobation from spectators. Some scholars endorse the former definition as the more fundamental one; others endorse the latter as more fundamental. This paper argues that neither definition is more fundamental than the other. The two definitions are distinct but complementary, in that they have to rely on each other in various ways.

In “The Evolutionary Debunking of Quasi-Realism,” Neil Sinclair and James Chamberlain present a novel answer that quasi-realists can pro-vide to a version of the reliability challenge in ethics—which asks for an explanation of why our moral beliefs are generally true—and in so doing, they examine whether evolutionary arguments can debunk quasi-realism. Although reliability challenges differ from EDAs in several respects, there may well be a connection between them. For the explanatory premise of an EDA may state that a particular theory of beliefs of a certain kind does not, or cannot, provide a plausible account of why those beliefs might be generally true, and its epistemic premise may state that, if that is the case, then the beliefs in question have a negative epistemic status or the theory is false inasmuch as, if it were true, it would lead to those beliefs having such a negative epistemic status. The quasi-realist can answer the reli-ability challenge by claiming that, when we form our moral beliefs through a process of well-informed impartial reflection, we form them in response to the non-moral features of things on which depend the moral features they have. Hence, when we form beliefs by means of such a process, we are most likely forming true moral beliefs.