Evan Jack

Derek Parfit defended a metaethical theory which he calls nonrealist cognitivism. According to this theory, there are irreducibly normative truths that stand without ontological implications. A lot of literature has been dedicated to raising puzzles about the coherency of such a theory. The aim of this article is to solve a puzzle specifically concerning truth. Suikkanen's puzzle about truth argues that defenders of nonrealist cognitivism have no resources to make sense of the nature of normative truths, given that they supposedly do not have available to them the traditional theories of truth. We argue that not only is such reasoning based on errors, but also that bringing light to the intersection of truth and metaethics only further highlights the attractiveness of the theory.

Within the past twenty years, meta-ethicists have started to make their ontological commitments minimal. This has led to the creation of a view called metaethical minimalism. Metaethical minimalism is a meta-ethical theory that states some moral truths are truthmaker gaps, that is, truths without truthmakers. Such a view, though, has not gone without criticism. In this paper, we have two aims. First, we aim to focus on responding to unaddressed criticisms from Donelson (Three problems with metaethical minimalism. 34, 1.) and by extension deal with worries from Enoch (Taking morality seriously: A defense of robust realism), Ingram (Robust realism in ethics: Normative arbitrariness, interpersonal dialogue, and moral objectivity), and McPherson (Against quietist normative realism. 154, 223–240.). Mainly, we aim to diffuse the objections, but in some instances, we adopt parody objections so that if it attacks metaethical minimalism, it equally attacks its rivals. Second, we aim to show how, since the common objections to metaethical minimalism fail, it is an attractive meta-ethical view without any (ontological) costs.

Recently, realists have been relaxing their ontological commitments. Two such instances of this are Mark Balaguer’s modal nothingism and the relaxed realism of various philosophers, e.g., Derek Parfit, T. M. Scanlon, and Ronald Dworkin. In this paper, I do three things. First, I rearticulate modal nothingism and reconstruct Balaguer’s argument for it. Second, I outline relaxed realism and how normative nothingism, as I call it, is a kind of relaxed realism. Third, I show how the argument for modal nothingism can easily be parodied by the normative nothingist in such a way that if one thinks that the modal nothingist has an argument, one should think the normative nothingist has an argument too.

Derek Parfit defended a metaethical theory which he calls nonrealist cognitivism. According to this theory, there are irreducibly normative truths that stand without ontological implications. A lot of literature has been dedicated to raising puzzles about the coherency of such a theory. The aim of this article is to solve a puzzle specifically concerning truth. Suikkanen's puzzle about truth argues that defenders of nonrealist cognitivism have no resources to make sense of the nature of normative truths, given that they supposedly do not have available to them the traditional theories of truth. We argue that not only is such reasoning based on errors, but also that bringing light to the intersection of truth and metaethics only further highlights the attractiveness of the theory.

Non-Realist Cognitivism is a meta-ethical theory that is supposedly objectionably unclear. Recently, Farbod Akhlaghi (2022) has provided a novel exposition of Parfit’s Non-Realist Cognitivism that employs truthmaker theory to clarify it. He illustrates that such clarification leads the non-realist cognitivist into a dilemma: either the theory has to accept truthmaker maximalism, rendering the theory inconsistent, or it has to let go of truthmaking altogether. He also attempts to undercut a “partners-in-innocence” strategy that the non-realist cognitivist utilizes to motivate the key assumption of Non-Realist Cognitivism: that normative truths are truthmaker gaps. In this paper, we do three things in reply to Akhlaghi. First, we show how most of his attempts to disqualify candidate partners-in-innocence fail, or at best miss the point. Second, we provide a case for a partner-in-innocence Akhlaghi never covers, though inadvertently mentions. Third, we outline how the non-realist cognitivist could reply to Akhlaghi’s dilemma in a way that allows Non-Realist Cognitivism to come out unscathed.

Recently, non-realist cognitivism has been charged with failing to meet various semantic challenges. According to one such challenge, the non-realist cognitivist must provide a non-trivial account of the meaning and truth conditions of moral claims. In this paper, we discuss the various strategies proposed to overcome this challenge. Our aim is to propose a new semantics, a Meinongian referential semantics that is based on truthmaker theory. The consequences of our proposal are two-fold. First, it alleviates objections raised against previous Meinongian semantic approaches. Second, adopting the novel semantics highlights the great theoretical flexibility of non-realist cognitivism.

Parfit (2011, 2017) denies that committing to the existence of reasons is ontologically costly. To motivate his denial, Mintz-Woo (2018) thinks Parfit forwards two arguments: the plural senses argument from elimination and the argument from empty ontology. Mintz-Woo believes he has ‘debunked’ both arguments. In what follows, we do three things. First, we argue that his objections to the arguments fail or at best miss the point. Second, we argue that even if our independent responses fail, his responses meet an unfortunate dilemma. Lastly, we address his concerns about the relationship between Parfit’s ontology and truth.

Recently, Andrew Ter Ern Loke has provided a new deductive formulation of the Moral Argument for the existence of God, which states that if one believes in moral realism (the metaethical view that there are objective moral truths), then they should also believe in theism. We demonstrate how his New Moral Argument does not guarantee the conclusion that objective moral truths are metaphysically grounded in a divine personal entity. Next, we reconstruct the argument in a way that is logically exhaustive. However, even once we do this, the argument remains unsuccessful, since it ignores at least one metaethical view that admits there are objective moral truths, but they are not metaphysically substantive: relaxed realism. We find five ways Loke could be motivating the claim that if there are objective moral truths, then they are metaphysically substantive truths, but we argue that these motivations do not succeed or are consistent with relaxed realism.