Jakob Green Werkmäster

According to defenders of the popular buck-passing account of value (the BPA of value), values should be understood in terms of reasons for pro- and con-responses. While much has been said about how to understand the normative component of the BPA of value, that is, how to understand ‘reasons’, including how to distinguish between reasons that imply value (the ‘right’ kind of reasons) and those that do not (the ‘wrong’ kind of reasons), less has been said about how to understand the response component, that is, how to interpret ‘pro- and con-responses’. Contrary to common usage in the debate, we argue against understanding values in terms of reasons for attitudes and reasons for action. Briefly, we contend that including reasons for action is unnecessary, has undesirable consequences for the debate on the wrong kind of reason problem, and enables us to generate novel yet mundane cases of the wrong kind of value problem. An important upshot of the paper is that it supports an alternative, prima facie attractive picture of the hierarchy of the normative landscape, in which reasons for attitudes are explanatorily prior to value and to our value-related reasons for action.

According to defenders of the popular buck‐passing account of value (the BPA of value), values should be understood in terms of reasons for pro‐ and con‐responses. While much has been said about how to understand the normative component of the BPA of value, that is, how to understand ‘reasons’, including how to distinguish between reasons that imply value (the ‘right’ kind of reasons) and those that do not (the ‘wrong’ kind of reasons), less has been said about how to understand the response component, that is, how to interpret ‘pro‐ and con‐responses’. Contrary to common usage in the debate, we argue against understanding values in terms of reasons for attitudes and reasons for action. Briefly, we contend that including reasons for action is unnecessary, has undesirable consequences for the debate on the wrong kind of reason problem, and enables us to generate novel yet mundane cases of the wrong kind of value problem. An important upshot of the paper is that it supports an alternative, prima facie attractive picture of the hierarchy of the normative landscape, in which reasons for attitudes are explanatorily prior to value and to our value‐related reasons for action.

The sorites paradox is central to theories on vagueness, which aim to explain apparent contradictions. Some theories, however, imply sharp cut‐offs where we would, intuitively, not expect them. This paper invokes the notion of normative resilience to address this issue. We argue that sharp cut‐offs may result from a gradual decline in resilience, making the existence of precise boundaries less unexpected. The paper details the sorites paradox and influential theories on vagueness, introduces normative resilience, explores its application and discusses the potential generalisation of this approach across domains.

We argue that we should be sceptical towards the claim that there is such a thing as the standing to blame someone privately, understood in terms of holding the attitude of blame. Key features of the idea about standing to blame do not apply to private blame. For example, we argue that private blame is not the exercise of some normative power, and it is not even pro tanto wrong for a hypocrite to privately blame a blameworthy agent. Thus, contrary to the prevailing sentiment, it is doubtful that there are conditions of standing for private blame. Importantly, our conclusions leave the idea of standing to blame intact when it comes to overt blame, which is understood as something voluntary.

The ethics of blame includes conditions determining whether an instance of blame is permissible. One generally recognised condition is that blame should be proportionate. If it is not proportionate, that speaks against its permissibility. All the same, what exactly amounts to proportionate blame is currently under-theorised. In this paper, we aim to amend this. More precisely, we distinguish between private and overt blame and highlight some of their differences – e.g., that they aggregate differently. Then, we develop an account of proportional blame and draw out some practical implications of our account.

This article discusses the phenomenon of normative resilience, with a focus on evaluative resilience. An object can become more or less valuable. In addition to this change in an object's value, the object's value can become more or less resilient. If it is less resilient, it cannot withstand as much evaluative change without its degree of value changing, as compared to an object with more resilient value. The article consists of three parts. First, examples of resilience are presented to give the reader an intuitive understanding of the phenomenon, Second, the Fitting Attitudes Analysis of value is invoked to provide a formal account of evaluative resilience. Third, the theoretical and practical advantages of acknowledging the existence of evaluative resilience are brought to light.

Normative reasons are of constant importance to us as agents trying to navigate through life. For this reason it is natural and vital to ask philosophical questions about reasons and the normative realm. This thesis explores various issues concerning reasons and normativity. The thesis consists of five free-standingpapers and an extended introduction. The aim of the extended introduction is not merely to situate the papers within a wider philosophical context but also to provide an overview of some of the central research questions concerning reasons and normativity. The introduction is divided into five chapters. Chapter 1 introduces and outlines the dissertation. Chapter 2 concerns the issue of what a reason is and what different types of reasons there are, such as pro tanto reasons and overall reasons. Chapter 3 discusses the frequently employed weighing metaphor, i.e. that reasons have a certain weight and can be weighed against the weight of other reasons. Chapter 4 covers how reasons relate to other normative notions such as ought, value, and obligation. For example, it discusses whether it is the case that for something to be valuable just is for there to be reasons to favor it. Chapter 5 concludes the introduction by briefly exploring how it all relates.The thesis can be said to be embedded in a recent research trend within philosophy of normativity that has a distinguished focus on reasons.The five papers deal with various issues concerning reasons and normativity. Paper I argues for a novel and theoretically parsimonious way to understand background conditions for values and reasons. Paper II explores an interpretation of the distinction between subjectivism and objectivism about reasons and value so as to accommodate that the distinction does not commit either party to certain first order claims about what reasons there are or what makes objects valuable. Paper III discusses the dictum ‘ought implies can’and how to properly interpret the ‘can’. Paper IV defends principles according to which what we ought and have reasons to do transmit from ends to the necessary means of that action. Paper V analyzes how the Fitting Attitudes analysis of value should best understand degrees of value.

This paper focuses on the interaction of reasons and argues that reasons for an action may transmit to the necessary means of that action. Analyzing exactly how this phenomenon may be captured by principles governing normative transmission has proved an intricate task in recent years. In this paper, I assess three formulations focusing on normative transmission and necessary means: Ought Necessity, Strong Necessity, and Weak Necessity. My focus is on responding to two of the main objections raised against normative transmission for necessary means, in that they seem to give us reasons for buying tickets to plays we have no intention of seeing and that the principles give us the wrong result when the means are necessary but not sufficient. Even though these objections have been discussed previously, the counterarguments have so far relied on rejecting premises that the proponents of these objections are unlikely to concede. In this paper, I show how we may answer the objections in a way more likely to convince proponents of the objections. The result is an argument for a key aspect when it comes to understanding how reasons and ends-means normativity function. Normative transmission from ends to necessary means is not only interesting at the structural level, it is also possible to argue that it has implications for areas as diverse as philosophy of rationality, political philosophy and applied ethics.

Philosophers have applied the framework of constitutive grounds to make sense of the disagreement between subjectivism and objectivism. The framework understands the two theories as being involved in a disagreement about the extent to which value is determined by attitudes. Although the framework affords us with some useful observations about how this should be interpreted, the question how value can be determined by attitudes in the first place is left largely unanswered. Here we explore the benefits of a positive interpretation which aims to address this oversight and make the framework more informative. This interpretation, which is inspired by the recent work of Schroeder and Sobel, claims that the relevant sense in which value can be determined by attitudes is discovered by seeing how facts can be endowed with the normative property of being a reason. We argue that this interpretation significantly deepens our understanding of the disagreement between subjectivism and objectivism.