Reductionisms are everywhere in philosophy, but surprisingly little has been said in any systematic way about reductions of some normative phenomena to other normative phenomena. This chapter aims to make some headway on that project. I call such reductions normative-to-normative reductions, and Iassess some of the prospects and problems for those normative-to-normative reductions that aim to reduce an entire domain of normativity to some other domain. In doing so, the chapter argues against vie…
Read moreReductionisms are everywhere in philosophy, but surprisingly little has been said in any systematic way about reductions of some normative phenomena to other normative phenomena. This chapter aims to make some headway on that project. I call such reductions normative-to-normative reductions, and Iassess some of the prospects and problems for those normative-to-normative reductions that aim to reduce an entire domain of normativity to some other domain. In doing so, the chapter argues against views that reduce the aesthetic to some other domain, including pleasure, prudence, desire, and social practices. This chapter also examines and classifies the argumentative strategies deployed and compares those to existing debates about other normative-to-normative reductionisms, including epistemic instrumentalism. It ends with an extended discussion of whether the reductionist view loses the distinctiveness of the reduced domain. This raises larger questions about what’s at stake in choosing between reductionism and eliminativism and how we individuate normative domains.
