Peter Railton

Discussions of the value of humanity often take as their starting point the idea of humans as _potentially rational beings_. This might, however, miss what is normatively distinctive of humans as _humans_. While humans are capable of regulating themselves rationally, they do not do so “by nature”—as beings situated in a causal order and subject to conflicting inclinations, they must struggle to achieve this. Kant himself located humanity in such struggling beings rather than in rational beings as such. In closer accord with commonsense notions of “humanity,” Kant recognized that humanity involves possessing certain distinctive forms of “feeling” toward oneself and others—feelings not part of rationality as such. These feelings enable humans to be moved in thought and action by appreciation of themselves and others as ends-in-themselves. The distinctive normative significance of humanity thus would be: humanity as such makes morality possible in a world of causes.

Justice would appear to require that those who are the principal beneficiaries of a history of economic and political behavior that has produced dramatic climate change bear a correspondingly large share of the costs of getting it under control. Yet a widespread material ideology of happiness suggests that this would require sacrificing “quality of life” in the most-developed countries—hardly a popular program. However, an empirically-grounded understanding of the nature and function of “subjective well-being”, and of the factors that most influence it, challenges this ideology and suggests instead that well-being in more-developed as well as less-developed societies could be improved consistently with sustainable resource-utilization. If right, this could refocus debates over climate change from the sacrifice of “quality of life” to the enhancement and more equitable distribution of well-being within a framework of sustainable relations with one another and with the rest of nature.

Morality, like language, is a ubiquitous feature of contemporary human societies. Both cases exhibit social variation as well as cross-cultural similarities, and individual acquisition of largely tacit abilities to communicate and cooperate spontaneously in an open-ended array of circumstances. Cognitive science has shed light on how this is possible in the case of language, but recently has challenged whether human morality could actually live up to the character it purports to have (e.g., objective and nonparochial) or the social role it purports to play (e.g., in guiding judgment, motivation, and practices). Realism about morality is seen as at odds with understanding it scientifically. Challenges have been based upon “dual-process” theories and evolutionary psychology. A defense of realism can be given, however, on the strength of research supporting a picture of the mind as engaged in non-egocentric as well as egocentric causal-evaluative modeling of the physical and social world.

How might artificial systems become sensitive to ethically relevant considerations? This chapter argues that the question we should ask is not “How can we build ethics into robots?” but rather “How can we build robots with a capacity for ethical learning?” It is evident from the continuing disagreement over overarching ethical theories that we do not know a set of consensus ethical principles with sufficient definiteness to “program” ethics into a machine. Recent research in artificial intelligence has shown the power of general-purpose learning to acquire autonomous human-level competencies. Intriguingly, recent research in developmental psychology suggests that children may also acquire independent social and ethical competence via similar mechanisms. Instead of programing ethics into robots, this chapter proposes that artificial systems could gain ethical competence through general-purpose learning, comparable to infants learning human ethics in part by observing adult behavior.

On the orthodox view, action is the joint product of belief and desire. We naturally assume that evolution would have equipped us for learning in belief, yet accurate beliefs would be of no avail if our desires were not adapted to our needs, capacities, and circumstances. Should we not, then, expect there to be mechanisms of adaptive learning in desire? A chief obstacle to this line of thought has been the idea that desire is an affective-conative state, incapable of truth or falsity. However, _degrees_ of belief likewise are not true or false, and yet we can learn by revising degrees of belief in light of experience. This chapter presents philosophical, psychological, and neuroscientific considerations in favor of a strong parallel between belief and desire; each is a compound state involving both a degree of affect (confidence or attraction, respectively) regulating action-guiding expectations, which then permit learning through discrepancy-reduction.

A satisfactory interpretation of Nietzsche's complex writings should help us see whether a coherent and distinctive normative theory is to be found there. At least four serious problems confront the interpreter: Does Nietzsche's _perspectivism_ about truth result in a kind of relativism, precluding the seemingly absolute claims about the superiority of certain beings, values, or ways of life for which he is famous? Nietzsche's writings are full of imperatives, but can an action-guiding normative theory be formulated _without_ incorporating the deontic concepts and associated idea of a free or autonomous will that Nietzsche dismissed? Does Nietzsche's _naturalism_ preclude the idea of finding genuine values in the world? And, if his theory _is_ founded upon value — say, _nobility_, _health_, _strength_, _knowledge_, and _aesthetic excellence_ — how could it also be the case that, as Nietzsche says, we _invent_ or _create_ our values? Using examples and arguments, and drawing upon an idea of _attunement to_ — _appreciative realization through life of_ — value as the basis for action-guidance, it is possible to see how these four problems can be overcome in a coherent, perhaps even plausible, way. However, no deep expertise on Nietzsche underwrites this paper, so the interpretation is offered on a speculative basis. It _would_ make sense of some of Nietzsche's most prominent claims, and also of his distinctive _style_ of philosophy, and his notion that ‘eternal recurrence’ is an appropriate test of a life.

The first volume of Derek Parfit’s _On What Matters_ makes a seminal contribution to ethics, by showing how normative theories traditionally thought of as rivals can be seen instead as “climbing different sides of the same mountain.” In the second volume, however, Parfit defends his meta-ethical non-naturalism by arguing that naturalistic meta-ethical theories are unable to recognize, much less account for, normativity, since they do not countenance irreducibly normative properties. I argue that, by distinguishing between normative concepts and normative properties, naturalistic theories can resist this argument. Moreover, once this is seen, and once it is clear that Parfit’s non-natural properties are “non-ontological,” and once the supervenience of the normative upon the natural is fully taken into account, naturalists and Parfit can indeed be seen as climbing the same meta-ethical mountain, each making different, complementary contributions to understanding moral thought and practice.

In his major work in meta-ethics, _Ruling Passions_, Simon Blackburn defends a neo-Humean “split” between the cognitive realm (inert, truth-apt, “Apollonian”) and the passionate realm (motivating, non-propositional, “Dionysian”), arguing that “splitting” is essential to “get it right” in the philosophy of mind and to preserve the critical edge of moral thought. Beliefs are to be placed in the former realm and moral judgments in the latter. In response, it is argued that Blackburn’s minimalist theory of truth undermines the ground for this distinction. Moreover, Hume himself insisted that it was an error to separate the belief attitude from the passionate side. “Splitting” belief from moral judgment is not warranted either by historical Humean theory of mind or by contemporary theories of truth or human psychology, but this need not eliminate the possibility of fundamental normative criticism.

Traditional virtue-oriented approaches to ethics suppose that acquiring relatively stable character traits, such as courage and compassion, is crucial in addressing the question of how to be. However, recent psychological studies cast doubt on the idea that people develop such traits. In light of this pessimism, the paper raises the question: what is left of virtue theory? It argues that much remains once one shifts from a traditional understanding of virtues to one of cognitive/affective “if…then” dispositions that form a person’s character. The central proposal is to understand such dispositions as “habitudes” – habitual ways of thinking, feeling, and acting that are acquired by example and repetition, and that enable one to competently react to varying situations one confronts. The resulting model of ethical comportment represents a psychologically realistic understanding of virtue. Furthermore, this account fits well with what we learn from the field of positive psychology about subjective well-being, thus helping to vindicate eudaimonism.

What are ethical judgments about? And what is their relation to practice? How can ethical judgment aspire to objectivity? The past two decades have witnessed a resurgence of interest in metaethics, placing questions such as these about the nature and status of ethical judgment at the very center of contemporary moral philosophy. Moral Discourse and Practice: Some Philosophical Approaches is a unique anthology which collects important recent work, much of which is not easily available elsewhere, on core metaethical issues. Naturalist moral realism, once devastated by the charge of "naturalistic fallacy," has been reinvigorated, as have versions of moral realism that insist on the discontinuity between ethics and science. Irrealist, expressivist programs have also developed with great subtlety, encouraging the thought that a noncognivist account may actually be able to explain ethical judgments' aspirations to objectivity. Neo-Kantian constructivist theories have flourished as well, offering hope that morality can be grounded in a plausible conception of reasonable conduct. Together, the positions advanced in the essays collected here address these recent developments, constituting a rich array of approaches to contemporary moral philosophy's most fundamental debates. An extensive introduction by Darwall, Gibbard, and Railton is also included, making this volume the most comprehensive and up-to-date work of its kind. Moral Discourse is ideally suited for use in courses in contemporary ethics, ethical theory, and metaethics.

Our notion of normativity appears to combine, in a way difficult to understand but seemingly familiar from experience, elements of force and freedom. On the one hand, a normative claim is thought to have a kind of compelling authority; on the other hand, if our respecting it is to be an appropriate species of respect, it must not be coerced, automatic, or trivially guaranteed by definition. Both Hume and Kant, I argue, looked to aesthetic experience as a convincing example exhibiting this marriage of force and freedom, as well as showing how our judgment can come to be properly attuned to the features that constitute value. This image of attunement carries over into their respective accounts of moral judgment. The seemingly radical difference between their moral theories may be traceable not to a different conception of normativity, but to a difference in their empirical psychological theories – a difference we can readily spot in their accounts of aesthetics.

I’ve been told that there are two principal approaches to drawing figures from life. One begins by tracing an outline of the figure to be drawn, locating its edges and key features on an imagined grid, and then using perspective to fill in depth. The other approach proceeds from the ‘center of mass’ of the subject, seeking to build up the image by supplying contour lines, the intersections of which convey depth—as if the representation were being created in relief. The second approach need not adopt a unified perspective, and is more concerned with evoking the volume and ‘presence’ of the subject than with accurate placement of edges and features. Call this second approach drawing ‘from the inside out’, meant to capture the living force of the subject rather than freeze it in a coordinate frame.

David Lewis was ideally equipped for the venture. In his life he was a great celebrator of value, in ideas, arguments, music, history, trains, and, above all, sociability and humour. Indeed, the author suspects that, in his own life, desiring and valuing, and valuing and desiring, were intimately connected. Lewis rejects accounts of the valuing attitude in terms of judging to be valuable, taking to be valuable, believing to be valuable, or even experiencing as valuable. Conditional relationalism would have a better fit, he thinks, with his underlying pluralism, which is tied to a lively sense of the delightful and devilish variety among humankind. The author finds Lewis's account of value congenial in many respects. He was fortunate to have had the chance to discuss some questions of further development with Lewis.

What is the real issue at stake in discussions of "moral explanation"? There isn't one; there are many. The standing of purported moral properties and problems about our epistemic or semantic access to them are of concern both from within and without moral practice. An account of their potential contribution to explaining our values, beliefs, conduct, practices, etc. can help in these respects. By examining some claims made about moral explanation in Judith Thompson's and Gilbert Harman's Moral Relativism and Moral Objectivity, I try to suggest a worthwhile account of this potential explanatory contribution

Ruth Chang has argued convincingly that we must recognize that some choices will not involve strict, univocal comparison of options. How, then, can such choices be made well? Chang suggests that commitment is a fundamental way of ‘putting one's very self’ behind a normative consideration, thereby ‘endow[ing] that consideration with the normativity of a reason’. This view challenges what Chang deems to be three dogmas of normativity, and the current comment critically assesses the relation of her view to the first and third of these dogmas. I suggest some alternative ways of thinking about these dogmas, which enable us to see how her work might uncover a fourth dogma, and which can, I believe, lend strength to a position very close to Chang's.