Sarah Raskoff

In this paper I argue that many metaethicists commit a fallacy that has not yet received a clear and unified description. I develop a characterization of this “transparency fallacy” by illustrations drawn from the metaethical writings of both historical and contemporary figures. The basic idea is that metaethicists often illicitly assume that if some fact about our moral thought and talk is true, then this fact is transparent to competent moral speakers, in (roughly) the sense that they believe it. In particular, I show that metaethicists often implicitly assume that the meanings, referents, truthmakers, attitude-types, and psychological roles of moral terms or judgments are transparent to competent speakers.

It is often morally important that you have a choice between two options in the sense that each option is available to you and you are not coerced into choosing one or the other. Even when you have a choice, though, the presence of time constraints and other noncoercive influences can prevent you from taking the time you need to make up your mind and really choose for yourself. How are we to understand this latter phenomenon? In this essay, I argue that while choosing for yourself seems, at first glance, to be an exercise in discovering your preferences, this is not the whole story. At least sometimes, choosing for yourself instead involves creating your preferences—and, in so doing, choosing what kind of person and valuer to be—through the exercise of what I call formative autonomy. I then explore some objections to this account and some implications for public health policy and clinical ethics. Throughout, I draw primarily on examples that involve choosing whether to continue or terminate a pregnancy and the regulations governing such choices.

Normative judgments are practical: they bear a close connection to motivation. Noncognitivists often claim that they have a distinctive explanatory advantage accounting for this connection. After all, if normative judgments just are noncognitive, desire-like states, then it is no mystery why they bear an intimate connection to motivation: desire-like states motivate. In this paper, however, I argue that noncognitivism does not have this explanatory advantage after all. The problem is that noncognitivists cannot provide a characterization of the practicality of normative judgment that allows them to retain this advantage. Noncognitivists either posit a strong and controversial connection between normative judgment and motivation that cognitivists have no trouble rejecting, or they posit a weaker connection that cognitivists can explain just as well. Either way, noncognitivists cannot argue from the practicality of normative judgments to their claim that normative judgments are noncognitive, desire-like states. The practicality of normative judgments does not support noncognitivism.

In a recent paper, Jack Woods advances an intriguing argument against expressivism based on Moore’s paradox. Woods argues that a central tenet of expressivism—which he, following Mark Schroeder, calls the parity thesis—is false. The parity thesis is the thesis that moral assertions express noncognitive, desire-like attitudes like disapproval in exactly the same way that ordinary, descriptive assertions express cognitive, belief-like attitudes. Most contemporary defenders of expressivism seem not only to accept the parity thesis but also to rely on it to distinguish their view from subjectivism, so Woods’s argument against it poses a serious challenge to the view. In this paper, I argue that Woods’s argument is unsuccessful, but show that diagnosing precisely where it goes wrong raises interesting questions for expressivists—and metaethicists more generally—about the transparency of our moral attitudes.

Nudges are small changes in the presentation of options that make a predictable impact on people's decisions. Proponents of nudges often claim that they are justified as paternalistic interventions that respect autonomy: they lead people to make better choices, while still letting them choose for themselves. However, existing work on nudges ignores the possibility of “hard choices”: cases where a person prefers one option in some respects, and another in other respects, but has no all‐things‐considered preference between the two. In this paper, I argue that many significant medical decisions are hard choices that provide patients with an opportunity to exercise a distinctive sort of “formative autonomy” by settling their preferences and committing themselves to weigh their values in a particular way. Since nudges risk infringing formative autonomy by depriving patients of this opportunity, their use in medical contexts should be sensitive to this risk.

The animal agriculture industry causes animals a tremendous amount of pain and suffering. Many ethical vegans argue that we therefore have an obligation to abstain from animal products in order to reduce this suffering. But this argument faces a challenge: thanks to the size and structure of the animal agriculture industry, any individual’s dietary choices are overwhelmingly unlikely to make a difference. In this paper, we criticize common replies to this challenge and develop an alternative argument for ethical veganism. Specifically, we argue that individuals should abstain from animal products because vegans, as a group, successfully reduce animal suffering, and individuals are obligated to participate in, rather than free ride on, this collective endeavor. Or, at the very least, individuals have strong reasons to purchase fewer inhumanely raised animal products—even if they are not obligated to go vegan per se.