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20The Responses That MatterPacific Philosophical Quarterly 105 (1): 33-49. 2024.We are all familiar with judgements about the persistence of people. Furthermore, we tend to structure certain attitudes and practices around such judgements because we think that personal identity matters for the relevant practical concerns. Response‐dependence views try to accommodate that personal identity matters by letting relevant attitudes and practices determine the personal identity relation for a particular person. This paper argues that genuine response‐dependence views are not well p…Read more
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181Conceptual Engineering: For What MattersMind 133 (530): 400-427. 2024.Conceptual engineering is the enterprise of evaluating and improving our representational devices. But how should we conduct this enterprise? One increasingly popular answer to this question proposes that conceptual engineering should proceed in terms of the functions of our representational devices. In this paper, we argue that the best way of understanding this suggestion is in terms of normative functions, where normative functions of concepts are, roughly, things that they allow us to do tha…Read more
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43Expressivism, but at a Whole Other LevelErkenntnis 1-22. forthcoming.A core commitment of meta-ethical expressivism is that ordinary descriptive judgements are representational states, while normative judgements are non-representational directive states. Traditionally, this commitment has been understood as a psychological thesis about the nature of normative judgements, as the view that normative judgements consist in certain sorts of conative propositional attitudes. This paper’s aim is to challenge this reading and to show that changing our view on how this co…Read more
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18Can We Have Moral Status for Robots on the Cheap?Journal of Ethics and Social Philosophy 24 (1). 2023.Should artificial agents (such as robots) be granted moral status? This seems like an important question to resolve, given that we will encounter a growing number of increasingly sophisticated artificial agents in the not too distant future. However, many will think that before we can even start to tackle questions about the moral status of artificial agents, we first need to solve tricky issues in the philosophy of mind. After all, most orthodox views about moral status imply that only entities…Read more
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7Revolutionary expressivismIn Bart Streumer (ed.), Irrealism in Ethics, Wiley-blackwell. 2014.While the meta‐ethical error theory has been of philosophical interest for some time now, only recently a debate has emerged about the question what is to be done if the error theory turns out to be true. This paper argues for a novel answer to this question, namely revolutionary expressivism: if the error theory is true, we should become expressivists. Additionally, the paper explores certain important but largely ignored methodological issues that arise for reforming definitions generally and …Read more
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120Responsible AI Through Conceptual EngineeringPhilosophy and Technology 35 (3): 1-30. 2022.The advent of intelligent artificial systems has sparked a dispute about the question of who is responsible when such a system causes a harmful outcome. This paper champions the idea that this dispute should be approached as a conceptual engineering problem. Towards this claim, the paper first argues that the dispute about the responsibility gap problem is in part a conceptual dispute about the content of responsibility and related concepts. The paper then argues that the way forward is to evalu…Read more
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62What is (Neo-)Pragmatists’ Function?Australasian Journal of Philosophy 101 (3): 653-669. 2023.Functions play an important role in neo-pragmatism. This paper advances neo-pragmatism’s prospects by investigating how functions are to be understood on this account. It argues that prominent ways of understanding functions do not suit neo-pragmatists’ meta-semantic commitments or their preferred methodology. It then presents an account that fits both, based on Laura and François Schroeter’s theory of rationalizing self-interpretation. On this account, a term’s function is what it allows us to …Read more
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48How to Have Your Quasi-Cake and Quasi-Eat It TooCanadian Journal of Philosophy 51 (3): 204-220. 2021.Quasi-realism prominently figures in the expressivist research program. However, many complain that it has become increasingly unclear what exactly quasi-realism involves. This paper offers clarification. It argues that we need to distinguish two distinctive views that might be and have been pursued under the label “quasi-realism”: conciliatory expressivism and quasi-realism properly so-called. Of these, only conciliatory expressivism is a genuinely meta-ethical project, while quasi-realism is a…Read more
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43Instrumental RobotsScience and Engineering Ethics 26 (6): 3121-3141. 2020.Advances in artificial intelligence research allow us to build fairly sophisticated agents: robots and computer programs capable of acting and deciding on their own. These systems raise questions about who is responsible when something goes wrong—when such systems harm or kill humans. In a recent paper, Sven Nyholm has suggested that, because current AI will likely possess what we might call “supervised agency”, the theory of responsibility for individual agency is the wrong place to look for an…Read more
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61Normative disagreement: a functional account for inferentialistsPhilosophical Studies 178 (2): 617-637. 2020.There was a time when meta-ethical expressivism seemed to be the only game in town for meta-ethical non-representationalists. In recent years, though, meta-ethical inferentialism has emerged as a promising non-representationalist alternative. So far, however, inferentialists lack something that would really allow them to draw level with expressivists. This is an explanation for the distinctive difference between normative and descriptive vocabulary when it comes to disagreement—something express…Read more
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658Epistemic Judgement and MotivationPhilosophical Quarterly 70 (281): 738-758. 2020.Is there an epistemic analogue of moral motivational internalism? The answer to this question has implications for our understanding of the nature of epistemic normativity. For example, some philosophers have argued from claims that epistemic judgement is not necessarily motivating to the view that epistemic judgement is not normative. This paper examines the options for spelling out an epistemic analogue of moral motivational internalism. It is argued that the most promising approach connects e…Read more
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35Disagreeing about who we areInquiry: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Philosophy 63 (2): 185-208. 2020.ABSTRACTOne argument that has been suggested for conventionalism about personal identity is that it captures that certain disagreements about personal identity seem irresolvable, without being committed to the view that these disagreements are merely verbal. In this paper, I will take the considerations about disagreement used to motivate conventionalism seriously. However, I will use them to motivate a very different, novel, and as yet unexplored view about personal identity. This is the view t…Read more
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27Disagreeing about who we areInquiry: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Philosophy 63 (2): 185-208. 2020.One argument that has been suggested for conventionalism about personal identity is that it captures that certain disagreements about personal identity seem irresolvable, without being committed to the view that these disagreements are merely verbal. In this paper, I will take the considerations about disagreement used to motivate conventionalism seriously. However, I will use them to motivate a very different, novel, and as yet unexplored view about personal identity. This is the view that pers…Read more
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209Betterness of permissibilityPhilosophical Studies 177 (9): 2451-2469. 2020.It is often assumed that morally permissible acts are morally better than impermissible acts. We call this claim Betterness of Permissibility. Yet, we show that some striking counterexamples show that the claim’s truth cannot be taken for granted. Furthermore, even if Betterness of Permissibility is true, it is unclear why. Apart from appeals to its intuitive plausibility, no arguments in favour of the condition exist. We fill this lacuna by identifying two fundamental conditions that jointly en…Read more
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21Matti Eklund: Choosing Normative Concepts: Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018. Hardback € 45,12. 240 ppEthical Theory and Moral Practice 22 (1): 251-253. 2019.
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112Moral Responsibility Without Personal Identity?Erkenntnis 86 (1): 39-58. 2018.Moral responsibility seems to presuppose personal identity. However, there are problems with this view, raised by Derek Parfit’s arguments for the view that personal identity isn’t what matters for our practical concerns. While Parfit discusses moral responsibility only in passing, the problems that arise for the connection between moral responsibility and personal identity have recently been sharpened by David Shoemaker. This paper defends the claim that moral responsibility presupposes persona…Read more
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21The Frege-Geach Objection to Expressivism, Structurally AnsweredJournal of Ethics and Social Philosophy 6 (2): 1-7. 2012.No abstract.
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Zwecke und Mittel in einer natürlichen Welt – Instrumentelle Rationalität als Problem für den Naturalismus? (review)Zeitschrift für Philosophische Forschung 65 (3). 2011.
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565Expressivism, Belief, and All ThatJournal of Philosophy 114 (4): 189-207. 2017.Meta-ethical expressivism was traditionally seen as the view that normative judgements are not beliefs. Recently, quasi-realists have argued, via a minimalist conception of “belief”, that expressivism is fully compatible with normative judgements being beliefs. This maneuver is successful, however, only if quasi-realists have really offered an expressivist-friendly account of belief that captures all platitudes characterizing belief. But, quasi-realists’ account has a crucial gap, namely how to …Read more
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5Thought-experiments, disagreement and moral realismGrazer Philosophische Studien 80 (1): 245-252. 2010.
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105Expressivism, meaning, and all thatCanadian Journal of Philosophy 48 (3-4): 337-356. 2018.It has recently been suggested that meta-normative expressivism is best seen as a meta-semantic, rather than a semantic view. One strong motivation for this is that expressivism becomes, thereby, compatible with truth-conditional semantics. While this approach is promising, however, many of its details are still unexplored. One issue that still needs to be explored in particular, is what accounts of propositional contents are open to meta-semantic expressivists. This paper makes progress on this…Read more
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115Revolutionary ExpressivismRatio 26 (4): 428-449. 2013.While the meta-ethical error theory has been of philosophical interest for some time now, only recently a debate has emerged about the question what is to be done if the error theory turns out to be true. This paper argues for a novel answer to this question, namely revolutionary expressivism: if the error theory is true, we should become expressivists. Additionally, the paper explores certain important but largely ignored methodological issues that arise for reforming definitions generally and …Read more
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166What is the Problem with Fundamental Moral Error?Australasian Journal of Philosophy 93 (1): 161-165. 2015.Quasi-realists argue that meta-ethical expressivism is fully compatible with the central assumptions underlying ordinary moral practice. In a recent paper, Andy Egan has developed a vexing challenge for this project, arguing that expressivism is incompatible with central assumptions about error in moral judgments. In response, Simon Blackburn has argued that Egan's challenge fails, because Egan reads the expressivist as giving an account of moral error, rather than an account of judgments about …Read more
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235Expressivism, Subjectivism and Moral DisagreementThought: A Journal of Philosophy 1 (1): 71-78. 2012.One worry about metaethical expressivism is that it reduces to some form of subjectivism. This worry is enforced by subjectivists who argue that subjectivism can explain certain phenomena thought to support expressivism equally well. Recently, authors have started to suggest that subjectivism can take away what has often been seen as expressivism's biggest explanatory advantage, namely expressivism's ability to explain the possibility of moral disagreement. In this paper, I will give a response …Read more
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19Normative bedrock: Response-dependence, rationality and reasons by Joshua Gert (review)Analysis 74 (1): 176-178. 2014.
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28Expressivism and Mind-Dependence: Distinct ExistencesJournal of Moral Philosophy 10 (4). 2013.Despite the efforts of meta-ethical expressivists to rebut such worries, one objection raised over and over again against expressivism is that, if the theory is true, matters of morality must be mind-dependent in some objectionable way. This paper develops an argument which not only shows that this is and cannot be the case, but also – and perhaps more importantly – offers a diagnosis why philosophers are nevertheless so often led to think otherwise.
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28Chrisman, Matthew. The Meaning of ‘Ought’. Beyond Descriptivism and Expressivism in Metaethics. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016. 260 pp. ISBN 978-0-19-936300-1. £41.99 (review)Ethical Theory and Moral Practice 20 (1): 197-200. 2017.
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81Do Expressivists Have an Attitude Problem?Ethics 123 (3): 479-507. 2013.One objection that has been raised for meta-ethical expressivism is that expressivists must give an account of the nature of the attitude which constitutes moral thinking, but that any expressivist account that attempts to do seems to fail. Call this objection the “moral attitude problem.” In this article I suggest a strategy for expressivists to escape this problem: I argue that the moral attitude problem is a problem that arises not only for expressivists but also for meta-ethical cognitivists…Read more
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101Expressivism and Mind-DependenceJournal of Moral Philosophy 11 (6): 750-764. 2014.Despite the efforts of meta-ethical expressivists to rebut such worries, one objection raised over and over again against expressivism is that, if the theory is true, matters of morality must be mind-dependent in some objectionable way. This paper develops an argument which not only shows that this is and cannot be the case, but also – and perhaps more importantly – offers a diagnosis why philosophers are nevertheless so often led to think otherwise.
Sebastian Köhler
Frankfurt School of Finance & Management
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Frankfurt School of Finance & ManagementAssistant Professor
Areas of Specialization
Meta-Ethics |
Value Theory |
Areas of Interest
2 more
Value Theory |
Epistemology |
Philosophy of Language |
Philosophy of Mind |
Normative Ethics |
Meta-Ethics |
Applied Ethics |