Seungsoo Lee

Normative realism is the view that there are ought facts, i.e. facts about what we ought to do. A recent influential challenge to normative realism, raised separately by Justin Clarke-Doane and Matti Eklund, argues that ought facts—even if they exist—are inert in the sense that they cannot tell us what to do. The ground for this challenge is the epistemic possibility of a normative pluriverse, that is, the epistemic possibility of there being not only ought facts but also ought-like facts. I counter this challenge by showing the inconsistency, and thus the epistemic impossibility, of a normative pluriverse. I do so mainly by revealing a certain constraint on ought-likeness.

According to a prominent family of theories of blameworthiness, quality of will theories, a person is blameworthy for an action if and only if, and to the degree that, her will manifested in that action is bad. A puzzle for such theories is that (the degree of) blameworthiness appears to be affected by several factors beyond how bad the manifested will is. Among such factors are certain types of incompetence of the agent, the outcome of the action, the developmental history of the agent (e.g., an unfortunate upbringing), and the time between action and blame. I defend a novel account of the nature of blame by appeal to its unique capacity to explain away these puzzling intuitions in a unified way. I argue that the account, in addition to being independently plausible, allows us to view those intuitions as products of a systematic yet understandable confusion between the issue of blameworthiness and some other separate issue.