Sharon Street

This chapter argues that theism — understood as the position that there is a God in the sense of an omniscient, omnipotent, and morally perfect being — leads to a crippling normative skepticism and therefore must be rejected. First it argues that if theism is true, then (as the saying goes) ‘everything happens for a reason.’ Second, that if everything happens for a reason, then we are hopeless judges of what reasons there are — indeed, to such an extent that if we are theists and some horrendous evil starts to unfold in front of us, then we should be in doubt as to whether there is any good reason for us to try to stop it from happening. Since this conclusion is unacceptable, we must abandon theism. This chapter suggests the view that atheism emerges as the most plausible _moral_ theory.

This chapter accepts for the sake of argument Ronald Dworkin’s point that the only viable form of normative skepticism is internal, and develops an internal skeptical argument directed specifically at normative realism. There is a striking and puzzling coincidence between normative judgments that are true, and normative judgments that causal forces led us to believe—a practical/theoretical puzzle to which the constructivist view has a solution. Normative realists have no solution, but are driven to conclude that we are probably hopeless at recognizing the independent normative truths they posit. Since this is an unacceptable conclusion, we must conclude that normative realism is false. Drawing on evolutionary considerations, it is explained why this internal skeptical argument does not carry over to our knowledge of objects in our manifest surroundings, and why the challenge does not depend on any assumption that the epistemology of the normative domain must be a causal one.

Parfit’s attempt to supply an adequate epistemology for his objectivist theory of normative reasons rests on a conflation of the thesis _that there are normative reasons_ with the thesis _that there are robustly mind-independent normative reasons_. An _objectivist_ about normative reasons must hold not only that there are normative reasons, but that there are robustly mind-independent ones, and that’s where the epistemological problems enter in. Parfit’s defense of objectivist over subjectivist theories of normative reasons, I argue, rests on a subtle but systematic failure to recognize that one can be a subjectivist without being a nihilist, and that objectivism of the strong sort he defends is not the only alternative to nihilism. And so we’d better hope, since objectivism of the strong sort he defends has no acceptable epistemology.

Quasi-realism about normativity is an ambitious attempt to have one's cake and eat it too in metaethics. The cake in question is an uncompromising naturalism that disavows anything metaphysically or epistemologically mysterious. Eating it consists in being able to go on saying all the things that ordinary realists about normativity say. This chapter argues that quasi-realists can't have it both ways. They must choose between a naturalistically palatable understanding of the nature and origins of normative judgment, on the one hand, and affirmations of the mind-independence of value, on the other. Quasi-realism—understood as an attempt to circumvent this choice and secure all the benefits of realism with none of the costs—fails. Moreover, even though one may in principle be an expressivist without being a quasi-realist, once quasi-realism's failure becomes clear, it is no longer obvious what advantages are to be gained from being an expressivist.

Christine M. Korsgaard has had a profound influence on moral philosophy over the past forty years. Through her writing and teaching she has developed a distinctive, rigorous, and historically informed way of thinking about ethics, agency, and the normative dimension of human life more generally. The twelve original essays in this volume are written in her honor on the occasion of her retirement from teaching. They engage questions that recur in her work: Why are we obligated to do what morality demands? What features of our nature make us subject to moral obligation? What does it mean to be autonomous and responsible for what we do? What do we owe to nonhuman animals? Contributors include Stephen Darwall, Kyla Ebels-Duggan, Barbara Herman, Richard Moran, Japa Pallikkathayil, Faviola Rivera-Castro, T.M. Scanlon, Tamar Schapiro, Sharon Street, David Sussman, Sigrún Svavarsdóttir, and David Velleman. These essays shed light on Korsgaard's own views while staking out provocative new positions on the topics that feature centrally in her own work.

This chapter accepts for the sake of argument Ronald Dworkin’s point that the only viable form of normative skepticism is internal, and develops an internal skeptical argument directed specifically at normative realism. There is a striking and puzzling coincidence between normative judgments that are true, and normative judgments that causal forces led us to believe—a practical/theoretical puzzle to which the constructivist view has a solution. Normative realists have no solution, but are driven to conclude that we are probably hopeless at recognizing the independent normative truths they posit. Since this is an unacceptable conclusion, we must conclude that normative realism is false. Drawing on evolutionary considerations, it is explained why this internal skeptical argument does not carry over to our knowledge of objects in our manifest surroundings, and why the challenge does not depend on any assumption that the epistemology of the normative domain must be a causal one.

This paper explores two questions in moral philosophy that might at first seem unrelated. The first question is practical. While it’s not a truth we like to contemplate, each of us faces the eventual loss of everyone and everything we love. Is there a way to live in full awareness of that fact without falling into anxiety or depression, or resorting to one form or another of forgetfulness, denial or numbing out? The second question is metaethical. Is it possible to vindicate a strong form of ethical objectivity without positing anything metaphysically or epistemologically mysterious? In this paper, I sketch a partially Buddhist-inspired metaethical view that would, if it could be made to work, give a positive answer to both questions. The overall view is too much to defend in one paper, so I focus on developing one limited part of it. I begin by characterizing the general constructivist strategy for vindicating the objectivity of ethics. After briefly discussing Christine Korsgaard’s Kantian implementation of the strategy, I suggest an alternative implementation. I explore the idea that every agent necessarily faces what I call the problem of attachment and loss. I close with some speculative remarks about why, even though the problem of attachment and loss presents itself in a different substantive guise to each individual agent, it is still possible that the best solution to the problem is universal, and involves taking up an ethical perspective on the world.

The driving question behind the dissertation is how we are to understand the nature of normativity, and in particular how we are to understand it in a way that is consistent with all of the various causal explanations---Darwinian and otherwise---of why we make the normative judgments we do. I explore this larger question by way of the pursuit of two more limited aims. ;The first aim is negative: it is to raise some questions, from a philosophical perspective informed by evolutionary biology, about the tenability of realism about reasons. According to this view, there are truths about reasons that hold independently of all of our judgments about reasons. Contemporary versions of this view claim to be compatible with natural science. I challenge this claim by arguing that realism about reasons is incompatible with the best evolutionary explanations of why human beings tend to make some normative judgments rather than others. Targets of my argument include normative realism , as well as ethical naturalism . ;The dissertation's second aim is positive: it is to begin developing a theory of what it is for someone to have a reason. I outline a version of constructivism about reasons, proposing that the fact that X is a reason to Y for some agent A is constituted by the fact that the judgment that X is a reason to Y withstands scrutiny from the standpoint of A's other judgments about reasons. This view is a species of anti-realism, since it construes truths about reasons as ultimately depending upon our judgments about reasons. Throughout the thesis, my concern is with the nature of normative reasons---that is to say, reasons in the sense of considerations that count in favor of or justify actions, beliefs, feelings, and so on

Most agree that when it comes to so-called 'first-order' normative ethics and political philosophy, constructivist views are a powerful family of positions. When it comes to metaethics, however, there is serious disagreement about what, if anything, constructivism has to contribute. In this paper I argue that constructivist views in ethics include not just a family of substantive normative positions, but also a distinct and highly attractive metaethical view. I argue that the widely accepted 'proceduralist characterization' of constructivism in ethics is inadequate, and I propose what I call the 'practical standpoint characterization' in its place. I then offer a general taxonomy of constructivist positions in ethics. Since constructivism's standing as a family of substantive normative positions is relatively uncontested, I devote the remainder of the paper to addressing skeptics' worries about the distinctiveness of constructivism understood as a metaethical view. I compare and contrast constructivism with three other standard metaethical positions with which it is often confused or mistakenly thought to be compatible: realism; naturalist reductions in terms of an ideal response; and expressivism. In discussing the contrast with expressivism, I explain the sense in which, according to the constructivist, the distinction between substantive normative ethics and metaethics breaks down. I conclude by distinguishing between two importantly different debates about the mind-dependence of value. I argue that a failure to make this distinction is part of what explains why the possibility of constructivism as a metaethical view is often overlooked.

Creatures inveterately wrong in their inductions have a pathetic but praiseworthy tendency to die before reproducing their kind.- Quine (1969)We think that some facts - for example, the fact that someone is suffering, or the fact that all previously encountered tigers were carnivorous – supply us with normative reasons for action and belief. The former fact, we think, is a reason to help the suffering person; the latter fact is a reason to believe that the next tiger we see will also be carnivorous. But how is the reason-giving status of such facts best understood? In particular, is it best understood as ultimately “conferred” upon these facts by our own evaluative attitudes, or do at least some facts possess normative reason-giving status in a way that is robustly independent of our attitudes? This is the modern, secular version of Plato's “Euthyphro question” - couched here in the philosophically useful, though not essential, language of normative reasons.

Contemporary realist theories of value claim to be compatible with natural science. In this paper, I call this claim into question by arguing that Darwinian considerations pose a dilemma for these theories. The main thrust of my argument is this. Evolutionary forces have played a tremendous role in shaping the content of human evaluative attitudes. The challenge for realist theories of value is to explain the relation between these evolutionary influences on our evaluative attitudes, on the one hand, and the independent evaluative truths that realism posits, on the other. Realism, I argue, can give no satisfactory account of this relation. On the one hand, the realist may claim that there is no relation between evolutionary influences on our evaluative attitudes and independent evaluative truths. But this claim leads to the implausible skeptical result that most of our evaluative judgements are off track due to the distorting pressure of Darwinian forces. The realist’s other option is to claim that there is a relation between evolutionary influences and independent evaluative truths, namely that natural selection favored ancestors who were able to grasp those truths. But this account, I argue, is unacceptable on scientific grounds. Either way, then, realist theories of value prove unable to accommodate the fact that Darwinian forces have deeply influenced the content of human values. After responding to three objections, the third of which leads me to argue against a realist understanding of the disvalue of pain, I conclude by sketching how antirealism is able to sidestep the dilemma I have presented. Antirealist theories of value are able to offer an alternative account of the relation between evolutionary forces and evaluative facts — an account that allows us to reconcile our understanding of evaluative truth with our understanding of the many non-rational causes that have played a role in shaping our evaluative judgements.