Teemu Toppinen

This chapter outlines an expressivist account of the meaning of normative sentences, according to which normative sentences express higher-order (or relational) states of being in certain kinds of complex states consisting of both desire-like states (or ‘pro-attitudes’) and non-normative beliefs. First, this kind of higher-order state view or higher-order state expressivism (cf. relational expressivism) is introduced (section 1). It is then argued that this view can exploit the resources that ecumenical expressivism is sometimes supposed to have for dealing with the Frege–Geach problem (section 2), and yet avoid the problems with the ecumenical view regarding validity, expression relation, and normative disagreement (sections 3, 4, and 5).

An action has moral worth when it’s a morally right action and when it is motivated in such a way that its being right is not accidental. When an action is, in this way, non-accidentally right, the agent is morally praiseworthy for doing the right thing. According to the _Right Reasons View_, an agent performs an action with moral worth, or is praiseworthy for doing the right thing, roughly to the extent that she does the right thing for reasons that make it right to act in this way (e.g., Arpaly, Markovits). According to another kind of view, actions with moral worth spring from the ‘motive of duty,’ or are based on the agent’s justified belief or knowledge that she ought to act in the relevant way (e.g., Sliwa, Johnson King). These are both attractive ideas. But given certain plausible assumptions, these ideas are in tension with each other. Chapter 9 suggests that the extent to which this is so depends on how the nature of moral thought is to be understood, and that certain forms of expressivism—relational expressivism, in particular—allow the pursuit of a reconciliatory approach.

Non-naturalism—roughly the view that normative properties and facts are _sui generis_—may be combined either with cognitivism (realist non-naturalism) or with non-cognitivism (quasi-realist non-naturalism). The chapter starts by explaining how the metaphysically necessary connections between the natural and the normative raise an explanatory challenge for realist non-naturalism, and how it is not at all obvious that quasi-realism offers a way of escaping the challenge. Having briefly explored different kinds of accounts of what it is to have thoughts concerning metaphysical necessity, it then proceeds to argue that once we understand the explanatory challenge in the light of a quasi-realist take on normative judgments, this challenge takes the shape of a first-order normative issue, and will be answerable by the quasi-realists’ lights. When it comes to explaining the necessary connections between the normative and the natural, all will be fine, it seems, if non-naturalists just go a little quasi.

This chapter examines pure expressivists’ prospects with regard to capturing the following form of motivational (or judgment) internalism: Necessarily, if one judges that φ-ing would be desirable, then, if one is rational, one is thereby also motivated to φ. A distinction is made between _first-order_ and _second-order views_. A first-order view about some type of normative judgment says that judgments of the relevant kind concerning some action, φ, are _at least in part_ desire-like attitudes (desiring, planning, being for) toward φ. A second-order view says that these judgments are not desire-like attitude toward φ, but rather toward something else, appropriately related to φ (second-order desires, say). It is argued that first-order views about judgments of desirability (e.g. Blackburn’s) offer a promising explanation for (Practicality), and that second-order views about such judgments (e.g. Gibbard’s) fail in this regard. These arguments generalize to judgments concerning what there is reason to do.

According to one form of rule consequentialism, RC, everyone ought to follow the rules whose universal acceptance would make things go best. According to one form of Kantian contractualism, KC, everyone ought to follow the rules whose universal acceptance everyone could rationally will. RC and KC are almost universally rejected on the basis of their appealing to universal acceptance rate. I argue that given the inclusion, into our value theory, of what Philip Pettit calls ‘robustly demanding goods’, RC and KC probably survive the most important objections of the relevant kind: the New Ideal World Objection and the Objection from Reprobates and Amoralists. If RC and KC can survive these objections, this is good news for those sympathetic to rule consequentialism and Kantian contractualism, as the alternative formulations of these views, which appeal to lower or variable acceptance rates, are widely agreed to face severe problems of their own.

I discuss Michael Smith’s recent case against the idea that the concept of a normative reason is unanalysable. Smith argues that, as a matter of conceptual fact, some fact, p, can only be a reason to believe that q, given that p provides evidence for the truth of q, and that this is best explained by the concept of a reason for belief being analysable in evidential terms. Given, then, that the concept of a reason is not a “ragbag,” reasons primitivism fails quite generally. I propose that reasons primitivists can make sense of this evidential constraint on reasons for belief if they adopt a suitable expressivist account of reasons judgements. I conclude by briefly considering a metaphysical version of Smith’s argument.

A common worry regarding normative supervenience theses is that they are easily trivialized unless we somehow restrict the set of descriptive base properties on which the normative properties supervene. The idea is that if all descriptive properties are included in the base, any two individuals that share all their base properties must be the same individual in the same world, from which it follows that they have the same normative properties. We argue that this trivial explanation for unrestricted normative supervenience fails. Moreover, we argue that even if it succeeded, this wouldn’t undermine the explanation challenges associated with normative supervenience.

Non-naturalism—roughly the view that normative properties and facts are sui generis—may be combined either with cognitivism or with non-cognitivism. The chapter starts by explaining how the metaphysically necessary connections between the natural and the normative raise an explanatory challenge for realist non-naturalism, and how it is not at all obvious that quasi-realism offers a way of escaping the challenge. Having briefly explored different kinds of accounts of what it is to have thoughts concerning metaphysical necessity, it then proceeds to argue that once we understand the explanatory challenge in the light of a quasi-realist take on normative judgments, this challenge takes the shape of a first-order normative issue, and will be answerable by the quasi-realists’ lights. When it comes to explaining the necessary connections between the normative and the natural, all will be fine, it seems, if non-naturalists just go a little quasi.

I argue that Jonas Olson’s argument from irreducible normativity is not a secure basis for an argument for error theory (section 1) and that a better basis is provided by the argument from supervenience, which has more bite against non-naturalist moral realism than Olson is willing to allow (section 2). I suggest there may be a view which can allow for the existence of irreducibly normative facts while remaining unaffected by the kinds of arguments that work against non-naturalist realism. This view is expressivism. Interestingly, James Dreier has recently suggested that expressivism may not escape these arguments. I very briefly outline (but do not pursue) possible response strategies for expressivists (section 3). I close by discussing Olson’s argument against expressivism. Olson suggests, somewhat surprisingly, that expressivism is a bad fit with a plausible evolutionary explanation of our moral thought. I argue that Olson’s argument does not succeed (section 4).

I explore the prospects of capturing and explaining, within a non-cognitivist framework, the enkratic principle of rationality, according to which rationality requires of N that, if N believes that she herself ought to perform an action, φ, N intends to φ. Capturing this principle involves making sense of both the possibility and irrationality of akrasia – of failing to intend in accordance with one’s ought thought. In the first section, I argue that the existing non-cognitivist treatments of enkrasia/akrasia by Allan Gibbard and Michael Ridge are not satisfying. In the second section, I propose that non-cognitivists should perhaps say roughly the following: to think that one ought to φ is to prefer φ-ing to the alternative courses of action, or to have a stronger desire to φ than to choose any alternative action. I outline an account of the strength of desire, which allows for the possibility of intending to act against one’s strongest desires, and makes it intelligible why rationality would nevertheless require that one’s strongest desires and intentions be aligned. This would allow the non-cognitivist to explain how akrasia is both possible and irrational. In the last section, I briefly suggest that this leaves non-cognitivists in a nice position in comparison to at least some of the competition, when it comes to capturing enkrasia.

In this paper the 'moral fetishism' argument originally presented by Michael Smith against moral judgment externalism is defended. I argue that only the internalist views on the relation of moral judgment and motivation can combine two attractive theses: first, that the morally admirable are motivated to act on the reasons they take to ground actions' being right, and second, that their virtuousness need not be diminished by their acting on their thinking something right. Lastly, some possibilities are envisaged for internalists in light of a worry to the effect that the argument, if successful, undermines the internalist theories, too.

Non-naturalism – roughly the view that normative properties and facts are sui generis and incompatible with a purely scientific worldview – faces a difficult challenge with regard to explaining why it is that the normative features of things supervene on their natural features. More specifically: non-naturalists have trouble explaining the necessitation relations, whatever they are, that hold between the natural and the normative. My focus is on Stephanie Leary's recent response to the challenge, which offers an attempted non-naturalism-friendly explanation for the supervenience of the normative on the natural by appealing to hybrid properties, the essences of which link them to both natural and sui generis normative properties in suitable ways. I argue that despite its ingenuity, Leary's solution fails. This is so, I claim, because there are no hybrid properties of the sort that her suggestion appeals to. If non-naturalists are to deal with the supervenience challenge, they will have to find another way of doing so.

Belief normativism is roughly the view that judgments about beliefs are normative judgments. Kathrin Glüer and Åsa Wikforss suggest that there are two ways one could defend this view: by appeal to what might be called ‘truth-norms’, or by appeal to what might be called ‘norms of rationality’ or ‘epistemic norms’. According to G&W, whichever way the normativist takes, she ends up being unable to account for the idea that the norms in question would guide belief formation. Plausibly, if belief normativism were true, the relevant norms would have to offer such guidance. I argue that G&W’s case against belief normativism is not successful. In section 1, I defend the idea that truth-norms can guide belief formation indirectly via epistemic norms. In section 2, I outline an account of how the epistemic norms might guide belief. Interestingly, this account may involve a commitment to a certain kind of expressivist view concerning judgments about epistemic norms

Many philosophers believe that judgments about propositional attitudes, or about which mental states are expressed by which sentences, are normative judgments. If this is so, then metanormative expressivism must be given expressivist treatment. This might seem to make expressivism self-defeating or worrisomely circular, or to frustrate the explanatory ambitions central to the view. I argue that recent objections along these lines to giving an expressivist account of expressivism are not successful. I shall also suggest that in order to deal with these worries, Dreier's influential response to the so-called ‘problem of creeping minimalism’ must be slightly revised