Gunnar Björnsson

Metaethical Contextualism Defended

We defend a contextualist account of normative judgments as relativized both to (i) information and to (ii) standards or ends against recent objections that turn on practices of normative disagreement. Niko Kolodny and John MacFarlane argue that information-relative contextualism cannot accommodate the connection between deliberation and advice. In response, we suggest that they misidentify the basic concerns of deliberating agents, which are not to settle the truth of particular propositions but to promote certain values. For pragmatic reasons, semantic assessments of normative claims sometimes are evaluations of propositions other than those asserted. Other writers have raised parallel objections to standard-relative contextualism, particularly about moral claims; we argue for a parallel solution.

Joint Responsibility without Individual Control: Applying the Explanation Hypothesis

This paper introduces a new family of cases where agents are jointly morally responsible for outcomes over which they have no individual control, a family that resists standard ways of understanding outcome responsibility. First, the agents in these cases do not individually facilitate the outcomes and would not seem individually responsible for them if the other agents were replaced by non-agential causes. This undermines attempts to understand joint responsibility as overlapping individual responsibility; the responsibility in question is essentially joint. Second, the agents involved in these cases are not aware of each other’s existence and do not form a social group. This undermines attempts to understand joint responsibility in terms of actual or possible joint action or joint intentions, or in terms of other social ties. Instead, it is argued that intuitions about joint responsibility are best understood given the Explanation Hypothesis, according to which a group of agents are seen as jointly responsible for outcomes that are suitably explained by their motivational structures, invoked collectively: something bad happened because they didn’t care enough; something good happened because their dedication was extraordinary. One important consequence of the proposed account is that responsibility for outcomes of collective action is a deeply normative matter.

Internalists Beware—we Might all be Amoralists!

Standard motivational internalism is the claim that by a priori or conceptual necessity, a psychological state is a moral opinion only if it is suitably related to moral motivation. Many philosophers, the authors of this paper included, have assumed that this claim is supported by intuitions to the effect that amoralists—people not suitably related to such motivation—lack moral opinions proper. In this paper we argue that this assumption is mistaken, seeming plausible only because defenders of standard internalism have failed to consider the possibility that our own actual moral practice as a whole is one where moral opinions fail to motivate in the relevant way. To show this, we present a cynical hypothesis according to which the tendency for people to act in accordance with their moral opinions ultimately stems from a desire to appear moral. This hypothesis is most likely false, but we argue, on both intuitive and methodological grounds, that it is conceptually possible that it correctly describes our actual moral opinions. If correct, this refutes standard motivational internalism. Further, we propose an explanation of why many have seemingly internalist intuitions. Such intuitions, we argue, stem from the fact that standard amoralist cases allow (or even suggest) that we apprehend the putative moral opinions of amoralists as radically different from how we understand actual paradigmatic moral opinions. Given this, it is reasonable to understand them as not being moral opinions proper. However, since these intuitions rest on substantial a posteriori assumptions about actual moral opinions, they provide no substantial a priori constraints on theories of moral judgment.

Enoch’s Defense of Robust Meta-Ethical Realism

Taking Morality Seriously is David Enoch’s book-length defense of meta-ethical and meta-normative non-naturalist realism. After describing Enoch’s position and outlining the argumentative strategy ...

Normative Responsibilities: Structure and Sources

Normative responsibilities have a central role in everyday moral thinking, largely because they are taken to ground requirements to act and react in certain ways. If parents are responsible for the ...

Strawson on ‘if’ and ⊃

Abstract This paper is concerned with Sir Peter Strawson’s critical discussion of Paul Grice’s defence of the material implication analysis of conditionals. It argues that although Strawson’s own ‘consequentialist’ suggestion concerning the meaning of conditionals cannot be correct, a related and radically contextualist account is able to both account for the phenomena that motivated Strawson’s consequentialism, and to undermine the material implication analysis by providing a simpler account of the processes that we go through when interpreting conditionals.

Outsourcing the deep self: Deep self discordance does not explain away intuitions in manipulation arguments

Abstract According to manipulation arguments for incompatibilism, manipulation might undermine an agent’s responsibility even when the agent satisfies plausible compatibilist conditions on responsibility. According to Sripada (2012), however, empirical data suggest that people take manipulation to undermine responsibility largely because they think that the manipulated act is in discord with the agent’s “deep self,” thus violating the plausible compatibilist condition of deep self concordance. This paper defends Sripada’s general methodological approach but presents data that strongly suggest that, contrary to Sripada’s contention, most of the effect of manipulation on attributions of moral responsibility is unmediated by worries about inadequate information or deep self discordance. Instead, it depends largely on worries that the action is ultimately explained by factors outside the agent’s control, just as proponents of manipulation arguments have proposed. More generally, data suggest that judgments of deep self discordance are themselves explained by worries about responsibility, and that the everyday notion of what an agent wants or is “deep down” is sensitive not only to the agent’s internal psychological structure, but also its source. This casts some doubt on recent claims about the explanatory role of deep self judgments.

'Must', 'Ought' and the Structure of Standards

This paper concerns the semantic difference between strong and weak necessity modals. First we identify a number of explananda: their well-known intuitive difference in strength between ‘must’ and ‘ought’ as well as differences in connections to probabilistic considerations and acts of requiring and recommending. Here we argue that important extant analyses of the semantic differences, though tailored to account for some of these aspects, fail to account for all. We proceed to suggest that the difference between ’ought’ and ’must’ lies in how they relate to scalar and binary standards. Briefly put, must(ϕ) says that among the relevant alternatives, ϕ is selected by the relevant binary standard, whereas ought(ϕ) says that among the relevant alternatives, ϕ is selected by the relevant scale. Given independently plausible assumptions about how standards are provided by context, this explains the relevant differences discussed.

Contextualism in Ethics

There are various ways in which context matters in ethics. Most clearly, the context in which an action is performed might determine whether the action is morally right: though it is often wrong no ...The category of natural resources is commonly taken to comprise anything - whether matter or energy – which is potentially useful to human beings, but which was not created by human beings. All of us require some land to stand upon, air to breathe, and water to drink, and in that sense natural resources are key to human survival. Moreover - though doing so is not always easy - individuals or communities lucky enough to command larger than average supplies of valuable resources such as oil or gold may manage to convert their good fortune into great wealth. Because the ownership of natural resources can be so consequential for peoples’ wellbeing, philosophers have argued for centuries about just how the pattern of resource ownership ought, morally speaking, to be constrained. This essay aims to provide an overview of debates about the justice or injustice of patterns of resource ownership. First, we consider ongoing debates about the circumstances in which individual agents can come to be the owners of the world’s natural resources. Second, we consider the way in which arguments about natural resource ownership have come to play an important role in more recent debates about the territorial rights of states.The rights of indigenous peoples (or indigenous rights) are those rights aspired to, claimed, held, exercised, or enforced by or on behalf of the indigenous peoples of the world (Connolly 2009). The United Nations has estimated the worldwide population of indigenous people at around 370 million, inhabiting 90 countries across all the regions of the world (United Nations 2009). In 2007, the UN General Assembly adopted the Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples. This agreement codified many of the rights asserted by the worlds indigenous groups over the past few decades and offered those groups a clear and authoritative moral and legal basis upon which to pursue their ongoing struggle for recognition and justice (United Nations 2008; see Identity, Politics of; Recognition; Reconciliation). The promulgation of the Declaration also signaled the increased importance within national and international moral, political, and legal discourse of issues surrounding the status and needs of indigenous peoples. Keywords: colonialism; ethnicity and culture; government, politics, and law; human rights; justice; law; legal and political; minorities; multiculturalism; politics