Philip Stratton-Lake

How to Deal with Evil Demons: Comment on Rabinowicz and Rønnow‐Rasmussen*

According to T. M. Scanlon’s buck-passing account of value (BPV), to be good is to have properties that give us reason to have a certain positive attitude toward the bearer of those properties. The buck-passing account of value is meant as a definition of value. If this definition is true, then the following biconditional will be true: X is good ↔ X has properties (other than its being good) that give us reason to have a certain pro-attitude toward X.

On W. D. Ross’s “The Basis of Objective Judgments in Ethics”*

In his 1927 article “The Basis of Objective Judgements in Ethics” Ross quickly moves from the question of the basis of judgements in ethics to the issue of the nature of the things those judgements are about, namely, rightness and goodness, and whether such judgments are true. Here I am interested in what he says about judgments and their grounds, as I think this reveals interesting aspects of, and possibilities for, his intuitionist epistemology. Ross begins by distinguishing the psychological from the logical basis of judgment. The former is a merely causal, psychological explanation of our judgment ðe.g., prejudices, hopes, fearsÞ, rather than a justification of it in terms of reasons. The logical basis of a judgment is what warrants it. If the judgement is inferential, then its justification will be the premises from which the judgment is inferred. Ross goes on to claim that if the judgment is direct, then the question of its ðlogicalÞ basis can have no meaning. For inferential judgments “the question, What is its basis? is a significant question, since it may not be clear what the premises are that warrant a given inferential judgment” ð114Þ. But since direct judgments are not based on premises, we cannot ask what their premises are and so cannot ask what their basis is.

Necessarily Coextensive Predicates and Reduction

Streumer argues that all normative properties are descriptive properties. His first argument is based on the principle that necessarily coextensive predicates ascribe the same property (N), and the claim that there is a descriptive predicate that is necessarily coextensive with normative predicates. From this Streumer concludes that normative properties are identical with descriptive properties. I argue that, even if we accept (N), this conclusion does not follow. Normative properties could only be descriptive properties if there is some descriptive way in which all instances of normative properties are similar. But Streumer does not show that, and the prospects for doing so are, I believe, not good. His second argument rests on the premise that the nature of normative properties cannot depend on which first order normative theory is true. I argue that this premise is false, and that the argument for it does not sit comfortably with (N).