Stephen Finlay

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.

The error in the error theory

Moral error theory of the kind defended by J. L. Mackie and Richard Joyce is premised on two claims: (1) that moral judgements essentially presuppose that moral value has absolute authority, and (2) that this presupposition is false, because nothing has absolute authority. This paper accepts (2) but rejects (1). It is argued first that (1) is not the best explanation of the evidence from moral practice, and second that even if it were, the error theory would still be mistaken, because the assumption does not contaminate the meaning or truth-conditions of moral claims. These are determined by the essential application conditions for moral concepts, which are relational rather than absolute. An analogy is drawn between moral judgements and motion judgements.

What ought probably means, and why you can't detach it

Some intuitive normative principles raise vexing ‘detaching problems’ by their failure to license modus ponens. I examine three such principles (a self-reliance principle and two different instrumental principles) and recent stategies employed to resolve their detaching problems. I show that solving these problems necessitates postulating an indefinitely large number of senses for ‘ought’. The semantics for ‘ought’ that is standard in linguistics offers a unifying strategy for solving these problems, but I argue that an alternative approach combining an end-relational theory of normativity with a comparative probabilistic semantics for ‘ought’ provides a more satisfactory solution.

Errors Upon Errors: A Reply to Joyce

In his response to my paper ‘The Error in the Error Theory’ criticizing his and J. L. Mackies moral error theory, Richard Joyce finds my treatment of his position inaccurate and my interpretation of morality implausible. In this reply I clarify my objection, showing that it retains its force against their error theory, and I clarify my interpretation of morality, showing that Joyces objections miss their mark.

Against All Reason? Scepticism about the Instrumental Norm

A naturalistic project descended from Hume seeks to explain ‘ought’ and normativity as a product of motivational states such as desires and aversions.1 Following Kant, rationalists reject this thesis, holding that ‘ought’ rather expresses a command of reason or intellect independent of desires. On Hume’s view the only genuine form of practical reason is theoretical reason operating in the service of desire, as in calculation of means to ends. Reason at most discovers normative requirements, which exist through the interrelation of subjective desires and objective world. The Humean desiredependence view of the source of normativity is commonly associated with instrumentalism, an influential theory of normative content according to which agents ought always and only to act so as to optimise satisfaction of their own desires. But rationalists (including Thomas Nagel, Jean Hampton, and Christine Korsgaard) have recently argued that proponents of desiredependence are not entitled even to this instrumentalist ‘ought’ (see also Wallace, 2003). Instrumentalism holds that all normativity derives from the instrumental norm: approximately, the principle that one ought to take the means to one’s ends, or

Motivation to the Means

Rationalists including Nagel and Korsgaard argue that motivation to the means to our desired ends cannot be explained by appeal to the desire for the end. They claim that a satisfactory explanation of this motivational connection must appeal to a faculty of practical reason motivated in response to desire-independent norms of reason. This paper builds on ideas in the work of Hume and Donald Davidson to demonstrate how the desire for the end is sufficient for explaining motivation to the means. Desiring is analyzed as having motivation towards making the end so, which is analyzed as engaging in mental activity aimed at facilitating that end. I conclude that it is constitutive of an agent’s desiring an end that he is motivated towards what he believes to be means.

Price, A. W., Contextuality in Practical Reason, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008, xxxiv + 208, US

when, in the book, he acts against that ‘better’ judgment. In turning to some positive lessons from neuroscience, Levy assumes an account of responsibility requiring control and the capacity to exhibit good or ill will. Various conditions may excuse one from responsibility, and Levy believes neuroscience can help us discover when these conditions apply, citing as a leading example research on psychopaths, who, he claims, lack moral knowledge given that they conflate conventional and moral rules by believing that the latter are conventional. Levy thus argues that they should be excused from (full) responsibility: they can’t grasp the justification against certain actions—that they cause harm to others—and so can’t express ill will in the way a normal individual would. This is too quick, however. For one thing, failing the conventional/moral test doesn’t yet seem to undermine legal responsibility, which may require only that one recognize the relevant rules as conventional (as authoritydependent), even if one views all legal transgressions as equally serious (or unserious). All that may matter for legal responsibility is thus that one recognize that X is wrong/illegal, not why X is wrong/illegal. Second, even if one can’t grasp justifications against certain actions, that doesn’t yet mean one can’t express ill will in performing those actions. This is because the former requires a facility with a certain sort of moral reasons, whereas the latter requires only that one have genuine ends one is capable of expressing in action. The remaining chapters of the book are also philosophically rich. Chapter 8 is on self-deception, and Levy here develops and deploys his interpretation of cases of anosognosia—in which some stroke victims with partial paralysis both believe they’re paralysed and also deny they’re paralysed—as evidence against Alfred Mele’s deflationary construal of self-deception. In the final chapter, ‘The Neuroscience of Ethics’, Levy defends the methodology of ethical theory against deflationary accounts stemming from neuroscience’s exploration of the nature of moral intuitions. I learned a great deal from Levy’s book, and I recommend it highly to both novices and experts. Because of the clarity and extent of his arguments, there is plenty to engage with and for that reason alone it would make for a stimulating classroom resource.