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Publications (96)
Many normative nonnaturalists find normative naturalism to be completely implausible. Naturalists and nonnaturalists agree, provided they are realists, that there are normative properties, such as moral ones. Naturalists hold that these properties are similar in all metaphysically important respects to properties that all would agree to be natural...
Ronald Dworkin charges that the error theory is a position in first-order moral theory that should be judged by the standards that are appropriately used in evaluating first-order theories. Perl and Schroeder contend that a “presuppositional error theory” can avoid Dworkin’s charge. On the presuppositional view, moral sentences, such as (1), “It is...
Legal Teleology seeks to embrace and to ground the most plausible tenets of both legal positivism and natural law theory. It is compatible with the positivist view that law consists at root in a social practice of a certain kind. Yet it also can accommodate at least some claims about the relation between law and morality that are advocated by oppon...
Evolutionary debunking arguments aim to undercut the epistemological status of our evaluative beliefs on the basis of the genesis of our belief‐forming tendencies. This paper addresses the issue whether responses to these arguments must be question‐begging. It argues for a pragmatic understanding of question‐beggingness, according to which whether...
The goal of this paper is to show that a cognitivist–externalist view about moral judgment is compatible with a key intuition that motivates non-cognitivist expressivism. This is the intuition that normative judgments have a close connection to action that ordinary “descriptive factual beliefs” do not have, or, as James Dreier has suggested, that p...
Recently, some philosophers have attempted to escape familiar challenges to orthodox nonnaturalist normative realism by abandoning the robust metaphysical commitments of the orthodox view. One such view is the ‘Non-Metaphysical Non-Naturalism’ or ‘Non-Realist Cognitivism’ proposed by Derek Parfit and a few others. The trouble is that, as it stands,...
Moral education is open to worries about indoctrination given the controversies there are about a wide range of ethical matters. I argue, however, that moral education is no more liable to being ‘indoctrinal’ than education in history or science. I begin by proposing an account of what indoctrination involves. I then note that moral education takes...
If we are going to understand morality, it is important to understand the nature of societies. What is fundamental to them? What is the glue that holds them together? What is the role of shared norm acceptance in constituting a society? Michael Bratman’s account of modest sociality in his book, Shared Agency, casts significant light on these issues...
What accounts for the offensive character of pejoratives and slurs, words like ‘kike’ and ‘nigger’? Is it due to a semantic feature of the words or to a pragmatic feature of their use? Is it due to a violation of a group’s desires to not be called by certain terms? Is it due to a violation of etiquette? According to one kind of view, pejoratives an...
The present text aims to make an examination of the varieties of moral naturalism, and for this it will examine some anti-naturalist and anti-realist arguments. It will also argue that existent theories can be considered on two dimensions, the metaphysical and epistemological dimension, and the dimension of motivation and normativity. In the first...
Moral and political philosophers commonly appeal to moral "intuitions" at crucial points in their reasoning. This chapter considers recent challenges to this practice-here referred to as "the Method"-based in empirical studies of moral intuitions. It contends that such studies do not justify radical or revisionary conclusions about the Method. A me...
This article considers whether we have moral duties that are owed directly to animals, or whether all duties regarding animals are derivative from duties we have to human beings. It maintains that we have moral duties directly toward nonhuman animals, not merely duties regarding them, and that this claim can be adequately grounded in the thesis of...
Many of the epistemic judgments we make are normative. We judge that we are justified to believe such and such. We judge that a certain belief is irrational or that another belief is so evidently correct that it would be irrational to deny it. We judge that certain things are known. These judgments are normative in much the way that our moral judgm...
Ethical naturalism is narrowly construed as the doctrine that there are moral properties and facts, at least some of which are natural properties and facts. Perhaps owing to its having faced, early on, intuitively forceful objections by eliminativists and non-naturalists, ethical naturalism has only recently become a central player in the debates a...
This comment addresses two issues that arise in Sacconi/Faillo/Ottone's essay. The first is the problem of compliance as it arises in social contract theory. The second is the problem of avoiding an incoherence that arises in the formulation of welfarist principles of distributive justice if these principles are taken to be concerned with the distr...
In his recent book, David Estlund argues that democratic states can be legitimate while epistocracy cannot be legitimate. His argument rests on his “Qualified Acceptability Requirement,” according to which a state is legitimate only if its coercive enforcement of law can be justified on a basis that is acceptable to all possible qualified points of...
Meta-ethical constructivism is sometimes viewed as an anti-realist alternative to moral realism. It is thought to avoid some of the difficulties of realism without lapsing into either an error theory or non-cognitivism. I will contend, however, that this is a misleading way to think of the matter. The distinction between constructivism and the kind...
According to a thesis that is familiar from the Kantian tradition, moral obligations are a source of “authoritative reasons”
– reasons it would be “irrational to ignore.” This thesis has been thought incompatible with moral naturalism and it has been
a premise in arguments both for the moral error theory and for moral constructivism. I reject the t...
The central philosophical challenge of metaethics is to account for the normativity of moral judgment without abandoning or seriously compromising moral realism. In Morality in a Natural World, David Copp defends a version of naturalistic moral realism that can accommodate the normativity of morality. Moral naturalism is often thought to face speci...
David Braybrooke argues that the core of the natural law theory of Thomas Aquinas survived in the work of Hobbes, Locke, Hume, and Rousseau. Much to my surprise, Braybrooke argues as well that David Copp’s society-centered moral theory is a secular version of this same natural law theory. Braybrooke makes a good case that there is an important idea...
This article represents the current state of debate on the wide range of issues discussed in moral philosophy. It focuses on theoretical questions that can arise in thinking about any practical issue as well as general moral questions of theoretical importance. Applied ethics is an area of moral philosophy that focuses on concrete moral issues, inc...
A person who sees that she morally ought to do something might wonder whether it would make sense for her to do it. Perhaps Aurelia is on a crowded bus, standing next to an old man whose wallet is almost falling out of his pocket. She says, “I see that the morally right thing would be to warn this man to take care of his wallet. But why should I do...
This symposium contribution discusses some issues of moral realism and antirealism involved in the metaethics of Hilary Putnam's book Ethics without Ontology.
The Oxford Handbook of Ethical Theory is a major new reference work in ethical theory, consisting of commissioned essays by leading moral philosophers. The handbook is divided into two parts, mirroring the field. The first part treats meta-ethical theory, which deals with theoretical questions about morality and moral judgment, including questions...
In his important new book, Russ Shafer-Landau takes the defense of moral non-naturalism to a new level of sophistication. 1 The key doctrines he aims to defend are that moral properties are sui generis and non-natural, and that moral predicates are not analyzable in naturalistic terms (p. 66). In the course of defending these doctrines, he deals wi...
There are striking and disturbing differences in the life prospects of people living in different countries. Most alarming is the fact that many people in many countries are unable to meet their basic needs.1 In some cases basic physical needs are going unfilled. People lack a source of clean water, adequate medical care, a healthy diet, and so on....
In this essay, I propose a standard of practical rationality and a
grounding for the standard that rests on the idea of autonomous agency.
This grounding is intended to explain the “normativity” of the
standard. The basic idea is this: To be autonomous is to be
self-governing. To be rational is at least in part to be
self-governing; it is to d...
Earlier versions of this paper were presented to the Departments of Philosophy at Bowling Green State University, the University of Wisconsin at Madison, and the University of British Columbia, and to the Philosophy Program in the Research School of Social Sciences of the Australian National University. I am grateful to the participants in the disc...
My goal in this paper is to explain what ethical naturalism is, to locate the pivotal issue between naturalists and non-naturalists, and to motivate taking naturalism seriously. I do not aim to establish the truth of naturalism nor to answer the various familiar objections to it. But I do aim to motivate naturalism sufficiently that the attempt to...
Philosophers since ancient times have pondered how we can know whether moral claims are true or false. The first half of the twentieth century witnessed widespread skepticism concerning the possibility of moral knowledge. Indeed, some argued that moral statements lacked cognitive content altogether, because they were not susceptible to empirical ve...
Moral realism and antirealist-expressivism are of course incompatible positions. They disagree fundamentally about the nature of moral states of mind, the existence of moral states of affairs and properties, and the nature and role of moral discourse. The central realist view is that a person who has or expresses a moral thought is thereby in, or t...
What We Owe to Each Other, T. M. Scanlon, The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1998, ix + 420 pages. - - Volume 16 Issue 2 - David Copp, David Sobel
Ethical naturalism is the doctrine that moral properties, such as moral goodness, justice, rightness, wrongness, and the like, are among the “natural” properties that things can have. It is the doctrine that moral properties are “natural” and that morality is in this sense an aspect of “nature.” Accordingly, it is a view about the semantics and met...
In order responsibly to decide whether there ought to be an international legal right of secession, I believe we need an account of the morality of secession. I propose that territorial and political societies have a moral right to secede, and on that basis I propose a regime designed to give such groups an international legal right to secede. This...
This paper is a reply to Anton Leist’s criticisms of the view I develop in my book, Morality, Normativity, and Society. Leist claims that my “standard-based” account of the truth conditions of moral propositions is incoherent. I argue that he is mistaken about this. Leist claims that my “society-centered” account of the justification of moral stand...
The Rational and the Moral Order: the Social roots of Reason and Morality. By Kurt Baier
Does morality override self-interest? Or does self-interest override morality? These questions become important in situations where there is conflict between the overall verdicts of morality and self-interest, situations where morality on balance requires an action that is contrary to our self-interest, or where considerations of self-interest on b...
We have the intuition that the function of morality is to make society possible. That is, the function of morality is to make possible the kind of cooperation and coordination among people that is necessary for societies to exist and to cope with their problems. This intuition is reflected in the 'society centered' moral theory I defended in my boo...
'Internalism’ in ethics is a cluster of views according to which there is an ‘internal’ connection between moral obligations and either motivations or reasons to act morally; ‘externalism’ says that such connections are contingent. So described, the dispute between internalism and externalism may seem a technical debate of minor interest. However,...
The concept of a society is central to several areas of philosophy, including social and political philosophy, philosophy of social science and moral philosophy. Yet little attention has been paid to the concept and we do not have an adequate philosophical account of it. It is a concept that is difficult to explain systematically, and it is subject...
Article 25 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights reads as follows: “Everyone has the right to a standard of living adequate for the health and well-being of himself and of his family, including food, clothing, housing and medical care and necessary social services.” I shall refer to the right postulated here as “the right to an adequate stan...
It is commonplace to criticize utilitarianism on the ground that it does not take moral rights seriously; that it cannot account for the rights we have, and for their role in constraining our pursuit of the overall good. Wayne Sumner does not directly address this criticism in The Moral Foundation of Rights. Instead he attempts to show that consequ...
The Problem
Economic efficiency is naturally thought to be a virtue of social policies and decisions, and cost-benefit (CB) analysis is commonly regarded as a technique for measuring economic efficiency. It is not surprising, then, that CB analysis is so widely used in social policy analysis. However, there is a great deal of controversy about CB a...
An account of the ontological nature of collectives would be useful for several reasons. A successful theory would help to show us a route through the thicket of views known as “methodological individualism”. It would have a bearing on the plausibility of legal positivism. It would be relevant to the question whether collectives are capable of acti...
The interpretation of the utilitarianism of John Stuart Mill has been a matter of controversy at least since J.O. Urmson published his well known paper over twenty-five years ago. Urmson attributed to Mill a form of “rule-utilitarianism”, contrasting his reading with the “received view” on which Mill held a form of “act-utilitarianism”. Since then,...
This work addresses itself to the question: How is morality to be properly defined? Also explored are the distinguishing characteristics of a moral code. The conclusion to which this analysis leads is that moralities do not necessarily concern themselves with satisfaction of human interests and with conflict resolution.
In his book, A Theory of Justice, John Rawls suggests that a theory of social justice is satisfactory only if it has both of two characteristics (pp. 182, 6). First, it must be capable of serving as the “public moral basis of society” (p. 182). That is, it must be reasonable to suppose that it would be strictly complied with while serving as the pu...
An agent is autonomous only if she governs her life in accord with her values. If our values had not been shaped by our society's culture, and by the values of our family and friends, we might not have had any values at all. Hence, living in a society seems to be a precondition of autonomous agency. This is ironic, for a person's values can be so i...