Dossier : Metaethics, Normativity, and Value

Metaethics, Normativity, and ValueIntroduction[Record]

  • Hichem Naar and
  • Michele Palmira

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  • Hichem Naar
    VISITING ASSISTANT PROFESSOR, DEPARTMENT OF PHILOSOPHY, UNIVERSITY OF NEBRASKA AT OMAHA

  • Michele Palmira
    POSTDOCTORAL FELLOW, DEPARTMENT OF PHILOSOPHY, UNIVERSITY OF BARCELONA

Some of the central questions of moral philosophy revolve around the nature, representation, and apprehension of moral concepts and properties, such as good, permissible, wrong, and the relation they bear to one another, if any. The list of questions taken up in contemporary analytic moral philosophy is familiar enough: “Are moral values and norms objective or subjective?,” “Is there any link between what’s good/bad and what’s obligatory/forbidden, and if so, which of the two pairs should come first?,” “Are moral values and normative facts reducible to nonmoral/nonnormative facts?,” “Are moral judgements expressive of cognitive states, or do they rather express our affective non-cognitive responses to morally relevant actions?” Answering these questions amounts to accomplishing the difficult task of unifying metaphysical, semantic, normative, and psychological considerations. The articles contained in this special issue jointly rise to this unity challenge by approaching the domains of the evaluative and the deontic from several interconnected perspectives. In “Goodness: Attributive and Predicative,” Michael-John Turp investigates the celebrated distinction between attributive and predicative uses of “good” made by Peter Geach and subsequently deployed by authors such as Philippa Foot and Judith Jarvis Thomson. According to Geach, our uses of “good” are chiefly attributive—that is, they require specification of the kind of thing that is said to be (or not to be) good, as in “This is a good move,” “The Broom of the System is a good book,” and so on. Geach famously maintained that the absence of a predicative reading of “good” has far-reaching metaethical implications: we should stop asking the classical metaphysical question philosophers have been after since G. E. Moore—i.e., “What is good?”—and instead ask: “What is it to be a good human being?” Turp contends that acknowledging the linguistic datum that several uses of “good” are attributive does not ipso facto make the traditional question of what good simpliciter is meaningless or philosophically insignificant. His argumentative strategy unfolds in three steps. First, by drawing an analogy with the attributive evaluation carried out in the assessment of artefacts, Turp stresses that an adequate account of attributive goodness be functional in kind, just like the goodness of a spade is determined on the basis of its function, which goes over and above the designer’s intentions and the present and personal concerns of the user. Secondly, Turp evaluates the prospects of a neo-Aristotelian functional account of natural goodness, notably that by Philippa Foot. This account maintains that, in order to establish what’s good for us, we should seek to discover what traits are conducive to evolutionary fitness, or what way of life serves our interests best. While Turp does not directly take issue with such an account of attributive goodness, he emphasizes an important asymmetry between human beings and other living beings: we have a capacity for rational reflection that enables us to pursue an assessment of the value of whatever conception of attributive goodness is recommended by a naturalistically oriented approach. Given our capacity for rational reflection, the question whether we reflectively endorse a life in which we assign priority to our self-interest will remain nonetheless open for us. That is to say, we can meaningfully ask: “Is a life that is good in the attributive sense a life that is worthy of pursuit?” (p. 81). This, Turp maintains, amounts to asking a question about the predicative goodness of a certain conception of the (attributively) good life. In this way, Turp vindicates the philosophical legitimacy of inquiring into the question of what the moral good simpliciter is. Toni Rønnow-Rasmussen’s starting point in “‘On-Conditionalism: On the Verge of a New Metaethical …