Maverick Philosopher

Footnotes to Plato from the foothills of the Superstition Mountains

Category: Normativity

  • The Euthyphro Problem, Islam, and Thomism.

    Top o' the Stack. The problem is genuine but insoluble. Or so I conclude. What say you?

  • Norms in Nature? Some Doubts

    Substack latest. It opens like this: Our friend Malcolm Pollack, riffing on some complaints of mine about Michael Anton's talk of natural rights, wrote the following: Rights are normative in their essence, while Nature simply is. Therefore, I see only two possibilities: 1) “Natural” rights flow from an intrinsic source of normative authority. Since brute and indifferent Nature…

  • The Ought-to-Do, the Ought-to-Be, and the Aporetics of “Be Ye Perfect”

    Could one be under a moral obligation to perfect oneself?  Substack latest.

  • After MacIntyre: On Deriving Ought from Is

    Are there any (non-trivial*) valid arguments that satisfy the following conditions:  (i) The premises are all purely factual  in the sense of purporting to state only what is the case; (ii) the conclusion is normative/evaluative?  Alasdair MacIntyre gives the following example (After Virtue, U. of Notre Dame Press, 1981, p. 55): 1. This watch is…

  • The Source of the Normativity of the Ought-to-Be

    I was working on this four years ago. It might never get finished. So here it is. ………………………………… Is there any justification for talk of the ought-to-be in cases where they are not cases of the ought-to-do?  If so, what is the source of their normativity?  I am led to pose this question by my…

  • Two Assurances of Religion and the Case of the Philosophically Sophisticated Rapist

    Karl Britton, Philosophy and the Meaning of Life, Cambridge UP, 1969, p. 192: Religion tries to provide two great assurances: that there is an absolute good and bad in the world at large, and that the absolute good has power. I agree that religion does attempt to provide these two great assurances. The first assurance…

  • Remembering Henry Veatch and Rational Man

    Douglas Rasmussen and Douglas Den Uyl

  • Norm Talk

    There is a lot of talk, and a slew of new books, about (democratic) norms these days and how President Trump is flouting them.  Your humble correspondent has speed-read two or three of them. This crisis-of-democracy genre wouldn't exist at all if the populist revolt hadn't put paid to Hillary's (mainly merely personal) ambitions. But…

  • Norms in Nature? Some Doubts

    Our friend Malcolm Pollack, riffing on some complaints of mine about Michael Anton's talk of natural rights, wrote the following: Rights are normative in their essence, while Nature simply is. Therefore, I see only two possibilities: 1) “Natural” rights flow from an intrinsic source of normative authority. Since brute and indifferent Nature cannot be such a…

  • The Generalized Ought-Implies-Can Principle and Novák’s Objection

    This entry is an addendum to my Prague paper (see link below) in which I deploy a principle I call GOC, a principle that comes under withering fire in the ComBox from Dr. Lukáš Novák.  Here is my reformulation of his objection.  You will have to consult my Prague paper to see what I mean by…

  • Is the Quality of Life Objectively Evaluable on Naturalism?

    This is the penultimate draft of the paper I will be presenting in Prague at the end of this month at the Benatar conference. Comments are welcome from those who are familiar with this subject. ……………………………………………….   IS THE QUALITY OF LIFE OBJECTIVELY EVALUABLE ON NATURALISM? William F. Vallicella Abstract This article examines one of…

  • Utilitarianism and Natural Normativity: Further Foot Notes

    Philippa Foot argues (Natural Goodness, Oxford UP 2001, p. 48 ff.) that a naturalistic approach to normativity rules out utilitarianism. In this entry I try to understand the argument.  Foot writes, . . . utilitarianism never gets off the ground in a schema such as we find in the work of Elizabeth Anscombe and Michael…

  • Natural Normativity: More Foot Notes

    I am trying to come to grips with Philippa Foot's  Natural Goodness (Oxford UP, 2001). For Foot, norms are ingredient in nature herself; they are not projected by us or expressive of our psychological attitudes.  They are ingredient not in all of nature, but in all of living nature.  Living things bear within themselves norms…

  • Aristotelian Categoricals and Natural Norms

     Here are some notes on Chapter Two, "Natural Norms,"  of Philippa Foot's Natural Goodness, Oxford UP, 2001.   As I mentioned previously, Foot essays "a naturalistic theory of ethics: to break really radically both with G. E. Moore's anti-naturalism and with the subjectivist theories such as emotivism and prescriptivism that have been seen as clarifications…

  • The Obligatory, the Supererogatory, and Two Moral Senses of ‘Ought’

    This is an old post from the Powerblogs site, written a few years ago.  The points made still seem correct. ………………… Peter Lupu's version of the logical argument from evil (LAFE) is committed to a principle that I formulate as follows: P. Necessarily, agent A ought to X iff A is morally obligated to X.…