oxford studies in metaethics volume ii jun 2007

[...]... needs to be answered in regard to the role of wrongness in ‘shaping’ our thinking about what to do So the question, in response to which wrongness needs to provide reasons (or to invoke them) is same in the two cases In the most common kind of case in which wrongness plays a shaping role, two kinds of reasons are in play, corresponding to two kinds of ‘why?’ questions There are first-order reasons such... with in that book, and what I am concerned with here, is one particular way in which an action can be morally wrong, the way that involves wronging someone or, as I say there, violating ‘what we owe to others.’ When I talk about wrongness in the rest of this paper, it is this way of being wrong that I have in mind The problem of explaining MM is the problem of moral motivation Putting the matter in terms... respectable as explanatory indispensability In section 5, I say more about what indispensability is, dividing the discussion into an account of what I call instrumental and intrinsic indispensability In the following two sections—6 and 7—I characterize the phenomenology of deliberation, arguing that it satisfies the desiderata needed for my argument for Robust Realism to go through In section 8, I briefly... explanatory indispensability just in case it applies to other, non-explanatory, kinds of indispensability, and in particular to deliberative indispensability This does not show, of course, that no rationale can be given for restricting respectable status to explanatory indispensability alone So think of my point here as a challenge: Can you think of any reason for grounding ontological commitment in explanatory... required in order to explain other moral facts, moral realism is vindicated? This seems like cheating, but can moral facts be declared less than respectable explananda without begging the question against the realist?⁸ What assumptions about the individuation of kinds of fact is it reasonable to read into the explanatory requirement? What kind of explanatory role must be played by a kind of fact in order... proponent of IBE) ¹⁸ A terminological apology: My use of the word ‘indispensability’ is without a doubt a stretch of ordinary usage Seeing, however, that my use of this term is not completely discontinuous with ordinary usage, that I explicitly explain my way of using it, and that my way of using it echoes the way it is already used in the context of indispensability arguments in the philosophy of mathematics,... other kind of indispensability She must show, in other words, why it is that explanatory indispensability ought to be taken seriously, but other kinds of indispensability ought not to be so taken; she must present a reason for taking explanatory indispensability to justify ontological commitment that does not generalize to other kinds of indispensability.²¹ Now, my way of justifying the move from indispensability... reason is mainly a higher-order reason of the kind I described earlier It is in the first instance a reason to think in a particular way about what to do and to accept as reasons the first-order considerations that this mode of thinking directs us to Thus understood, my version of contractualism describes a property that is reason-providing, but not the property of being morally wrong (being something that... need not be reasons for action As my remarks about the ‘shaping’ role of moral wrongness indicate, they could instead be reasons for thinking about what to do in a certain way (a way that involves taking a certain view of which other considerations count as first-order reasons for action, and how these considerations are to be weighed) One thing that seems clear is that the concept of moral wrongness... a more charitable interpretation of what he may have had in mind Putting things in the manner I have above, one could say that what he believed was that the general happiness was the only consideration capable of giving a standard of conduct the authoritative ⁹ Scanlon (1998: 13) ¹⁰ Moore (1903: ch 1) ¹¹ Bentham (1799), in (Ryan 1978: 67) Wrongness and Reasons 13 status invoked in the concept of wrongness . y0 w0 h1" alt="" OXFORD STUDIES IN METAETHICS This page intentionally left blank Oxford Studies in Metaethics VOLUME 2 Edited by RUSS SHAFER-LANDAU OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS · OXFORD 1 Great Clarendon. remarks about the ‘shaping’ role of moral wrongness indicate, they could instead be reasons for thinking about what to do in a certain way (a way that involves taking a certain view of which other. Massachusetts Institute of Technology Introduction Russ Shafer-Landau Oxford Studies in Metaethics is devoted to providing an annual selection of some of the most exciting new work in the foundations