Requiring Reasons as Reasons to Feel Compelled: An Attitudinal Account of Normative Weight (forthcoming in Philosophical Studies)
Selim Berker has argued that the distinction between requiring and justifying weight—two kinds of weight reasons can have—is not in good standing. Weight is a gradable property of reasons, and extant accounts that try to analyze the two kinds of weight in terms of the all-or-nothing statuses of requiredness and permissibility fail. I develop an alternative basis for the distinction. The core idea is that the different types of weight correspond to different attitudes that reasons are right-kind reasons to have. A reason has requiring weight in virtue of being a right-kind reason to feel compelled to perform an action, and the degree of its requiring weight is the strength of that right-kind reason. On the non-requiring side, I distinguish two functions: a commendatory function, analyzed in terms of right-kind reasons to feel enticed, and a permissibility-conferring function, analyzed in terms of right-kind reasons to feel entitled. The gradable dimension throughout is the familiar one of reason-strength. A reason can contribute to the total right-kind case for an attitude even if the attitude is not warranted on the whole; thus, the resulting account avoids the problems Berker identifies whether or not his objections succeed.
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Moral Worth Beyond Right Reasons (published in Oxford Studies in Metaethics, vol. 21)
Theories of moral worth assume that when two agents perform the same right action yet differ in praiseworthiness, the difference must lie in the content of their motivating reasons. But this assumption is false. Agents who act for identical reasons may nonetheless differ in whether they deserve moral credit for the act. This cannot be explained by depth of concern. What matters is instead whether the agent takes a categorical stance toward the right-making feature: a stance in which the agent treats the reasons for which she acts as (in a certain sense) independent of her contingent desires. No content-based view of moral worth can account for this structural difference in motivation. So no content-based view can succeed. Debates focusing on content (in particular whether that the agent cares about the right “de re” or “de dicto”) rest on a false presupposition and obscure a critical dimension of moral worth.
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Attraction, Aversion, and Meaning in Life (published in Journal of Ethics and Social Philosophy)
Desire comes in two kinds: attraction and aversion. But contemporary theories of desire have paid little attention to the distinction, and some philosophers doubt that it is psychologically real. I argue that one reason to think there is a difference between the attitudes, and to care about it, is that attractions and aversions contribute in radically different ways to our well-being. Attraction-motivated activity adds to the good life in a way that aversion-driven activity does not. I argue further that the value of attraction-motivated activity is irreducible to the prudential value of pleasure or desire-satisfaction. Rather, it contributes in a distinctive way to the felt meaningfulness of life. In the end, I offer a hypothesis: when we are attracted to something, we see it as (noncomparatively) good; and it is only when we pursue the apparent good that we see ourselves as engaged with the type of value that makes our lives and the universe worth maintaining.
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An Explanation of the Essential Publicity of Practical Reasons (published in Oxford Studies in Metaethics, vol. 19)
This paper argues that practical reasons are essentially “public” in the following sense: If R is a reason for X to Φ, then R is also a reason for other people not to interfere with X’s Φ-ing. The paper derives the Publicity Thesis from an independently motivated non-cognitivist account of normative judgment that covers both should-judgments and judgments about reasons. This account “explains” the publicity thesis in the sense if the non-cognitivist view is correct, anyone who judges that R is a reason for X to Φ is thereby committed to regarding R as a reason for others not to interfere. Hence practical reasons must be regarded as public by anyone who thinks about them, and so are essentially public, though in a sense somewhat different from Korsgaard’s (1996) or Nagel’s (1970).
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Noncognitivism and Agent-Centered Norms (with Gideon Rosen; published in Philosophical Studies)
This paper takes up a neglected problem for metaethical noncognitivism: the characterization of the acceptance states for agent-centered normative theories like Rational Egoism. If Egoism is a coherent view, the non-cognitivist needs a coherent acceptance state for it. This can be provided, as Dreier (Aust J Philos 74: 409–422, 1996) and Gibbard (Thinking how to live, Harvard University Press, 2003) have shown. But those accounts fail when generalized, assigning the same acceptance state to normative theories that are clearly distinct, or assigning no acceptance state to theories that look to be intelligible. The paper makes the case for this and then asks: What should we conclude if the problem cannot be solved? We might conclude that since Egoism is clearly a coherent (if mistaken) view, the argument amounts to a refutation of noncognitivism. But we suggest another possibility. There is, on reflection, something incoherent, or at least odd, in standard formulations of Egoism; noncognitivism predicts this and so provides an intriguing explanation for this fact.
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Deciding for Others: An Expressivist Theory of Normative Judgment (published in Philosophy and Phenomenological Research)
This paper develops a new form of metaethical expressivism according to which the normative judgment that X should Φ consists in a decision that X Φ. When the judgment is first-personal—e.g., my judgment that I should Φ—the view is similar to Gibbard’s plan expressivism, though the state I call “decision” differs somewhat from a Gibbard-style plan. The deep difference between the views shows in the account of third-personal judgments. Gibbard construes the judgment that Mary should Φ as a de se plan on the thinker’s part to Φ if she turns out to be Mary (the Subtle View). I construe the judgment as a decision for Mary that Mary Φ (the Simple View). The main argument for Simple Plan Expressivism is that it solves problems for Gibbard’s approach, resonates with a new and interesting moral psychology, and better makes sense of certain independently plausible constraints on normative judgment. In the end I argue that this account of normative judgment has implications for first-order ethics, implying in particular that rational egoism as standardly formulated is incoherent.
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Blaming for Unreasonableness: Accountability without Ill Will (published in Journal of Ethics and Social Philosophy)
Many theorists of moral responsibility endorse the following quality of will condition: X is blameworthy for a wrong act A only if in doing A, X expressed ill will. I argue that the quality of will condition is in fact false to ordinary moral practice, because ordinary practice licenses blame for agents who act wrongly from epistemically unreasonable ignorance of the wrong-making features of their act, even when the act does not express ill will. In response, I provide a theory of culpable ignorance, and blameworthiness more generally, on which ill will is not necessary for blameworthiness. My theory, which I will call Rational Capacitarianism, entails that when an agent acts wrongly from factual ignorance, she is blameworthy if and only if her ignorance is caused by a failure to exercise a rational capacity—a capacity to recognize reasons for believing and desiring and to be generally responsive in one’s beliefs and desires to one’s assessment of reasons. Failures of rational capacities are relevant because only such failures can be attributed to the agent in a distinctive way. My theory shows that we do not need to choose between a quality of will view (which seems too lenient) or a standard Capacitarian view (which seems too harsh).
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Can Model-Free Reinforcement Learning Explain Deontological Moral Judgments? (published in Cognition)
Dual-systems frameworks propose that moral judgments are derived from both an immediate emotional response, and controlled/rational cognition. Recently Cushman (2013) proposed a new dual-system theory based on model-free and model-based reinforcement learning. Model-free learning attaches values to actions based on their history of reward and punishment, and explains some deontological, non-utilitarian judgments. Model-based learning involves the construction of a causal model of the world and allows for far-sighted planning; this form of learning fits well with utilitarian considerations that seek to maximize certain kinds of outcomes. I present three concerns regarding the use of model-free reinforcement learning to explain deontological moral judgment. First, many actions that humans find aversive from model-free learning are not judged to be morally wrong. Moral judgment must require something in addition to model-free learning. Second, there is a dearth of evidence for central predictions of the reinforcement account—e.g., that people with different reinforcement histories will, all else equal, make different moral judgments. Finally, to account for the effect of intention within the framework requires certain assumptions which lack support. These challenges are reasonable foci for future empirical/theoretical work on the model-free/model-based framework.
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Rational Learners and Moral Rules (co-authored with Shaun Nichols, Shikhar Kumar, Theresa Lopez and Hoi-Yee Chan. Published in Mind & Language)
People draw subtle distinctions in the normative domain. But it remains unclear exactly what gives rise to such distinctions. On one prominent approach, emotion systems trigger non‐utilitarian judgments. The main alternative, inspired by Chomskyan linguistics, suggests that moral distinctions derive from an innate moral grammar. In this article, we draw on Bayesian learning theory to develop a rational learning account. We argue that the ‘size principle’, which is implicated in word learning, can also explain how children would use scant and equivocal evidence to interpret candidate rules as applying more narrowly than utilitarian rules.
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